A BIT OF AN ORDEAL - some matters pertaining to trial by ordeal in 12th century England by Elizabeth Chadwick

At the start of the 12th century, trial by ordeal was an accepted part of the judicial system and daily life.  The idea was to allow the accused to undergo a test and that God would decide the outcome. This test would involve either fire, water, combat, or character testification known as compurgation.
In ordeal by water the accused would be let down into an ordeal pit filled with water deep enough to close over his (or her) head,  and closely observed by witnesses.  If the person sank it meant the pure element of water had accepted him and he was innocent.  If he floated, then the worse for him (assuming he hadn't drowned!).  Failing the test usually meant that the accused faced mutilation as a punishment.
The ordeal pits belonged to the church and were a lucrative source of monastic income,the clergy being paid generous sums of money to bless them before ordeals.  Itinerant royal justices Geoffrey de Mandeville and Richard de Lucy paid the sum of ten shillings to have the local clergy bless ordeal pits near Bury St. Edmunds in 1166. This was at a time when the daily wage of a labourer was one penny.
Should a water ordeal pit not be to hand, then the next best thing was to dunk the accused off a bridge into a stream or brook.  The ordeal of cold water was accompanied by liturgical the chanting, a sermon and a mass, and was something of a spectacle for the local populace. The ordeal of water was a trial reserved for those at the bottom of the social pile according to a treatise on the law written down in the later 12th century. 'per aquam si fuerit rusticus.'  

Free men of status could look forward to ordeal by hot iron instead. scilicet per ferrum calidum si fuerit homo librum. Here the accused had to briefly hold or carry a hot iron.  His hand was then bandaged and sealed and was examined a few days later.  If the damage was healed, or healing cleanly, then he was deemed innocent.  If it didn't then it was mutilation again.  King William Rufus in the 11th century was a very unhappy man when 50 people accused of crimes in his forest took the ordeal of hot iron en masse and all came through it unmarked! The King swore that he would never be taken in again.  At the assize of Clarendon in 1166, Henry II chose not to believe the people who had been pronounced innocent of trial by water and banished them all from England anyway.

It does seem that there were ways to cheat at these ordeals.  Peter the Chanter, a chronicler of the late 12th century mentioned someone he knew who, on realising he was to face trial by water, prepared for it by practising breathing exercises beforehand in order to succeed.  He also mentioned how people would cultivate thick calluses on their hands in order to mitigate the effect of the hot iron ordeal.

A third way of deciding who was guilty or innocent, right or wrong was trial by combat, a system introduced by the Normans. William the Conqueror made it expressly clear that trial by combat was not to be enforced upon English litigants, who must stick to fire and water.  However, accused Normans had the choice of combat as well as the other two ordeals.  As with the water ordeal, the church got in on the act by blessing the weapons and imploring God's mercy. Trials by combat were sometimes fought by the accused themselves, as in the case of Henry II's standard bearer Henry of Essex (who lost, was spared and took the tonsure).  William Marshal is another example from the late 12th century.  Accused of having an affair with his lord's wife, he offered to fight his detractors man to man, but no one wanted to go up against him (strangely enough).

People were sometimes deemed ineligible for trial by combat.  Over sixties need not apply to fight and had to tick the fire or water box.  If a person was suffering a serious sickness or injury - such as a broken arm, or a deep cut, the same applied.

Not everyone had the military skills to make success in combat a likelihood and so professional champions were sometimes engaged to do the dirty work, but that had it its drawbacks too.  The richer you were, the better the fighter you could afford.  Indeed, if you were really rich, you could buy all the best fighters and leave the cupboard bare for your opponent!  By the end of the 11th century, a merchant guild of St. Omer in Flanders had formed a system of mutual help to allow their members to hire the best champions in the land should the need arise - a sort of insurance policy.

