Category Archives: History

Prostitution and virtue in Victorian England: Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Acts

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One of the joys of being a woman in Victorian England must’ve been the multitude of people available to police your sex life–or as they’d have put it, your virtue. Let’s come at this by way of the reformers.

Victorian Britain had a glut of reformers and  philanthropists. The most stereotypical were upper class, religiously motivated, and full of zeal for improving the poor–their morality, their health, their smallest daily routines. Surely if the poor learned to manage better, to be better, they’d get over their distressing habit of earning so little money. 

High on the list of the poor they set out to improve were prostitutes, or fallen women if we want to use era-appropriate language.

For all the reformers’ superiority and cluelessness about why the poor were poor, what it took to live on so little, and why women engaged in prostitution, some of the reformers managed to do some good in the world. And occasionally, if you dig deep enough, you stumble over an upper-class reformer who broke through the limits their world imposed. Allow me to introduce you, friends, to Josephine Butler. She didn’t break out entirely, but she makes an interesting tale.

Irrelevant photo: hills in North Wales.

 

The inevitable background

Butler was born in 1828 into an upper-middle class family. Her parents were Church of England–in other words, they belonged to the respectable church–and abolitionists, but the sort of abolitionists who were related to and hobnobbed with lords and prime ministers. 

Okay, make that one prime minister, but how many does it take to impress you people anyway?

If your point of reference is the US–as mine still is, even after 18 years in the UK–I should explain that Britain’s upper-middle class is considerably more upper than the US version. In addition to hobnobbing a prime minister, this was the sort of family whose kids had horses and whose girls were educated at home, learning music and whatever else was suitable for young ladies. At 17 Butler (sorry–I’m using her married name although she was still single; it’s simpler) had a religious conversion, one that didn’t involve packing up and moving to a different religion but becoming more intense about the one she already belonged to. In other words, she drank her religion straight from then on, without ice or mixers, thanks.

She married George Butler, a classical scholar and a believer in women’s equality. Marrying him was an opportunity to get as close to higher education as a woman could, and in one of his letters before they married proposed “a perfectly equal union, with absolute freedom on both sides for personal initiative in thought and action.”

This was as good as it was going to get. This was a world where a woman’s property and earnings–if she had any–belonged to her husband, she had no legal standing apart from him, girls’ education was at best narrow and decorative, a lady was expected to stay at home and ever so genteely lose her mind, and a single woman was an object of pity and likely to be broke or dependent on some male relative or both.

Over the next few years, Butler and her husband had three kids and moved around a bit, landing after a while in Liverpool, where as a way to cope with the death of their only daughter she began a ministry (we’re back to that religious thing) to women imprisoned in the workhouse and to prostitutes working the street. 

You could argue–convincingly, I think–that prostitution was central to any understanding of the condition of women. A man’s sexual drive was thought to be pretty much ungovernable and a woman’s, or at least a lady’s to be nonexistent. Prostitution was seen as a way to keep the pressure cooker from exploding. And prostitution was one of the few ways a woman could earn money if the factories weren’t hiring. So this wasn’t some random choice on her part.

Still, I know: fallen women; Victorian lady healing herself by swooping in to minister to the unfortunates. She hadn’t broken the mold yet, but she did overflow it a bit by taking some of the most desperate women into her house, often to die. 

She also joined campaigns to open higher education to women, questioning the deeply embedded belief that women’s role–their natural and only role–was to be a wife and mother. Where, she asked, did that leave the two and a half million women for whom no husbands were available, since there weren’t enough men to go around? How were they supposed to support themselves?

 

The Contagious Diseases Acts

Let’s take a step to the side here and catch up with the Contagious Diseases Acts. I’ll get back to Butler in a minute. 

The first of the acts was passed in 1864 and grew out of public reaction to the British military’s underwhelming performance in the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion. They’d been disorganized, undisciplined, and immoral, the public (or whatever passed for the public) had decided. Their ranks were filled with bachelors, which might (gasp, wheeze) lead them into homosexual activity, and the soldiers and sailors were riddled with venereal disease.  

Something had to be done, even if that something had nothing to do with anything. You’ve been around long enough to see that solution implemented more than once.

The something that got done was to pass a law focused on port and garrison towns and aimed at stopping the spread of venereal disease by forcing women who were suspected of prostitution to accept medical examinations. If a woman showed signs of infection, she could be sent to a lock hospital for three months. Anyone refusing to be examined faced six months in prison, with or without hard labor.

This was, remember, before penicillin. Syphilis was still being treated, ineffectively and toxically, with mercury.  So locking infected women away for three months during which no effective treatment was available?

Yeah.  

What about men with venereal diseases?  The thinking was that they might resist, so the law gave them a free pass. One prostitute who’d chosen to go to prison rather than submit to an examination told Butler that the judge who condemned her had paid her for sex just a few days before.

The law’s definition of a prostitute was vague and the plainclothes police who enforced the law, like ICE in the US today, didn’t have to offer evidence against a woman. If they stopped her, she could choose to go to prison or accept an invasive physical exam and sign a form registering her as a prostitute.

Can’t say she didn’t have a choice.

Later versions of the act extended it to more parts of the country and added that women who’d been registered had to be checked every two weeks for up to a year. The lock hospital detention was extended to six and then nine months. Women working in brothels had to have tickets signed and kept up to date, establishing that they’d been examined.

Predictably enough, it was poor and working class women who were detained. 

 

The campaign for repeal

Multiple organizations were formed to push for repeal. One of them, the National Anti-Contagious Diseases Acts Association (NA), excluded women. 

No, I don’t make this stuff up.

In response, the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA) formed, and this is where Butler breaks out of the nice-lady savior mold. The NLA’s members were mostly upper- and middle-class women, but they collaborated with working-class women, with men, with prostitutes, and they invaded the all-male world of politics. In other words, they challenged the hell out of Victorian gender and class norms. Parliamentarians talked about it as a “revolt of women” and newspapers called them a “shrieking sisterhood.”  

In 1870 Butler became the leader of the NLA, a step that she and her husband both knew risked her respectability and his career. I can’t find anything that says his career did end up being damaged, but she was denounced in Parliament as “a woman who calls herself a lady” and “worse than the prostitutes.”  Philanthropy was one thing, after all, but she was out in the world speaking in public about sex. It just wasn’t done. 

She was a good speaker and seems to have been a speaking machine. In one year, she spoke at more than 100 public meetings and travelled something like 4,000 miles, addressing small groups and large ones, groups of women, groups of working class men. By licensing brothels, she argued, the state was profiting from women’s misery.

By returning detained women to their sinful lives, the government was making itself complicit with prostitution. 

This wasn’t a polite campaign or a safe one.  She spoke in a barn and someone set it on fire. Men smashed the windows of a hotel she was staying in, threatening to set it on fire. At one rally, pimps threw cow dung at her. At some point, a man asked,  “Can you ever reclaim prostitutes?” 

Prostitutes often asked her if men could be reclaimed, she answered.

A byelection came up where one candidate wanted to extend the law so it applied not just to prostitutes but to soldiers’ wives. The LNA seized on it, passing out leaflets, holding prayer meetings, hiding from angry crowds. 

The candidate lost.

But it wasn’t all agitprop and burnt barns. The LNA funded legal representation for women who were locked away and raised money to care for their children.

The repeal campaign ran for sixteen years. The acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886.

 

Hope Cottage

In 1885, Butler set up a non-sectarian house of rest in Winchester’s red light district. It was conceived as a contrast to the secure units churches set up to reform fallen women. 

Throw a few quotation marks into that last sentence, please. I’m using the language of the time, even though it gives me a rash.  

I’ve seen the place described as a faith hospital, as a place for the dying, as a refuge for women who were “friendless, betrayed and ruined, judged for one reason or another not quite suitable for other homes or refuges.” In its first year, it served more than 40 women. Butler’s husband–by this time ordained and a canon, which is a religious position, not something to fire at the enemy–preached there (informally, according to one website) on Sundays. Which means the place may have been non-sectarian but it wasn’t non-Christian. 

Addressing the economic roots of prostitution, women living there could earn money by making envelopes. Given how few ways a woman could earn money– Hell, it was better than nothing, although not by much.

 

A quick break here . . .

. . . to honor how murky life is. Butler wasn’t above making a distinction between prostitutes and, ahem, virtuous women. 

“The degradation of these poor unhappy women is not degradation for them alone,” she wrote; “it is a blow to the dignity of every virtuous woman too, it is dishonour done to me, it is the shaming of every woman in every country of the world.” 

So give her one point for solidarity and take one away for still being tangled in the spiderwebs of Victorian morality. And if we’re surprised, take a point away from us.