14thc trial by combat

Finally there was compurgation.  This wasn't so much an ordeal as a way of proving innocence.  The  accused would each gather together a band of people to swear as to his good character and innocence, having first sworn their own impeccable credentials. One might initially imagine this turning into an 'I've got more friends than you' match.  Sometimes it probably did, and sometimes people could be bought, but on the whole the system worked reasonably well.  In a society where everyone knew everyone else,a criminal was generally going to be the 'Billy no mates' person.

Gradually the above systems were mostly replaced with trial by jury.  Occasional trials by combat continued for centuries, but they weren't the norm, although the right wasn't taken off the statute books until the early 19th century.  By the 1180's trial by jury was becoming  the established method of deciding cases.  A jury was more reliable and acceptable in practise than leaving it up to God (and a few ruses) to decide.The jury, which mingled Norman and English members, was  a sound basis on which to go forward, and since it was a departure from methods on both sides, it was not seen as unduly fair to one side or the other and was accepted with equanimity.

I'm always fascinated when researching medieval lives and lifestyles. I constantly recognise myself in the people and come across emotions, situations and moments that are very familiar to me today.  And then there are times like this, when I think of trial by fire or water, or fight to the finish, when I realise that the past is a foreign field, even if too close for comfort when it comes down to it!

Elizabeth Chadwick

Suggested reading for further interest
The Birth of the English Common Law by R.C. Van Caenegem: Oxford University Press
The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly called Glanville edited and Translated by D. G. Hall - Oxford Medieval Texts

RAGS AND BONES AND OTHER TREASURES; INFORMAL RECYCLERS OF YESTERYEAR, BY LESLIE WILSON

Photograph of a chiffonnier by Eugene Atget, (1857-1927,
Getty Archive

'In Paris you only have to bend down to pick up money in the streets. Truly, the Parisians are such prodigies that they throw away more than fifty thousand francs a day on the public thoroughfare, which represents eighteen millions per year.'
These are the opening words of Louis Paulian's The Rag-picker's Basket (La Hotte du Chiffonnier,1885) an extraordinary book which describes the work of what we would nowadays call 'informal sector recyclers', (otherwise rag-pickers, scavengers), and the products of their labour. The first appellation is preferable, being more respectful of the professionalism of these largely very hard-working and knowledgeable people ('specialists,' Paulian justly called them). Born in 1847, Paulian (later secretary of the Chamber of Deputies) came to Paris when he was twenty, to study law. He was drawn to the study of social questions and political economy, but he was dissatisfied with the learned books he read about the poor, and decided that if he was to get an accurate account of their lives, he should get alongside them and live their lives with them. It was typical of his method that when he wrote about prisons, he had himself locked in a cell, in order that he should find out exactly what was wrong with the system. If La Hotte du Chiffonnier is anything to go by, he had a gift for getting people to talk to him.

My own edition of Paulian's book is a rather pretty one, the kind people buy to put on their shelves for decoration, as you may see from this picture. What is inside is much more exciting.
'The chiffonnier is as old as the world,' says Paulian, and certainly they are still with us. Walking down the street in Moqattam, a town of modern-day informal recyclers in Cairo,I saw sights that reminded me of the pictures in La Hotte du Chiffonnier, and indeed, this picture in the book of one chiffonniers' quarter in Paris, reminds me strongly of parts of Moqattam. 

Here are the specialists engaged in the hand-sorting of refuse. They knew how to distinguish between different fibres; knew which bits of bone could be used for buttons, and which had to be boiled down for glue; which bottles could be returned to which factories for refilling, and what kind of glass should be broken up for various purposes. 

The Parisians, before Monsieur Poubelle invented his useful bin, used to tip their rubbish out directly onto the street outside their houses, and it had to go out at the same time at night; and then the chiffonniers had a few hours to rummage through it before the public service vehicles came along to take away the residual material. The chiffonnier with whom Paulian set off, at nine pm, to go along the streets in Paris, a 'coureur' or 'runner' he was called, carried a basket with straps on his back, also a lantern, and a hook for fishing in the heaps. If they were a nice 'sugar-loaf shape', the coureur knew that the heaps were undisturbed and full of treasure. These are some of the things Paulian's companion unearthed from them: a mesh of women's hair, a bone (which he had to fight a dog for); paper, wine-corks, woollen rags, bits of flannel, rags from sheets, sardine tins. He didn't like restaurants: they were too thrifty and would boil a bone, for example, till there was nothing left in it at all. He also picked up crusts of bread. 

 Paulian exclaimed: 'But the bread-crusts have got all wet in the gutter!' 'Oh, monsieur!' the chiffonnier answered, 'that doesn't matter. If the bread we find is clean, we eat it, and if it's dirty, we make the middle classes eat it. We never waste anything.’
In Parisian households, the cooks usually gave clean bread straight to the chiffonniers, but threw the dirty bread in the bin. Clean bread went home and was dipped in soup to soften it and make it fit to eat – this is hard stale baguette we’re talking about! If there was a surplus of good quality waste bread, it was sold on, via a middleman, mainly to feed the children of poor Parisian tradespeople who were being reared by women in the suburbs. 

Another coureur with his hook
and basket

Soiled bread had plenty of uses; the best was fed to pigs, rabbits and poultry, and the chiffonniers’ horses, if they had them. Bread that was so filthy that the animals would refuse to eat them would be roasted in an oven and then sieved. The coarse crumbs that wouldn’t go through the sieve were sold to restauranteurs in the Quartier Latin for breadcrumbs. These restaurants were used by students, who bought their dinner for 90 centimes, and neither knew nor (Paulian suggests) cared that their hams and cutlets were coated with bread that had been rejected by animals. The burnt powder that was the residue of this process was made into tooth-cleaning powder and ‘chicory’ which was sold in grocers’ shops. Major yuk factor, but the roasting probably got most of the bugs out of the bread, at least, and there wouldn't have been oil in the gutters as there would be nowadays.

The chiffonnier also found a chicken head, which would make a pot-au-feu for his family's dinner. Like a Chinese gourmet, he thought chicken head was a pretty good dish. Another time, he found some thrown-out calf's liver, which made wonderful eating. Other things in his haul; an old umbrella, a lady's corset, a soldier's epaulette, a gilt button - and so on. Small things which, collected together, represented a mine of metals, foodstuffs, raw materials.

There was a hierarchy of informal recycling work; the coureur, who you have just met, was at the bottom of it. Then there was the placier, who came every day to better-class houses. He would run errands for the cook and generally help out, and was effectively a member of the staff. Of course he put the rubbish out (having sorted it out himself and got the pick of the refuse.) The placier would often have a horse or donkey, as here illustrated, and a cart to take his stuff home in, and might aspire to raise himself to the next echelon, which was the middle-man. These entrepreneurs bought from the collectors, and then sold on to the factory-owners who processed the refuse, some of whom had once been humble coureurs. Like old Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, the entrepreneurs could become wealthy men. 

Rags being weighed and sold to an middlewoman

The coureurs themselves, sometimes people who had come down in the world, sometimes sons and daughters of other chiffonniers, lived a pretty hand-to-mouth existence, and tended to drink heavily in their leisure time. But they valued their independence. Though they consented to wear the metal ID discs the authorities insisted on (the idea was to restrict the numbers of chiffonniers), these were made a mockery of when the possessor of the disc took his whole family out collecting with him, and attempts to prevent them collecting at all, reducing them to employees who would sort refuse and sweep the streets, were strenuously and successfully resisted. In practice, the ID discs rarely held the details of the chiffonnier who was actually using them.

The chiffonniers went by nicknames, like 'Poil aux Pattes' (Hairy Paws) or 'Gras d'Huile,' (Oil Grease) - this latter was the moniker of an old woman called Rosalinde Famion. 'Sac d'Os' (Bag of Bones) was another one. They took the refuse they gathered up to their townships, and Paulian estimated the accumulated income of one of these townships at 12,000 francs a year. The rooms were often windowless, and were no bigger than a prisoner's cell, with earth floors. They were furnished with things picked out of the rubbish, 'the richest,' Paulian tells us, 'contain a bed, a table and a chair, or rather something that resembles a bed, a table and a chair.' The poorest had only the bed. Some had nothing except a thin heap of straw picked up in the street. So lived most of the men and women whose hands gathered from the throw-outs of bourgeois society, the raw materials of recycled wealth.