 

Enter Rebecca Jarrett and W.T. Stead

Somewhere along in here Butler met a former sex worker named Rebecca Jarrett, who’d kept a brothel dealing in virgins. Or that’s what one source says. What I’ve learned of the world tells me that most people only stay virgins for just so long, after which they mysteriously become not-virgins, so Jarrett’s trade was either a bit less limited or open to being sued for false advertising. 

But that’s neither here nor there. Jarrett had kept a brothel, had been saved by the Salvation Army, and moved into Hope Cottage. I’m tempted to ask for more quotation marks so I can spend them on the word saving, but Jarrett described herself as a “poor broken up drunken woman,” so maybe we should pocket the quotation marks so we can pull them out on some clearer occasion. Either way, Jarrett went on to help set up a second home, similar to Hope Cottage. And here’s where the story’s pace picks up.

W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was running an expose on child sex trafficking and wanted to stage the buying of a child to demonstrate how easy it was. Butler put him in touch with Jarrett and they found a 13-year-old, Eliza Armstrong and paid her mother £2, promising £3 later on. That would be about £760 pounds today.  

Several sites say they took the child someplace safe–I’ll catch up with her story in a minute–and Stead published “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”

The Victorians didn’t do understatement. 

The article led to Jarrett and Stead being arrested but also to sensational headlines in the rest of the press. The trafficking of children was now in the public eye and within weeks Parliament raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. 

Did that mean Jarrett and Stead weren’t prosecuted? The hell it did. Because Eliza’s father hadn’t okayed Eliza’s sale–only her legally irrelevant mother had–Jarrent was imprisoned for six months and Stead for three. Butler defended them, writing to the Hampshire Chronicle, “Rebecca Jarrett, at my own urgent request . . . undertook some of the most difficult tasks connected with the recent exposure.” 

Butler wasn’t charged.

After her release, Jarret continued to work with prostitutes for a while, then spent the rest of her life “in the care” of Butler.

 

Eliza Armstrong

Traumatizing a kid didn’t seem to be a consideration in all this–you know, greater good and all that–but in talking about trauma I may be importing a theory that hadn’t formed yet. Jarrett took Eliza to a midwife/abortionist, who examined her and verified that she was a virgin. She sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform and Jarrett took Eliza to a brothel, where she drugged her lightly. 

Stead then came in, playing the role of a man buying himself a virgin, and he waited for her to come to. When she did, she screamed, which apparently implied that he’d–as they said–had his way with her. Your guess is as good as mine here. 

She was then handed over to Bramwell Booth, a general in the Salvation Army, who took her to France and left her with a Salvation Army family.

After the trial, the prosecutor raised money for Eliza’s family, which paid for her to attend the Princess Louise Home for the Protection of Young Girls, where she was trained to work as a servant. She married twice, had ten children, and maintained a friendly correspondence with Stead. 

If you know a weirder story than that, leave it in the comments. 

 

Purity

In the 1870s, Butler’s speeches to young men began to focus on purity, personal morality, and the dangers of uncontrolled sexuality. It sounds prim and scolding, and–yeah, well, it is prim and scolding, but in a context where men could give almost free reign to their sexual impulses and women not only couldn’t follow theirs but were handed the consequences of and the blame for men’s–. 

Context, people. Context.

Butler wasn’t alone in calling on men to keep it buttoned up. The National Vigilance Association was headed down the same road, but when it began supporting the prosecution of prostitutes and brothel keepers, Butler set up a rival group, the Personal Rights Association, which warned against “Purity Societies,” calling them “stampers on vulnerable people.” 

Her later campaigning also focused on women in colonial India who were being forced into prostitution by the British army. So let’s give her back that point we took away earlier.

Cambridge University and the women suspected of evil

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Let me take you back to the good old days, when men were men, kings were kings, and things weren’t at all the way we imagine. Those manly men of the court? They wore ruffs and earrings. And the king in question was a queen. 

Shall we start over? Back in the days when Elizabeth I was on the throne, she granted a charter to Cambridge University that allowed it to arrest and imprison any woman  “suspected of evil.” I don’t know what happened behind the scenes to bring that about, but if she’d set out to prove that a woman wielding power doesn’t necessarily improve life for all women, she did a pretty fair job of it.

irrelevant photo: Men-an-Tol, in Cornwall.It’s from the Bronze Age and your guess is as good as mine what it was for.

 

What kind of evil did she have in mind?

Do you need to ask? Sexual evil, of course. 

The university was a perfect set-up for out-of-bounds sexuality. Until the 1880s, its dons (translation: the men–and they were all men–who taught there) weren’t allowed to marry. That meant they weren’t allowed to have socially (and university-) approved sex. With anyone–presumably including their own lonely selves. 

Admittedly, there’s always a massive gap between the rules and real life, but Cambridge was an all-encompasing institution whose fellows ate, drank, slept, played, prayed, and taught in one fairly limited space. They wouldn’t have expected or found much privacy. 

Into that claustrophobic container, pour half a gallon of hormonally driven adolescent males, also single. Into a series of separate containers, measure out a full gallon of parents worried that loose women would tempt and corrupt their babes. 

Now stir, being mindful to keep the parents at some distance from their offspring but close enough to press their worries on the dons and the university. 

The resulting mixture was combustible, so while both dons and undergraduates could and did keep mistresses, the university had to make gestures in the direction of protecting the undergraduates from sin, temptation, and anything else that might worry a concerned parent or a church.

In other words, it had to arrest any young woman who might represent the forces of sin and temptation, because it sure as hell wasn’t going to arrest its students. 

 

How Cambridge differed from the rest of the country

Under the ordinary laws of Liz’s time, a woman could only be arrested for prostitution if there was something at least vaguely resembling proof that she was, in fact, engaged in prostitution. Under its shiny new charter, though, Cambridge University didn’t have to bother with proof. Its proctors–senior members of the university–could arrest any young woman who was out of the streets after dark. And they did. 

The woman would then be tried by the vice chancellor in a private court, which required no witnesses and no witness statements. The woman had no right to legal defense and wasn’t allowed to say anything more than her name. The university could then imprison her in the Spinning House, a repurposed workhouse. It was cold and damp and the food was bread and sometimes gruel. In 1846, a 17-year-old, Elizabeth Howe, died after spending a December night on a damp bed in a cell with a broken window. She’d been arrested for walking with a friend–another woman–near a brothel, which was enough to demonstrate that she was up to no good.

A friend–possibly the same one but I’m not sure–described her as gentle and kind. The friend tried to get a doctor for her but was stopped by a proctor and threatened with arrest herself. She went home and Elizabeth died.

Women were held for two and three weeks at a time, and anyone who didn’t go along quietly when she was arrested was given a longer sentence. Once inside, anyone who raised hell was held in solitary confinement. In 1748, the vice chancellor paid the town crier 10 shillings to whip “10 unruly women.”

 There’s no way to know how many of the women held there were in fact prostitutes–surely some; prostitution was one of the few ways desperate women could make a little cash–but also surely not all. At one point, the wife and daughter of a councillor (that would be a local politician) were stopped because they’d walked ahead of him and were on the street un–ahem–chaperoned.

I’m going to assume he was able to get them released. No woman could match the power of a respectable man intervening for her, especially when he was aided by a respectable explanation and a bit of local power. Intervening for herself, though, would only get her into deeper trouble. 

Basically, any woman on the streets at night was fair game. Their crimes were listed in the committal books as “street walking” or “suspected of evil.” Over the course of the 19th century, more than 5,000 women were held there.

All this comes from a book, The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked up Women in Its Private Prison, by Caroline Biggs. 

“The town,” Biggs says, “was run for the benefit of the university, not the townspeople. The women in my book represent the ultimate example of how the University wanted to run things to suit themselves. They were so frightened of the undergraduates being tempted that they treated the townswomen, mainly working-class women, with great cruelty.”

Semi-relevantly, the university also controlled the sale of alcohol, the licensing of pubs, and how much credit students were allowed, although how they managed that last one is beyond me. 

 

Then it all fell apart

In 1825, parliament gave the university the power to maintain its own police force, nicknamed bulldogs, who patrolled the night streets alongside the proctors. They were supposed to go after women found in the company of members of the university but Biggs says they pursued any rumors–”every morsel of tittle-tattle”–about young women in Cambridge.

That situation held until 1891, when a 17-year-old, Jane Elsden, was arrested although she was alone on the street, not with a member of the university, and a few months later another 17-year-old, Daisy Hopkins, was hauled in although a man admitted he had solicited her, not the other way around. 

At this point, it all gets a little hazy–possibly not in Biggs’ book but in the articles I’ve found. Sorry–I’m not even using secondary sources but tertiary ones. Someone brought a case of habeaus corpus involving one or both of the women, which meant a judge got to rule on whether she or they were imprisoned legally and ruled that she/they wasn’t/weren’t. One or both of them was or were released.