It's been hard to keep this blog within some kind of bounds, so I have decided to split it into two. Next month I shall describe in more detail the products that were made from the rubbish, with illustrations of the machines that processed them.

Breaking the Rules by Kate Lord Brown

Doha Jan 2014

Browsing in the souq this morning, it struck me again how strange (particularly for someone who adores history), it is to live in a city that is so new. The oldest building dates from the 1980s, the souq has been rebuilt to look more picturesque, and the antiques are rather more recent than you would at first glance believe. It's a city creating itself, buildings rising up out of the desert, and it's an interesting time to be here.

Writing historical fiction (with all the inherent contradictions just in the name alone), is rather the same. We take the past and create something new - our interpretation shapes what is known into entirely new characters, objects, cities, worlds. 

Perhaps you are the same when you're working on a new book - the brief rest between edits over the holiday was filled with an orgy of reading and films, (for me, at least, books and movies are the ultimate rewards). One of the films was Marie Antoinette (2006, Sophia Coppola). Based loosely on Lady Antonia Fraser's biography, it played pretty fast and loose with historical fact. Fraser was interviewed on the DVD, and she said how remarkable it was to see the film, and as a medium how deftly it imparted information (the description of a single bodice could take pages, but on film a picture's worth a thousand words ...). Then this image flashed onto the screen:

Screenshot - Marie Antoinette (2006)

My immediate thought was that continuity had missed the Converse trainers - but then it seemed so deliberate, so styled, I did a little research. Coppola used the image as shorthand to show the youth of Marie Antoinette and her ladies in waiting. I'm hoping perhaps you can come up with some examples in fiction where writers have managed to pull off something similar?

Perhaps film manages to break the rules in a way prose can't. Another favourite, filled with deliberate anachronisms is 'A Knight's Tale'. From the suspiciously familiar logo hammered onto William's armour by the female blacksmith to the soundtrack, the director played with twelfth century history in a way I just don't know if you can with fiction? For those of you who write in this era, it would be interesting to know how historically accurate the rest of the film was - the armour, architecture etc?

There's an assumption that although we are creating worlds from our imagination, they are rooted in historical fact. That we do our best to tell the truth. That we weed out anachronisms of dress, speech, even emotion. Certain genres lay their cards on the table and are clearly breaking the rules - for example alternate realities like Harris' 'Fatherland', or Steampunk novels (I'm rather taken with these keyboards just discovered browsing for images):

Perhaps every work of historical fiction is partial, telling as much about the writer as the reader's review does of them. No doubt you've had feedback - good and bad - from readers because your fiction does or doesn't fit their notion of the past, even if your facts are watertight. Some truths are concrete, some are simply more open to interpretation. Celia Rees' recent excellent post on HGs 'Shelve Under Venus or Mars' highlighted the gender snobbery in histfic - that some books are (grinds teeth), seen as 'girl fiction'. This was a charge levelled against one of my own books in a stinker of a review on Goodreads (yes, I now know you shouldn't read them, but it was my first, and yes I can quote it from memory ...). Because the girls wept when their friends were killed, because they had love affairs, because they danced with as much enthusiasm as they flew - to that reader it was 'girl fiction' whereas she prefers 'boy fiction'. The fact it was based on unpublished WW2 diaries belonging to brave male and female pilots which recorded heartbreak and love alongside their flying hours is neither here nor there - it didn't work for that particular reader, and the emotion was a jarring anachronism for her.