When I looked for more information on the first woman, Jane Elsden, I found the blog of a distant relative who tells the story that’s come down through her family. It holds that Elsden and Hopkins were friends and were both prostitutes. They’d been arrested and the students they’d been with were given only a mild rebuke. Somehow Elsden escaped from the Spinning House, breaking windows in the Wesley House Chapel as she went. 

“She aroused such fierce debate that eventually the power of the University was challenged and changed.”  

Take it for what it’s worth. If you pass a story down through enough generations, it will evolve, but it will probably still carry some bits of truth. Somehow or other, the two cases caused a public uproar and after 1891 women arrested by the university were allowed legal representation. Then in 1894, parliament revoked Elizabeth’s charter and with it the vice chancellor’s right to arrest women. The Spinning House was torn down not long after that and in a sour little bit of irony a police station was built on the site.

Anne Wentworth, feminism, and the spirit of prophecy

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When did feminism start in England? If you’re in the mood, you could start with Boudicca–warrior queen who took a hefty bite out of the Roman army and turned Roman towns to cinders–but let’s start with Anne Wentworth instead. She was fiery but not in as literal a way. 

Admittedly, Wentworth’s a random place to start, but so’s Boudicca. The real answer is that feminism doesn’t have any single starting point, so I’m almost playing fair here.

Anne Wentworth was born in 1629. Or 1630. Close enough since we’re too late to send a birthday card. The Romans were long gone by then and she was no warrior, but she fought the good fight. 

Even more irrelevant photo than usual: Madron Holy Well, Cornwall. The strips of cloth (and hair scrunchies, and dog bags) represent– Well, they represent whatever the people who left them there wanted them to represent: prayers, wishes, respect, anything else you can think of. I found them oddly moving.

 

Anne Wentworth steps out of line

Her story starts off conventionally enough: She married William Wentworth–probably a glove dealer–in her early twenties and they had a daughter. They lived in London and were (this gets less conventional) Anabaptists, a small and persecuted religious group that was a forerunner of (improbable list warning here) the Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. 

For eighteen years, the Wentworths lived together unhappily. Or at least Anne was unhappy. She later described herself as suffering “great oppression and sorrow of heart.” I don’t know the details, and I’d be surprised if she published them. They weren’t the point, but she did write about being “grossly abused” mentally and physically and she described William as a “scourge and lash,” so that she “lived in misery.”

That’s not the misery memoir we expect today but it was shocking at a time when women were expected to put up with whatever situation their marriages had landed them in and shut up about it.

In 1670, when their daughter was about ten, Anne had what she considered a visit from god.

As she later described it, she came down with a “hectic fever,” nearly died, and came out of the experience believing god had spared her for a reason. It was time to stop living a lie and to start–yes, folks–prophesying. And prophesy she did, which neither her church nor her husband welcomed.   

The sequence of events may be clear to the experts but they’re not to me, so let’s throw any attempt at a timeline out the window. What I can piece together is this:

  • She and the church parted ways, although it’s not clear whether she walked out or was pushed.  
  • Her husband locked her out of the house and destroyed her writings,
  • in spite of which, she published four accounts of her experience, including: A True Account of Anne Wentworth’s Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt With by Some of Those People Called Anabaptists (1676; no one went in for understatement back then) and A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (1677).
  • Anne and her daughter hid from William for a while. 
  • A year after he pitched her out, with the help of her supporters she got back into the house and changed the locks.

 

Giving the church a right of rebuttal

I’m not sure what document we’re quoting here–that’s a problem when you work with secondary sources–but her church considered her a “proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented, and mad woman,” (you may have figured out by now that proud wasn’t a compliment, especially for a woman). She had “unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of [her] husband” and had “wickedly left him.” They charged her with “rejecting and neglecting their church” and with “dissatisfying” her husband.

 

Gender and timing

If that doesn’t convince you that gender was an issue, I’m not sure what will, but gender doesn’t entirely account for why Wentworth’s prophecies weren’t a smash hit. Her timing was off. The high tide of prophecy had passed. After the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the religious upheaval associated with all of that, a lot of people were nervous about inventive religions. They figured the world had received all the prophesies it needed, thanks, and everybody could just make do with what they had.

Still, if you have a visit from god–or if you’re convinced you do, anyway–you’re probably not going to say, “Couldn’t you have told me this twenty years ago?” Wentworth was sure she was living in the end times and god had chosen her as his “battleaxe,” so she did battle with her pen.

Her timing was also bad in that she predicted the would happen apocalypse before New Year’s Day 1678, even thoughtfully warning Charles II and London’s lord mayor about it. 

Then it didn’t happen, which will lose any prophet a bit of credibility, not to mention popularity, but she kept on writing and continued to have supporters–see above about the people who helped her get back into her house. 

She wouldn’t be the last prophet to get the timing wrong on the apocalypse, and probably not the first either. Let’s not hold it against her.

 

So what makes her a feminist?

The word didn’t exist, so she wouldn’t have considered herself one. The first recorded use is from the 19th century and it was used to mean nothing more than the state of being feminine.  

How the world has changed.

But in the face of opposition from husband and church, she claimed the right to speak and publish the truth as she saw it, and at a time when the idea that a woman shouldn’t be dominated by a man was almost unthinkable, she thought it. And went public with the thought. 

It must’ve scared the hell out of her. She wrote, “Here is a case that cannot possible be brought to an end without coming into the publick view of the World, though it is so contrary unto my nature, that I would rather suffer unto death than be in any publick way; but am constrained now, & thrust out by the mighty power of God, who overpowers me, that I must no longer confer with flesh and blood, and yield to my own reason of my weakness, foolishness, and fearful slavish nature, that am daunted with a look of any terrible, fierce, angry man.”

After that, the passage gets so religious, not to mention so 17th century, that I wandered off to feed the cats, but even if Wentworth and I pour our passion into different molds, I have to respect hers.

The Brigantes: a bit of Roman-era British history

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When the Romans invaded Britain, some of the British tribes weighed the odds of defeating them, didn’t like their chances, and cut deals with them. As far as I know, you won’t find statues to those tribes. They got their payoff at the time and to hell with posterity. 

By way of contrast, Boudicca–leader of the Iceni and scourge of the Romans–has a very nice statue in Westminster. Or if it’s not nice, it is at least big.  

Boudicca earned her statue by leading an uprising against Rome, burning what are now Colchester, St. Albans, and London. According to a Roman source, her troops killed 70,000 Romans and pro-Roman Britons and made mincemeat of the Ninth Legion. 

The word mincemeat isn’t in the original. It’s my translation and since I don’t know Latin you shouldn’t give it too much weight, but you might also want to substitute “a lot” for that 70,000. It’s from that impeccable source, the Britannica, which got it from a Roman writer, but at the time statistical reporting was no better than my Latin. 

I also question the number because Wikiwhatsia (sorry–handy for a shallow dive on a beside-the-point topic) estimates the late-second century population of what’s now the UK at somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million, which is close enough for a blog post. If we subtract all the people who lived outside of the area the Romans occupied, and then  eliminate children, old people, and people who had migraines when the battles took place or who were nine months pregnant (women fought–consider Boudicca–so we’re not eliminating them all), we’re left with–um, nowhere near as many people as we started out with. And we haven’t even eliminated all the people who weren’t pro-Roman.

What I’m saying is that if 70,000’s the right number, she would have killed off an unlikely proportion of the fighting population. I suggest we take it as a deceptively specific way of saying she did the Romans a lot of damage.

The Romans did eventually defeat Boudicca, but many centuries later she got her statue.

The tribes who collaborated with the Romans not only don’t get statues (as far as I know), they also don’t get much press, but I stubbed my toe on one of those tribes, the Brigantes, recently and I hate to let that pain go to waste, so let’s stop and learn a bit about them.

Okay, I’m pushing it here. This is a fougou–an elaborate prehistoric tunnel whose purpose no one’s sure of–at Carn Euny, in Cornwall. Wrong end of Britain for this story, but the village was in use until the fourth century CE. 

The Brigantes

The Brigantes were a confederation of tribes–the largest on the island at the time–occupying most of northern England. Or northern what’s-now-England. Or else they were one large honkin’ tribe, not a confederation. Take your pick. We’ll probably never know.

In 43 CE (that’s where we pick up the story), they were led by a queen, Cartimandua, who made an alliance with the Romans in order to avoid an invasion. 

Not invading, though, didn’t mean the Romans stayed out. It just meant they didn’t kill people on their way in. They came, they settled, and they rubbed their hands in glee at the minerals that were to be had. Above all, they made money. 

Unfortunately, the Brigantes left no written records, so we only get to see what happened from Roman sources and from archeology, and with all due respect to archeologists, they can never tell the full story of people’s lives. So we don’t know much about Cartimandua’s life and we don’t know the Brigantes’ experience of having the Romans move in. What we do know is that the Roman pattern was to create what an article on a Warwick University site calls “mutually beneficial relationships with the local elite.”