Studying English, much was made about 'the willing suspension of disbelief' and the risks of breaking the fourth wall. It's a risk to shatter your viewer/reader's investment in the idea that somehow this history, this fiction is 'true'. A single stitch dropped in the tapestry of your story can ruin the entire fiction you have woven - your reader no longer trusts you. I'd be fascinated to know if anyone can think of examples in fiction where deliberate anachronism has worked - or indeed your favourite examples of accidental anachronism. While you're thinking, enjoy a wonderful scene awash with anachronisms from 'A Knight's Tale':

Lost Stories in the Land by Imogen Robertson

My mother rang me just before Christmas and offered to buy me an ipad. She is a very nice person, and had probably noticed that I kept nicking hers whenever my husband and I go to visit in Darlington. 

I can’t help it. It’s shiny and you can find pictures of amusing cats with it. I put the phone down and told Ned I was going to get a shiny, funny kittens machine all of my very own and he made a face. I don’t think he has anything against cats, but he did point out that I didn’t really need an ipad because I’m rarely more than three feet away from an internet enabled device in our flat. Wasn’t there something else I could buy instead? Hadn’t I been going on about a book I wanted, but felt guilty about the price?

He was right. A few months ago we were in Bath and I spotted in a second hand book-shop in the centre of the city the four volume Dictionary of British Folklore complied by Katherine M Briggs. I cashed Mum’s cheque and caught the train to be reunited with it. I did check with Mum first, by the way.

For those who don’t know her, Katherine M. Briggs (1898-1980) devoted her life to writing on folklore. I became a devotee of her work when I read The Fairies in Tradition and Literature last year. The book is a brilliant corrective to anyone who thinks of fairies as sweet, child-like inhabitants of the English Country Garden. Fairies, known by many names and existing in various forms, are dangerous, ambiguous creatures. They are beings of the liminal world; of bridges and ruins, barrows and circles. They might deal honourably with humans who treat with with respect, but they are best avoided. They blind, cheat, steal and punish. Sometimes they are associated with the dead, sometimes not. But seriously, do not go looking for these guys. No good will come of it. Having read that book the world looked more interesting to me. More mysterious, more complex.

An installation on the Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail at Hardcastle Crags in 2004 Phil Champion

There are plenty of Fairies in the Dictionary of British Folklore. There are also witches, saints, ghosts, black dogs, demons, lost treasures, lost leaders, warriors and giants. Reading through the stories, each one with its sources and motifs noted, Britain becomes a magical country where every hill, crossroads, forest and pathway has its own history. So my husband was right. Better than amusing cats. I’ve also developed a bit of a thing for a series of books called Highways and Byways of x (where x = eg, East Anglia, Somerset, Surrey), and Auther Mee’s county books, both are stuffed with local legends and anecdote. I want them all. 

I am a fan of human invention and I’m delighted to live in the world of the internet, the mobile phone, antibiotics and modern dentistry, but reading through Brigg’s work, I can’t help thinking about what we have lost too. We are still all telling stories to each other in novels, on TV, in newspapers, on social media, but while we are sharing those stories over great distances, are we at the same time loosing our local legends and tales? We are loosing our local dialects, so perhaps it is inevitable that we are also loosing the local stories that were told in those dialects. That’s tragic and serious. It must loosen our connections to the landscape if we no longer remember the tales of which giant created which hills, how the crags were named, and which King fell in the river and which local saint pulled him out. I’m glad we now all have the advantage of knowing what Benedict Cumberbatch had for breakfast, I'm just saying perhaps there is something more. Of course these folkloric local histories were changeable over time, a nest of unreliable narratives and narrators, but they still tied each generation into their particular landscapes. We were made by them, and made them. 

Rydale Water by Nessy-Pic on wikimedia commons

So I have a proposal because, as usual, I would like the best of both worlds. There must be one of the 1% out there who would like to construct a map / database of Britain’s folklore. Just think what a resource that would be. Brilliant for schools, students, tourists but mostly I mean it would be brilliant for me. Next time I’m out walking in the countryside, after tweeting about the weather, taking a picture of my pub lunch to post on facebook, and - who knows - maybe just looking about at stuff, I’d like to tell Siri or Google Glass to share with me the stories of the landscape I am in. A straight narration at first, then lots of nested footnotes on sources, themes and alternate versions for when I feel geeky. Most of all though, I want my technology to replace what is lost, to be my virtual grandmother telling the stories of my home ground by the fireside or while walking the old ways. I want to know about the dancers turned to stone there, and the route the phantom carriage of the impious landowner takes across the heath, and yes, where I should be careful to avoid meeting the fairies at dusk.  

Imogen's latest book is The Paris Winter and has nothing to do with British folklore.

www.imogenrobertson.com

'The History in the Words' by A L Berridge

All historical novelists know to avoid the ‘wrong words’ – the little anachronisms that boot us into the wrong century will the speed of a train crash. What I find much, much harder is learning when to avoid the right ones.

You know the ones I mean. The ones that are perfectly, demonstrably, authentically in period – but somehow sound as if they’re not. An astute copy-editor wisely advised me not to use the word ‘scan’ in ‘In the Name of the King’, because its rock-solid pedigree in the 16th century didn’t prevent it from sounding as if it sprang to life with a chunk of technology in the 20th.

Not what I meant

He was right. Not just because of the terrifying reader who’s so certain I’ve Got It Wrong that he can’t wait to tell the world on Goodreads, but because it creates a ‘blip’ – a moment of surprise that jolts the reader out of the story.  Anything’s better than that, so we swallow our pride and our research and consign our historical darlings to the dump.

Sometimes we can find ways round it, but they feel equally counter-intuitive. I have a character in my Crimean series who uses a lot of 19th century London slang, and since much of it sounds screamingly modern I often find myself choosing the oldest versions I can find. ‘Mug’ is a perfectly good 1850s word for the face, but I opted for the equally accurate but archaic ‘phizog’ instead. I only do this in the early chapters when readers are still adjusting to the voice, but it still feels strange to make my world seem more alien and distant than it really was.

And how far should we go anyway? The totally authentic ‘Shut your trap’ sounds suspiciously modern for 1854, but if I replace it with the original ‘shut your potato trap’ then I’m risking an altogether different kind of ‘blip’. I want my readers to be following a story, not stopping to think ‘oh, so that’s the origin of that expression!’ Words should be invisible, the mere medium of the story, and never the focus of the reader’s attention.

But they’re all we’ve got, and it’s sometimes a real struggle to make them convey what we intend. Numbers are clean things, fresh with every use, but words are second-hand and come to us laden with history and association. I wanted to use the historically-correct word ‘kid’ in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, but had to avoid it because of its modern associations with America, gangsters and cowboys.

Not what I meant. Though I think I could be persuaded...

Sometimes our innocent immersion in a period leads us to miss even more dangerous interpretations, and I still blush to remember a copy-editor’s polite suggestion that a character’s fast movement from a wall might be better not described as ‘jerked off’.

Sometimes it’s really frustrating. When writing the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’, I had to really struggle to avoid the one single phrase that would have described exactly what was happening as the Russians harnessed their cannon to field carriages to draw them from the field. Those two-wheeled carriages were called ‘limbers’ and the correct expression is ‘limbering up’, but I wanted the reader to see a scene like this:

Russian artillery at reenactment of the Alma (Sergey Kamshylin / Shutterstock.co)

and not something like this:

That may seem appallingly patronising to my readers, but the power of word-association can be stronger than logic. I know exactly what a limber is, and so will many of my readers, but the modern association still kicked in and gave me a ‘blip’ as big as a solar eclipse. Out went ‘limbering up’ and in went ‘backing to limber’, which in context was just as accurate.

And ultimately – I don’t mind. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dead languages, but ours is a living record of our own past. I like the fact that the word ‘limbering’ remains like a ghost of its extinct military origin. I like the fact we still say ‘scot-free’ without the slightest idea that we’re using an Anglo Saxon word that means ‘exempt from royal tax’. The words stay when the meaning has gone, pebbles thrown up on the beach when the tide has gone out.