It would be a long time before the non-elite put their point of view on the record.

We also don’t know whether Cartimandua was one of the eleven British “kings” who surrendered to Emperor Claudius and who were mentioned–not by name–on his triumphal arch, but she might’ve been. It might’ve made more sense to the Romans to call a woman a king than to acknowledge a woman as a ruler.

 

Resistance to Rome

While Cartimandua was cutting her deal, some of the tribes to the south surrendered to the Romans and others fought the. The Catuvellauni tribe fought and lost, and Caratacus, the son of their king, fled to Wales–or what’s now Wales–where with one of the local tribes he kept the fight going for nine years. 

When he was finally defeated, he fled into the territory of the Brigantes, hoping for sanctuary. That makes it sound like he hadn’t been reading the newspapers–the Brigantes; deal with the Romans; should’ve been front-page stuff–but that can happen when you’re fighting an asymmetrical war. You’re too busy to send a kid running to the newsstand. Or you send the kid but then you don’t have time to unfold the damn paper, never mind read it. You’re too busy dodging spears and mending your shield and wondering how you’re going to feed your warriors. 

It’s also possible that he knew Cartimandua had cut a deal with the Romans but he didn’t have any other cards in his hand so he played the one he had.

Either way, Cartimandua handed him over to Rome.

It’s not the sort of move that fills her descendants with pride, but if you narrow history down to feel-good stories about heroes, it’s no longer history, it’s propaganda. Which is of course not a comment on what’s been happening to school books and museum exhibits in the US lately. 

Caratacus’s defeat pretty much settled the question of who controlled Britain: Rome did. He and his family were shipped off to Rome and paraded through the streets. The humiliation of enemies brought glory to Rome. So I’m about to tell you he was executed, right?

Wrong. He gave an impassioned speech asking for clemency and Claudius–the emperor–pardoned him. He and his family lived out the rest of their lives in Rome, quietly.

If life was a movie, it wouldn’t make a good ending.

 

Cartimandua, Venutius, Vollocatus, and a soap opera plot

Cartimandua did well out of handing him over. Or out of her deal with the Romans. Either way, archeologists have unearthed luxuries–glass; rare tableware; amphorae for wine and olive oil–from what may have been her capital. 

Remember that business of the Romans cutting deals with the local elite? 

But we have to backtrack here, because Cartimandua had a husband, Venutius. He seems to have been the lesser power in the relationship and–speculation alert here–may have been the leader of another tribe and their marriage a political alliance. Who knows? They’re both dead and we can’t ask. 

Somewhere around 57 CE, they split up, and Cartimandua not only married his armor-bearer, Vellocatus, but shared power with him. Or so Tacitus, a Roman historian, tells us. Again, who knows? It’s as close to the story as we’re going to get. Let’s pretend to believe it. 

Theirs doesn’t sound like the kind of divorce where the couple gets together every Friday night to eat popcorn and watch TV with the kids, because at some point Cartimandua captured some of Venutius’s relatives, which (life advice warning here) is never a good move if you’re looking to keep peace in the not-quite-family.

Venutius attacked her, but when I say her what I probably mean is her territory. Her tribe. 

It’s possible–or better yet, probable–that this wasn’t all about who shared a bed but about politics. Handing over Caratacus might not’ve been a popular move. Becoming an accessory to a new ruling elite–the Romans–slotting themselves into place over the Brigantes might’ve made Cartimandua unpopular. 

A lot of things are possible. What’s known is that the Romans sent soldiers to defend Cartamandua and Venutius lost but lived and tried again ten years later, when Nero’s death left Rome in turmoil. He attacked, the Romans had only auxiliary troops to send, and Venutius won. 

What happened to Cartamandua? Dunno. She might’ve survived. She might not have.  After that, we’re out of possibilities. Vellocatus drops out of sight. Venutius, though, ruled the Brigantes only until the Romans booted him out and ruled directly. To hell with these client queens and kings; they’re too much trouble. What might’ve been Cartimandua’s capital–it’s now Stanwick–fell out of use and the center of power moved to what’s now Aldborough, which became a Roman administrative center. Where Stanwick seems to have been a place for gatherings rather than a town or stronghold, Aldborough followed the Roman pattern and became a town. A Roman legion was stationed nearby, in what’s now York, so let’s assume that all was not peaceful. Or at least that it was an uneasy peace.

 

What does it all mean?

Cartimandua’s come down to us–I keep saying this, don’t I?–only from Roman sources, and the Romans didn’t take well to the idea of women rulers. As they told her story, it was about a woman’s lust and lack of wisdom and the corrective violence of a tribe that couldn’t accept a woman’s rule. But with her and Boudicca as evidence, we can pretty safely say the tribes had no problem with women rulers. Or leaders, if that’s a better fit. The two queens sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum–fight the Romans; cut a deal with the Romans–but both held power and didn’t have to hide behind a man to wield it.

Cartimandua ruled for more than twenty years, which is more than most politicians can claim. Still, though, no statue.

Why am I so sure of that? Because when I asked Lord Google to help me find one, he led me either to Boudicca’s statue or to statues of people with heavy beards who I’m reasonably sure aren’t Cartimandua.

Shedding a bit of light on Dark Age Britain

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For a long time, pretty much anyone who paid attention to these things agreed that after the Romans left Britain, Anglo-Saxon invaders flowed in, the economy collapsed, trade withered away, and ignorance twined its thorny tendrils around the land. Roman cities and villas were abandoned and everybody proceeded to live in misery. 

That period was once known as the Dark Ages, although the name’s gone out of fashion, and if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, that image of collapse is headed toward the same fate. 

Irrelevant photo: field and fog in September

 

Challenging the orthodoxy

The first challenge I stumbled across was Susan Oosthuizen’s. As she reads the period, the withdrawal of the Romans also meant the end of taxes and goods being siphoned off to Rome. People were able to keep more of what they grew, made, and mined. It’s true that in places land that had grown crops was converted to pasture, and that’s often cited as a sign of collapse, but she sees it as a kind of luxury. People could afford to do that now.

As for the invaders, she looks at the way land was used and finds that people were farming much of the same divisions of land in the same ways. That doesn’t speak to invaders swooping in and changing things to suit their needs. It speaks to immigration and accommodation. 

She paints a picture of immigrants and native people integrating themselves into a shared culture. If you look at their burial grounds, the only way to tell Anglo-Saxons from Celts is to test what’s left of their skeletons, looking for both their DNA and indications of where they grew up–something that’s only been possible recently. They were buried the same way and their grave goods show that their social standing wasn’t defined by which group they came from. 

We might do better to think of we’ve called the Anglo-Saxons as a culture, not an ethnicity or set of tribes.

The tests also show that they weren’t living in isolated communities. They had connections from as far afield as Byzantium and West Africa. That speaks to trade.

Forgive me for referring you to myself as if I was a sober historian–I am sober but a historian, sadly, I’m not. Still, I can’t link to her entire book and I wrote a bit more about some of this here.

 

So what survived after the Romans left?

Well, take Isurium Brigantum, now called Aldborough, in Yorkshire. The area’s rich in silver, lead, and iron, which set Roman noses a-twitching, and they–that’s the Romans, not the noses–set up a regional capital there. 

To see how much mining went on before and after the Romans picked up their toys and went home, Martin Millet, an archeologist associated with the site, looked at pollutants in the mud beside the river Ure. What he found was that instead of mining either ending or dying back when the Romans left, lead levels–the pollutant mining left behind–rose for the next two centuries. 

For later centuries, the lead levels paint an unsurprising picture of mining rising and falling to match wars, plagues, and kingly politics. The one surprise was the absence of a post-Roman collapse.

Still, some things may have collapsed. Isurium Brigantum was a walled town, and it may or may not have continued to be used, but the Roman villas with their mosaics fell into ruin, and archeologists have found the predictable coins, jewelry, and broken glass and pottery nearby. Websites for the site talk, justifiably, about the sophisticated design and decoration.

You can see collapse in all that if you like, but mining–that measurable activity–continued, but it was integrated now into a different kind of economy, one where for a long time coins were fairly peripheral. 

As for art, the Anglo-Saxon taste in decoration was different, but they weren’t without skill.

 

Yeah, but those abandoned villas . . .

The abandoned villas get mentioned as a sign that culture took a nosedive and everything was mud and misery. Who, after all, would voluntarily abandon plumbing and under-floor heating to live in a hovel? 

Not the person who posed the question, but back away for a minute and remember that very few people in Roman Britain owned villas or had plumbing and underfloor heating. That was the elite, the some-very-small percent. True, some larger number of people lived in or around villas as servants and slaves, but most or all of them would’ve been servicing the plumbing, not enjoying it. Someone had to keep the fires stoked if those hypocausts were going to work.

So asking who would voluntarily abandon plumbing and underfloor heating is sort of like asking if we, the world’s current population, would voluntarily abandon our luxury superyachts. For 99.someverylargepercent, that wouldn’t be a hardship. We don’t own them and never will. It’s not impossible to imagine a reconfiguration of the world’s resources that would leave the superyachts and all associated possessions abandoned but everyone living better.

If you look at post-Roman society from a distance, you can notice the disappearance of cities and villas and see loss. If you look at it from some peasant’s doorway, though, the change just might look like an improvement.

A quick history of England’s bastard children–and their mothers 

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Before we get started, isn’t bastard a nasty thing to call a person? 

It’s turned into an all-purpose insult, yes, but it’s still better than illegitimate child, which people use if they’re trying to be polite but which implies that some kids are legal and justified and some aren’t and maybe we should just ship ‘em into the outer darkness and be done with them. So yeah, I’ll go with bastard, in spite of its drawbacks.

 

How much can we actually know about them?

Less than I’d like. Probably less than you’d like. In an article about unmarried mothers in medieval England–called, surprisingly enough, “Unwed Mothers in Medieval England,” Becky R. Lee says,  “I have a confession to make. The claim of any historian to uncover the experiences of, and attitudes towards, any group from the past is at best hyperbole. When it is a group of women, and medieval women at that, the claim and the information is bound to be full of gaps.”

Ditto bastard children. 

Lee’s topic isn’t identical to mine, but it’s close enough: if you don’t have mothers, you don’t get children. I’ve drawn on her article heavily but managed to lose the site where it’s most easily available. Basically the link above proves it exists but– Um. Yeah. Sorry.

Irrelevant photo: rowan berries–or if you prefer, mountain ash

 

The medieval period

William the Conqueror–the big bad Norman who conquered England in 1066–wasthe  famously known as William the Bastard, and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis seems to have hinted (notice the two weasel words there, seems and hinted?) that William’s parents not having been married was less important than in his mother having the wrong pedigree. She was the child of either a tanner or an undertaker. How unseemly can you get?

In William’s time and place, a bastard child could inherit and could even rule. What mattered was being born to parents (preferably two, but William made do with one) who had power, money, titles, ancestry, and– Hey, you know how it is: the aristocrats have ancestry; the rest of us just hatched somehow. 

I started with William because it’s easiest to find information on the bastard children of kings and aristocrats. They left a record and historians and pseudohistorians have a fascination with them. But what about ordinary people? We can’t all be the bastards of kings and dukes.

In the early medieval period, the attitude toward ordinary bastards was linked to the way marriage worked: couples didn’t have to marry in the church or even just outside the door. Some did, but others married more casually: on the road, at the pub, at someone’s house, in bed. They also didn’t need witnesses, their families’ permission, or a priest. They didn’t have to throw a party or wear clothes they’d never use again. If the two people agreed to marry and exchanged a gift of some sort–often a ring–it was done, which is why marrying in bed was not only possible but convenient. 

This had a downside: it made it hard to prove you were married. Or weren’t married. So the line between married and not married wasn’t as clear as it is today.

The secular custom of trothplight (the first recorded use is from sometime around 1300) was more public: a couple exchanged vows before friends and family, after which they were considered married. 

When there was a public betrothal, it was acceptable for couples to live in the same house before the wedding. Ditto while the terms of a marriage were being hammered out. Presumably they had sex, although they didn’t let me know so I can’t say for sure. One writer describes marriage in this period as a process, not a one-time event. 

If the line between the married and the unmarried was hazy, so too was the line between bastard and not-bastard.

Don’t you just love it when I take something that used to be clear and murk it up a bit?

 

Inheritance

It’s not until the twelfth century that children born outside of any marriage were excluded from various kinds of inheritance. I would’ve assumed that shift was driven by the church, but according to one article (and again I’ve lost the link; sorry, I’m more than usually disorganized this week), it was initially driven by court battles over inheritance in which disinherited and very grumpy descendants who’d been born on the right side of the bed presented judges with bits of Church doctrine to back up their claim that the descendants born on the wrong side had no right to inherit. 

Still, the Church wasn’t irrelevant. Starting in the eleventh century, it began trying to take control of marriage and eliminate adultery and concubinage by limiting the rights of bastards. It now defined a legitimate child as one born to a couple who were free to marry and who’d married publicly and formally. 

Don’t take that to mean that everything changed at once, though. For one thing, Church and state had separate courts, and Church law and civil law weren’t necessarily in tune on this, so the two court systems might rule differently. Take a couple who had a child and then married. To the Church, that made the child no longer a bastard as long as the parents were free to marry when it was conceived. To the state, it changed nothing.

Another factor slowing the change was public opinion. Especially in a small community, people would have strong opinions about what was and was not a marriage and who was and was not in one, and those opinions would vary from place to place and time to time.

 

The economics of bastardy

Central to all of this was the cost of bringing up a child. At least among the poor, who were the vast majority of the population, it took two people to raise a child and it was a struggle even then. A single woman with a child would be desperate. In fact, a single woman would be desperate even without a child. Marriage integrated her into the economy, and many single (or somewhat single, given the haziness of the dividing line) women who had children went on to marry. 

Still, the birth of a bastard child would be a matter for either a manorial court, where the lord of the manor presided, or a Church court, and either court would demand to know who the father was. He’d have to contribute to the child’s support, and sometimes support the mother through her pregnancy and provide her with a dowry. If he couldn’t be found, his family might be called on. 

And if he wasn’t known, if he and his family had no support to give, if any number of other things went wrong? Then it came down to community support. It wouldn’t have been much but it was better than nothing. That support might come from the parish, a monastery, a guild, or a town, and at least one historian raises the possibility that the financial burden on an already poor community turned communities against the mothers, and/or their children.

Some babies were abandoned at the door of a church or hospital, but others were raised by their mothers–with, I’d speculate, the support of the women’s families–or more rarely their fathers. There are instances of fathers leaving bequests to their bastard children in their wills, especially (in case you were about to get all sentimental about that) when they had no living non-bastard children. 

 

Penance & Punishment

Having unauthorized sex was also a matter for the church and manorial courts–or it was if you got caught. A manorial court could levy a leyrwite, a fine for fornication, and these were more common and the fines were higher during hard times, when community resources were stretched thin and an extra child would be a burden. In some cases, the woman’s landholding was seized and she was expelled from the community. After the plague, though, when the population was depleted and an extra child would be welcome, no matter how it came into the world, fines were smaller and less common.

Predictably, more women than men were charged with fornication in manorial courts–men aren’t in the habit of getting pregnant and have a long history of saying, “Who, me?” when confronted with a pregnancy taking place in someone else’s body–and most of the women fined were poor. About a quarter of them later married. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty, fines, repeated charges, and presumably sexual exploitation. Some of the charitable institutions that supported unwed mothers and their children excluded these women. They weren’t the deserving poor.

The Church went in not only for fines but also public penance–things like walking at the head of the Sunday procession or around the church in their underwear–and these sometimes landed on men but more commonly on women. One of the writers I read speculates that these rituals could’ve been a way for the punished to be accepted back into the community. Others see them simply as public humiliation. 

 

Names

You can’t play spot-the-bastard by looking at people’s names. Children whose fathers recognized them often took their father’s name; others took their mother’s. Fitz, as in Fitzwilliam, isn’t the mark of a bastard ancestor. It simply means son of, although many a royal bastard did become a Fitz, which is why it’s often assumed that it marks a bastard birth.

 

The late medieval period

By the time we get into the late fourteenth century, a bastard child could no longer inherit, but there were ways around that. Take Sir William Argentine, a bastard son whose father had entailed most of his estates, cutting out his non-bastard daughter and her two entirely respectable children. Along with the property went the right to serve as cup-bearer to Henry IV. Everybody involved went to court and William won.

If you’re not convinced yet that Fitz didn’t signify bastardy, William’s opponent in the lawsuit was his half-sister’s husband, whose last name was Fitzwaryn.

As for entailment, let’s skip the details: it allowed the person in possession of a property to control how it was distributed after his death–and I suspect we do mean his there. Women’s hold on property was rare and tenuous.

William went on to sit in parliament as a knight of the shire (they talked like that back then; trust me, I’m old enough to remember) and serve as sheriff for Norfolk and Suffolk. In other words, bastard birth or not, he was screamingly respectable.

 

A quick dash through a few more centuries

Once we get into the sixteenth century, we find laws like the Acte for Setting of the Poore on Work, and for the Avoiding of Ydleness (they spelled like that too), which in theory punished both parents but–well, you know how it is, what with fathers being unlikely to get pregnant and all. And since walking around the church in your underwear had gone out of fashion, it allowed the mother’s name to be announced  publicly instead. 

Shaming a woman for having had sex hadn’t gone out of fashion. 