Mostly we hardly even notice them. A word just ‘is’, and we rarely stop to question how it got that way. Some people still refer to a ‘drawing room’, without any idea it’s an abbreviation of the ‘withdrawing room’ to which ladies would retire during the port and cigars. Many more will actually own a ‘penknife’ – but how many have ever used it to sharpen a quill? 

Or how about this:

The BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, unveiled in Frankfurt 2013 – with an engine that produces 231 horsepower.

After all these years. Few of us have ridden in a horse-drawn vehicle, but that’s still the standard by which we judge those driven by the combustion engine. We can see both together in this fabulous colour footage from 1920’s London, but when we do we know we’re looking at history. Only the words have kept the history alive – just under the bonnet of our cars.

I suppose it’s natural to retain ‘horsepower’, since units of measurement are often the last to change. The horse itself is still measured in ‘hands’, just as many of us still measure distance in ‘feet’. How far does that go back? When did we last even think about it – except perhaps to marvel at men with twelve inch feet and to wonder if the size were proportional?

‘Hands’ and ‘feet’ will probably go in the end, as imposed metrication grinds its way through our remaining scraps of measuring heritage, but it’ll take more than that to expunge the many centuries of the horse from our language. Our idioms are steeped in it – ‘give him his head’, ‘rein him in’, ‘spur him to action’ – and they won’t disappear in a hurry.

Or will they?

Enter the Historical Language Saboteur, the chap who uses words without the slightest interest in what they actually mean. He’s the man who gives us the utterly meaningless ‘tow the line’, because he doesn’t understand the Naval historical concept of ‘toe the line’. He’s the man who writes about ‘giving free reign’ or ‘reigning in’ because the idea of controlling a horse by means of reins is beyond him. He's the man who infects millions of innocents, who dutifully repeat his mistakes because they've seen them written down on the internet. Distortion of language used to take centuries to accomplish, but these days it can happen in a matter of weeks.

But perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps he too is part of history. Mistakes and ‘back-derivations’ have played their own part in shaping our language, and they often enrich our understanding in how people thought and spoke in earlier times. Those who complain about today’s ‘sloppy diction’ might want to ask how the words ‘norange’ and ‘napron’ became respectively ‘orange’ and ‘apron’ – and if they say ‘a norange’ aloud, then they’ll know.

That’s the best part of language history for me: what it tells us about our ancestors and how they lived. I’m fascinated, for instance, by the fact we use English words for an animal in the field but French ones for the same animal on the table – and what this tells us about life under the Norman Conquest. The peasants were English who knew cows, sheep and pigs, but the court aristocracy were only familiar with boeuf, mouton, and porc – beef, mutton, and pork.

The history of language can obviously teach us far more profound truths than that, and I only wish I knew more about it.  My mother was lucky enough to attend the lectures of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien himself, and one of the remarks she recorded in her notebooks takes my breath away even now. Tolkien told his students that the first languages to develop a future tense were those of peoples who lived by the sea.

I have no idea how accurate that is, but it makes me tingle because of its essential truth. To comprehend the idea of a future, one has to have a sense of the ‘beyond’ – and who would learn that quicker than those who can look further than the edge of the world?

But the past is ‘beyond’ too, and words can take us there if we let them. Words aren’t just a record of the whole of human history – they are that history, and the living chain that joins it all together. If we choose to, we can follow them right back to the beginning, when the first people came out of the forest to stare in wonder at the power of the sea.

***

If you think words can never be dull, you should visit A L Berridge's website.
If you care about the history behind the words, you should visit the Crimea Appeal. 

HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENTS

Theresa Breslin

I’ve been searching in the attic trying to find research notebooks, photographs and primary source material relating specifically to World War One.