After 1609, a mother could be sent to a house of correction for a year unless she gave security–in other words, money–for her bastard child.  Public opinion turned on women with bastard children if they became dependent on the parish, which was now more likely because when Henry VIII chased the Catholic Church into exile, it took with it its network of charitable support, however thin and patchwork it had been.

You notice a pattern here? Punishment fell on women who didn’t have the money to support their children. Well-connected bastards would be okay if their mothers’ families accepted them, or if their fathers’ did. Charles II’s bastards did very well, thanks. They were given titles and good marriages were organized for them. A bastard child brought up in a wealthy family might not be on equal footing with the other children but she or he wouldn’t be out on the street.

Or a wealthy man might pay some other man to marry a woman he’d made pregnant. If she wasn’t of his class, who was she to turn her nose up at a milliner or a tailor?

Poor women, though? As a measure of the desperation they faced, infanticide became common enough that in 1624 an Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was introduced . A woman could face execution if she concealed the dead body of a child she’d given birth to. 

With all that said, bastard children were less common than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Skip to 1732 (that takes us into the Georgian era) and under the Bastard Child Act any man charged with being the father of a bastard child would be imprisoned until he agreed to pay the parish if he failed to shoulder the cost of raising the child. That was entered in the parish record and was called a bastardy bond. 

How would they know who the father was? It was the woman’s responsibility to name him. My best guess is that the threat of getting no support at all ensured that most would. 

In the eighteenth century, half of all conceptions happened outside of marriage, although only one in five births were recorded that way. That argues for a lot of hurried marriages. Under common law, those children wouldn’t have been able to inherit but I’d bet on a surprising number of premature children being born. And again, that workaround, entailment, was still available to let a father settle property on a child–as long as he had enough money to pay a lawyer, which narrows the field considerably.

Somewhere along in here we find people using euphemisms like base-born children, natural children, or by-blows for the bastard children of respectable men. 

 

Nineteenth  century

The 1833 Poor Law Commission Report on Bastardy argued that the existing poor laws were encouraging women to have bastard children. Parish relief was too easy and too expensive. (The arguments never seem to change, do they?) Parishes were being saddled with children they had to maintain. And if economics weren’t enough to win the argument, religion and morality went into high gear. Immorality and poverty became more or less the same thing. 

What was needed? Why, punishment. No one, male or female, who was able-bodied should get financial support–they either worked or went to the workhouse, which at its best was deliberately harsh.  

The 1834 Poor Laws did all that and also absolved fathers of any responsibility for bastard children.  

The mothers were solely responsible. Since babies don’t take well to being tucked in a drawer somewhere so that their mothers can work a twelve-hour day–well, if they couldn’t manage job and child, into the workhouse with them. What did they expect when they got themselves pregnant? 

You now find talk about the “vicious mother” and the “great offence against the sacrament of marriage.” The Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords denounced “the lazy, worthless, and ignominious class who pursue their self-gratification at the expense of the earnings of the industrious part of the community.” 

In case the picture isn’t grim enough, abortion became illegal in 1861. 

Enter baby farming: people would place ads offering to find a home for babies in return for some payment from their mothers. Some of the children died of malnutrition, neglect, or abuse, which in an age of high infant mortality hardly draw attention. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, legislation began to regulate both adoption and foster care. 

In 1926, after-the-fact legitimization was allowed. Sorry–I wasn’t going to use that word. De-bastardization? Call it what you like, it became legally possible. In 1969, a bastard child was allowed to inherit if her or his parents died without a will. 

The Boer War: civilians, concentration camps, and Emily Hobhouse

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The Boer War (1899-1902; you’re welcome) was fought between white settlers who’d already colonized parts of South Africa–they’re the Boers–and the British, who’d done likewise and wanted the parts the Boers already had. You might be more familiar with the Boers if we call them Afrikaaners. 

Spoiler alert: the British won, although, as Britain’s National Army Museum’s website puts it, “not without adopting controversial tactics.”

Um, yeah. The controversial bit is that the British pioneered the use of concentration camps. I’d have used a stronger word myself, but in our enlightened times I doubt you’d have to go far to find someone ready to defend them.

Most summaries of the war sideline the African people–the original people whose land the two sides were fighting over. 

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus

 

The war 

The British and the Boers had already fought one war, from 1880 to 1881, and the Boers won it. Or at least the British didn’t. It’s not our focus, so let’s not bother.

Then 1886 came around and gold was discovered. Whee. Ring out the bells, because everyone can get rich quick. Or at least they can dream about getting rich quick. As long as they’re white, anyway. Immigration from Britain skyrocketed. Tension grew between the bits ruled by the Boers and the bits ruled by the Brits until war broke out. 

Am I oversimplifying? Hell yes. If I didn’t, we’d never get to the end.

The Boers fought a guerrilla war. The British had a professional army and outnumbered them. But a-symetrical warfare’s an unpredictable beast: the Boers won a few battles, sending the British public into shock. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, and in a fit of patriotic fervor, men signed up to join the military until Britain had 400,000 soldiers in South Africa. The Army Museum counts this as “the first campaign in which British people from all sectors of society took up arms”–a kind of foreshadowing of the First World War. 

 

The context

In the early stages of the war, both sides made what the Army Museum website calls a tacit agreement not to arm the Black population. Because when you take someone else’s land–and what else is colonization?–it’s so much nicer if you’re armed and they’re not. But as the war ground on, neither side could hold to it. 

Eventually something like 15,000 to 30,000 Black Africans served as scouts and sentries for the British Army. Another 100,000 worked as labourers, transport drivers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, farriers, and builders. Some smaller number of Indians (another British colony, remember, and many Indians had immigrated to South Africa) served as stretcher bearers and servants. Some 300 of them were free, another 800 were indentured workers from sugar estates, who didn’t get a choice: they were sent by what the museum, keeping a straight face the whole time, calls their employers. 

The early battles, when the Boers were winning, involved sieges and hunger among both British soldiers and civilians, and especially (no surprise here) among the Black population.   Then the tide turned and the British began to conquer territory but their control kept slipping away as soon as the army moved on. That’s guerrilla war for you. So the British began burning farms, destroying crops and livestock, and poisoning wells to deny food to the enemy and punish people who’d been supporting the Boers, and if that has a familiar sound, you’ve been following the news.

After a while, the British created those concentration camps I mentioned, imprisoning both the Black and the Boer women and children. In separate camps, mind you, because the decencies had to be maintained. 

Why imprison the Black population? It was partly about denying supplies to Boer fighters but it was at least as much about forcing the men into the gold mines as laborers, which you could do more easily if you’d driven them off the land and taken their families prisoner.

And here at last Emily Hobhouse makes her entrance.

 

Enter Emily Hobhouse

Hobhouse was from St. Ive (not to be confused with the better known St. Ives), Cornwall, and was an archdeacon’s daughter. After her father’s death and with the support of her uncle–a baron, no less–she did what the website of a museum dedicated to her calls “social upliftment work” among the Cornish miners in Minnesota. She got engaged, bought a farm in Mexico (yes, that is a long way from Minnesota), and lost most of her money. The museum website calls it a failed engagement. A different site calls it a failed romance and links the farm (and presumably the man) to the disappearing money. I don’t know anything more than you do but I’m placing my bet on the second version. It not only sounds more realistic, it makes her sound more interesting. That doesn’t make it right but it is more fun.

In 1898, with all that under her belt and (I assume) sadder but wiser, she went back to Britain–to London, not Cornwall–where she became a Suffragist, campaigning to expand the vote not just to women but to all men and women. She became chair of the People’s Suffrage Federation and then the Women’s Industrial Council, investigating child labor.

When the Boer War broke out, she became involved in the South African Conciliation Committee, which opposed it, chairing its women’s branch (anyone here old enough to remember the days of ladies’ auxiliaries?). When word reached Britain about the conditions of Boer women and children in the camps, she  established the South African Women and Children Distress Fund and in 1900 went to South Africa to distribute aid and investigate conditions.

What she found in the camps was hunger, disease, overcrowding, and terrible sanitation. The death rate in 1901–the year it was highest–was 344 per 1,000 people in the white camps. One source says the dead were mostly children and that the numbers may be an underestimate. 

I can’t find parallel numbers for the Black camps but one article says they were similar. I’ll go out on a limb and guess they weren’t as well documented.

All told, 28,000 white and 20,000 Black people died in the camps. Civilians made up more than 60% of the war’s dead. Measles were probably the greatest single killer but malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor sanitation paved the way. And typhoid. We mustn’t forget typhoid.  

With the permission of the military, Hobhouse waded into the camps, distributing aid and demanding milk, clothing, soap, and medicines. Although the officers in charge of the camps apparently had no idea who she was, she had the clothes, the accent, and the sense of entitlement that can perform magic if all the stars are in the right position. I don’t say that to diminish what she did, only to keep it in perspective.

More importantly, though, she documented conditions in the camps and when she got back to Britain published a report, lectured the secretary of state for two hours, wrote reams of letters to newspapers, and turned the issue into a national scandal. She was called a traitor, “that bloody woman,” and “a weapon used wherever the name of England was hated.”  

As far as I can tell–and I’m working from secondary sources, so take that into account–her focus was on conditions in the Boer camps, not the Black ones.

In response to the scandal, the government sent a committee to investigate. It reported back pretty much what Hobhouse had, although it managed not to mention her. In 1901 she returned to South Africa. She was refused permission to land and put on a ship bound for Britain.

She went back in 1903, after the war, to set up rehabilitation projects–again they seem to have been focused on Boer women–and returned again in 1913 for the unveiling of a monument to the Boer women and children who’d died. 

During that visit, she met Gandhi, who talked to her about the suffering of the Indian community and she helped set up a meeting between him and the South African prime minister, Louis Botha. 

Was she cluelessly racist? As far as I can tell, yes. She doesn’t seem to have seen past the Boers–or if she saw she didn’t act on what she saw. On the other hand, meeting with Gandhi wasn’t something most whites would’ve done at the time, and he wrote in her obituary that she “was one of the noblest and bravest of women. She worked without thinking of any reward. . . . She loved her country and because she loved it she could not tolerate any injustice caused by it. She realised the atrocity of war. She thought Britain was wholly in the wrong. . . . She had a soul that could defy the might of kings and emperors with their armies.” 

Let’s acknowledge both sides of the story. Reality’s a bitch but I’m committed to it, at least as far as I’m able to find it.

 

Aftermath

We’ve now gone past the Boer War, but let’s follow Hobhouse a little further. When World War I broke out, she wrote to every well-placed contact she had, trying to stop it. (You have to have well-placed contacts to think you can stop a war by talking to a few people.) That included Lloyd George, who had backed her on the camps during the Boer War and who became prime minister after the war started, in 1916. 

She also wrote letters to newspapers. In one to the Manchester Guardian, she wrote “Few English people have seen war in its nakedness. . . . They know nothing of the poverty, destruction, disease, pain, misery and mortality which follow in its train. . . . I have seen all of this and more.’ 

The war started in spite of her efforts–you saw that coming, right?–and at Christmastime she organized an open letter from 100 British women to German and Austrian women: “Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us. . . . We must all urge that peace be made. We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow.” In March, a matching open letter was published from a similar number of German and Austrian women, carrying warm greetings.

When the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (it was founded in 1915) based its office in Amsterdam, she served as secretary for three months while its main organisers were in the United States, making it to Amsterdam although Britain had asked its embassies in France, Italy, and Switzerland to send her home.

Before the war’s end, she attended the socialist Second Zimmerwald Conference, along with socialists from both warring and neutral states. The manifesto they hammered out opposed the war, which had been a contentious issue among socialist parties. 

The Foreign Office revoked her passport, but it took them a while to find her, since the Swiss police couldn’t give out foreigners’ addresses, and when they did find her and asked her to call in at the Legation, she hightailed it to Belgium–then occupied by Germany–to look into the conditions of noncombatents. Then she spent five days in Germany, where she met with the foreign secretary and came away convinced that he wanted peace and that she’d been asked to serve as an intermediary. When she got home, the British government wasn’t convinced. 

Two or three years later, when Britain was negotiating an exchange of internees with Germany, the negotiator found the Germans offering the same concessions Hobhouse had listed.

After the war, she worked for the relief of civilians who’d been caught up in the war. 

Toward the end of her life, money was raised in South Africa to buy her a house in St. Ives (this is the town with the S at the end), Cornwall, and much later South Africa’s apartheid government honored her by naming a submarine after her. 

She would have hated that.

How the English got hereditary family names

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If that title makes it sound like I’m about to tell you how the alligator got its tail, I sort of am but it’s not alligators and it’s not tails. It’s about a tradition–hereditary family names–that those of us who grew up with it tend to forget isn’t inevitable. 

 

Let’s start with the Anglo-Saxons 

The Anglo-Saxons had a pressing need to tell one Aelfgifu or Aelfstan from all the other Aelfgifus and Aelfstans. Because as far as I can tell the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy all had the same damn names. 

Okay, I admit, I haven’t done a deep dive into the Anglo-Saxons, and the names are one of the things that put me off. But I can still explain the system. Or systems, really. 

Irrelevant photo: evening light, north Cornwall

 

Some people got nicknames: the king Aethelred Unraed translates to Aethelred the poorly advised. Since Aethelred means wise counsel, the pun must’ve been irresistible. He’s gone down in history as Ethelred the Unready, and having gotten named with a pun in one language, it was probably inevitable that he’d get saddled with a parallel pun in the language that picked up from it.

He was neither ready nor well advised in the face of Viking invasions, so the name’s not a bad fit. 

But the nicknames weren’t necessarily insults. The woman who married Harold II, the last of the  Anglo-Saxon kings, was Edith (Aelfgifu in Anglo-Saxon) Swanneck. 

Well, she sort of married him. It was a handfast marriage, not one recognized by the church, which apparently left him free to also marry Edith of Mercia, and that brings us neatly to the second way they could keep track of their Aelfgifus and Aelfstans: by adding a place name to a given name. 

The third way was to use a patronymic–forming a second name from the father’s name, so one of the six Cuthberts in a village might be Cuthbert Edmund’s son. But Cuthbert’s son would be Aelfric Cuthbert’s son. It was a family link but only for one generation. 

What about the Celts, though? They seem to have started out using patronymics–that one-generation use of the father’s name, although the Welsh sometimes listed more than one generation. Cornwall, at least, was slower than England to stabilize last names. One article I found gives examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth century of families changing their names when they moved, sometimes using the place they lived as a last name.

 

Enter the Normans

Hereditary family names were still fairly new in France when the Normans invaded England. (That’s 1066–one of the few dates I don’t have to look up.) Or more to the point, they were new in Normandy, which was where the Normans came from. It was part of France except for the ways in which it wasn’t part of France. It was a duchy within France and didn’t become a French province until the fifteenth century, so– 

Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s also pretty much irrelevant, but I’ll stop here long enough to say that it doesn’t help to see history through modern glasses. Let’s think of it as vaguely French. All we’re talking about is naming practices, and Lord Google assures me that in the eleventh century a hereditary family name was the must-have item for any aristocratic French family. So of course the Normans brought theirs when they crossed the channel.

Your average French family, though? Didn’t have one, didn’t need one. Last names were strictly a prestige item, emphasizing pedigree and unbroken tradition and all that stuff you have to believe matters if you’re going to convince yourself that aristocracy makes sense.

So when the Normans set foot on English soil, they brought those invisible prestige items with them, although just to contradict everything I’ve said, William the Conqueror–the big, bad chief of the Normans–never did have a hereditary last name. Before the invasion, he was William of Normandy or William the Bastard. Then he became William the Conqueror. 

Following that tradition, England’s (and later Britain’s) royal families ran around without surnames until 1917, when the current lot took the name Windsor. Before that, they were known by their dynasties: the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts–

How’s that different from having an inherited last name? Let’s admit that we’re splitting hairs, but it’s what the experts say, so we’ll just nod wisely and play along. 

We have a handy way to check in on how this last name business all played out after the Norman conquest. William–he’s now the Conqueror, not the Bastard or the of-Normandy–demanded an inch-by-inch and tenant-by-landlord survey of his new toy, England, and it took the form of the 1068 Domesday Book, where you find a mix of surnames and no-surnames: Gilbert Tison, Ralph Paynel, and Robert Malet, but also Walter the deacon and Walter the crossbowman. 

 

Commoners 

Over the course of a few centuries, inherited surnames slid downward until every Tom, Dick, and Edith had one. By 1400, most English families were using hereditary last names.

I got drawn into this topic by last week’s post, about Johanna Ferrour, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, who had at least three different last names and three spellings of her first. The system was shifting but the pieces weren’t locked into place yet. 

One source links the spread of family names to those poll taxes that set off the Peasants Revolt Johanna Ferrour helped lead. How else are you going to track who’s paid and who hasn’t? 

When Henry VIII introduced parish registers that recorded each parish church’s births, marriages, and burials, the country lurched further in the direction of hereditary surnames, but even then in some parts of the country a person could still be baptised under one name, married under another, and buried under a third.

The village I live in is small enough that a lot of people know a lot of people but don’t necessarily know their last names. We end up identifying people by their jobs if they’re visible ones, or by their partners, or occasionally by their dogs. We’re not stuck in the medieval era, but the early medieval system is handy.

To be fair, back when I drove cab–this was in the seventies and in the US–we did the same thing. We had an Al and a Big Al. We had a driver known by not just his last name but also by his favorite phrase, Shitya.