Being a professional librarian it should all have been boxed, filed and labelled - with perhaps even a card catalogue or, at the very least, an index file to help me navigate the tremendous amount of ‘stuff’ I collected when writing Remembrance. Sadly, no. After finishing a book that requires major commitment in time, energy and travel, I always find that I’m physically and emotionally exhausted. It requires a huge effort on my part to put the research in some kind of order and tie up the files. Sometimes I don’t want to even think about or discuss the subject. Fortunately that wears off, and, by the time publication date is approaching, and I’m semi-sane again, I’m quite willing to talk about themes, issues, whatever, to anyone who’ll listen. Perhaps it’s having a glossy-covered, crisp-paged, brand-new book in my hand - with my name on it - that gives me the kick start. I hope I never lose the slight feeling of surprise and the incredible joy that I experience when I open up the book and begin to read it.

My recent attic ‘finds’ were the photographs of Historical Re-enactments that I attended when researching a couple of my books: Remembrance and Spy for the Queen of Scots

I’ll come straight out and admit it right away. I’m a big fan of Historical Re-enactments…

I’ve never actually participated in a ‘Living History’ event but, speaking to those who do and listening to their stories, is almost as fascinating as watching the re-enactment itself. Reasons given ranged from : ‘ I like dressing up’, ‘you get to shoot at people without actually hurting them’, and ‘it’s a sort of respectable way to play games when you’re an adult’ to ‘I never feel more alive than when I’m doing this’ I love being connected with history and culture in this way’, and ‘it’s an essential part of my life’. A significant number of people said they did it because they could trace their ancestry back to those specific times – and a high proportion of these claimed to be direct descendants of royalty and nobility! In the case of World War One, very many men and women told me it gave them a real and very personal connection with their own family history. They’d traced their roots, and / or found family photographs and letters of relatives who’d fought and often died during the Great War.      

Most of the events I’ve attended have been slightly chaotic. The World War One re-enactments at Stirling Castle involved a lot of running about and shouting, interspersed with smoke bombs and officers bawling orders, which their troops cheerfully ignored. I’m not sure if this was intended to reflect the actual action of the Great War, but certainly the rainy weather gave a flavour of authenticity. And this made me pay attention to the rain capes of the soldiers, how they look and how they smell when wet.   

Our visual images of World War One are mainly black and white or sepia tinted. It’s startling to see the pristine cream-coloured puttees worn by the soldiers on parade. The aprons that the soldiers of the Highland regiments were obliged to wear over their kilts when working out of the front line look faintly ridiculous. I can touch the actual army uniform and feel the coarse cloth against my skin. NB – I did manage to get close to the one that was worn by Brad Pitt in one of his acting roles!

I try on the soft cap which was the soldiers’ headgear in the early part of the War. I turn it over in my hand, and I shudder as I recall seeing the size of artillery shells in the Imperial War Museum.

I know that girl munitions workers wore overalls of a distinctive blue and the shade was named by them as ’munitions blue’.

What did impress me was the knowledge of the participants. In addition to performing their set pieces, when ‘off duty’ they’d take time to chat and were an invaluable source of information. The Internet is a vast resource and one can find almost anything one is looking for. But often I don’t actually know what I am looking for. And often when I find it, I don’t recognise its true value. 

But I am a hoarder. 

When the maid of the household of Mary, Queen of Scots tells me that she collects strips of willow for her mistress to use to brush her teeth, I write that down. It may be months before I realise that it could be the way that a would-be assassin might try to poison her Grace. 

I watch the four Marys ‘dress’ their Queen’ and, almost unconsciously, I’m counting the number of pins it takes to secure the heavily embroidered sleeves to her dress.

The chap in charge of the horses lets me know that the stable boys had their heads shaved at regular intervals to prevent lice. Is that worth remembering? Why yes, because a shaved head completely changes a person’s appearance.  

When I come to the actual writing of the book I’m aware that some part of my brain has been weaving things together. And then suddenly there’s a spark! A connection is made.

Which leads to another.

And another.

And another…   

Images and Photographs Copyright:  © SCARPA

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LATEST BOOKS

Spy for the Queen of Scots 

The Traveller  (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke)

Divided City   Playscript now available.