 

Women’s last names

Everything I’ve said so far about hereditary names has a built-in problem: it applies to men, not to women. Sorry. I don’t usually write as if men represented humanity at large. What with being a woman and all, I’m constantly getting reminders that it’s inherently problematic to say “people” when you mean men. But men’s last names defined the system and we needed to slot the system into place.

So now let’s talk about women’s names.

In the fourteenth century–around the time of the Peasants Revolt and the poll tax, England was developing the legal theory of coverture, which meant that when a woman married anything she owned was transferred to her husband. (There were a few exceptions, but not many.) The rest of Europe followed Roman law, which gave the husband management of the wife’s property but not ownership. 

She herself also became his property.

Yeah, history’s a bitch and the present has a few problems of its own.

Women took their husbands’ last names when they married. (That wasn’t necessarily true in other countries.) The woman disappeared behind the man. Taking his name wasn’t mandatory and there were exceptions, but it was the default setting–common enough that the exceptions were sometimes written into marriage contracts. This mostly happened among people of property when the woman’s fortune was bigger than the man’s and the woman’s family had no other way for its name to continue. Which by then would’ve been a central concern to any aristocratic family.

 

Inevitability

I started out by saying that those of us who grew up with hereditary family names tend to think the tradition’s inevitable and pretty much universal. But the world’s more imaginative than that. In many places, women who marry keep their own names and no one expects a family to have the same last name. Some cultures continue the tradition of forming a last name from the father’s name–and sometimes if less commonly from the mother’s. In places, people use their given name and that’s pretty much it. The idea of a family name isn’t universal.

 

A bit of personal history

This is pretty much irrelevant, but since we’re talking about how those solid-seeming family names turn out to be fluid, I thought I’d toss it in: names on both sides of my family have been changeable. On my mother’s side, Baruch seems to have become Benedict and Weill became into Wiley.

My father’s family name was Gurievich when my grandfather left Russia for the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, but he wrote it in the Cyrillic alphabet. And/or in the Hebrew alphabet–your guess is as good as mine and possibly better. I’m not sure how many languages he knew–Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, surely–but English doesn’t seem to have been one of them when he landed at Ellis Island. That came later. So some immigration clerk wrote down Hurwitz. What the hell, it had a few of the same sounds. That happened to a lot of immigrants.

When he’d saved up enough money to bring his family over, they became Hurwitzes.

My father was born in the U.S. with the name Hurwitz, but as a young man he played bit parts in the theater, and it was a time when Jewish actors took non-Jewish stage names. He took that a step farther and he changed his last name legally, and a generation and many extra years later here I am with this absurd ultra-English name. When I was younger I thought of changing it back, then asked myself how far back I wanted to go and on which side of the family, although on either side I’d be tracing men’s names, which put me off the idea a bit. I talked about it with one of my aunts and she, who’d changed her own name when she married but had also taken the professional name of Delza (she was a dancer), told me I should stay with the name I had.

“It’s who you are,” she said.

She was right, but it left me wondering who she was.

So I kept the name I was born with, and I’d always assumed it was Anglo-Saxon, but Lord Google assures me of several contradictory origins, including Norman, Anglo-Saxon tinged with northern English and Scottish, and (if AI is to be believed, which it isn’t necessarily), Viking. It seems fitting that I get to choose my own origin for the name I have such tenuous title to. But in case that’s not murky enough and I need a coat of arms–and who doesn’t in these difficult days?–Lord G. led me to nine variations I could claim, and I just can’t decide which suits me best.

I have no idea if any of them is real, and that seems fitting too.

Women in the Peasants Revolt: Johanna Ferrour

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If you’ve read anything about the Peasants Revolt (England, 1381; you’re welcome), the image it calls up is of–okay, I’m being obvious here–peasants, and I’ll bet they’re peasants of the male persuasion. Because if I meant peasants of the female persuasion, surely I’d say something along the lines of peasant-ettes, right? Or following the common format of saying female astronaut, or female judge, I’d call them female peasants, because the people whose job titles don’t come adorned with adjectives–well, they’re male.

Besides, we’re talking about a revolt, and historically speaking the people who fight were male. People who led were male. People who left a mark on the world were male. And so on for another six paragraphs.

Ha. Allow me to introduce you to Johanna Ferrour. Or to Joanna Ferrour. Or if you prefer, to Joan Marchall. Same person, and I’ll get around to explaining that in a minute. What I need to slot into place first is that she was a leader of the Peasants Revolt and is (as far as I can tell, given my status as a non-expert) only recently being reclaimed for history.

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

Let’s get the name issue out of the way

Last names were still a liquid in fourteenth-century England. The tradition of hereditary family names had crossed the English Channel with the Normans in 1066, but married women didn’t have  last names. They were their husbands’ possessions and didn’t need them. As one court put it in 1340, “When a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of.’ “

Thanks, guys. 

As far as I can tell, that business of last names started out by applying only to the people who mattered–the aristocracy–and gradually trickled down from there. The BBC article I’m drawing on here implies that vassals had no surnames. 

That’s a rabbit hole, even if it does look like an interesting one. Maybe I’ll throw myself down it another time. Now, though, let’s sneak ahead of our story for a paragraph: by the fifteenth century, the interpretation of–or at least the verbiage about–marriage had softened and the husband and wife were seen as one person. Except, of course, that person was the husband and the woman took his surname. Legally speaking, she either didn’t exist or barely registered.

In Johanna/Joanna/Joan’s time and among her class, last names (not to mention their spellings) were still fluid and usually drawn from a person’s work or home. She was married to a blacksmith who made horseshoes–a farrier, or ferrour. Or marchall. It all means the same thing.  

Her first name was also fluid. Johanna, Joanna, and Joan were all variations of the same name. Let’s call her Jo. If we don’t, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

 

The rebellion

Although a lot of things contributed to the Peasants Revolt, the cause closest to hand was the imposition of a poll tax, a poll being a head. If you had a head and you were an adult, you paid a tax of 12 pence for the privilege–the same amount the lord and lady of the manor paid for their more luxurious heads.

It was the third poll tax in four years.

What did 12 pence mean to, let’s say, a skilled worker? To answer that, we have to go deep into the realm of guesswork. Too many variables are involved and in a moment of carelessness the fourteenth century’s computer files have been wiped. Still, at a guess, in 1351 a mason might’ve earned 4 pence a day and a carpenter 3. Emphasis on might. So the tax came to three or four days’ pay for a skilled worker and more for a laborer, at a time when keeping a family fed took everything most people had. 

But the revolt wasn’t about just the new tax. The Black Death had left labor in short supply and workers of all sorts in a position to demand better pay. If you’re one of the people who’s paying wages, that’s a Bad Thing. So the government passed the Statute of Labourers, which made it illegal to pay laborers more than they were paid in 1346. 

The final gripe was the enclosure movement, which had started in the twelfth century and was still grinding on. This meant (insert Simplified Explanation warning here) that landowners were seizing common land, which peasants used to use for grazing, gathering firewood, fishing, or–well, it varied from place to place. Landowners across the country were now claiming it as theirs and enclosing it with hedges or fences. For peasants, this was the difference between subsistence and hunger. 

Even though we’re talking about something called the Peasants Revolt, the poll tax and the Statute of Labourers gave townspeople and artisans like Jo and her husband reasons to get pissed off, and the revolt involved not just serfs but also artisans, tradespeople, and tenant farmers–people who rented their land and wanted to shed the feudal inheritance of service their landlords demanded. 

In other words, the king and all his friends and relations were looking at  a large group of pissed-off people. They rose, they marched toward London, destroying tax records and documents that were evidence of serfdom, and one of the interesting things about the Peasants Revolt is that they  don’t seem to have acted like a mob but in a well-organized way. In London, their actions were tightly focused on the people they held responsible for passing and collecting the poll tax. 

If you’re still seeing men when you picture that not-a-mob, consult Professor Sylvia Federico, who argues that women were at the heart of the revolt and did pretty much the same things the men did. They incited crowds. “They were not shy to pick up staffs, sticks, and staves and wield them against perceived oppressors.” One woman was accused of encouraging a group to attack the prison at Maidstone in Kent, another of leading rebels to plunder a number of mansions, leaving servants too scared to return. 

 

Where does Jo come into the picture?

Um, we don’t really know. And neither do the experts. This is the problem with early history in general, but especially about the early history of common people and of women. The lower you sat in the hierarchy, the thinner a record you left behind. Not much is known about the revolt’s leader, Wat Tyler, either. So we can’t blame sexism alone for the lack of information. 

Sorry. I’d love to. Really I would.

What we do know is that Jo and her husband, John, lived in Rochester and owned what a Wikipedia entry (sorry–I try to use more stable sources but I’m desperate) describes as a “not insignificant amount of land.” 

From there, let’s fill in the picture around them: the revolt started in Essex and Kent and swept toward London–not that far if you have a car but a longer trip if you’re on foot with an impromptu army of your fellow furious commoners. Jo and John became part of that army. Court documents describe Jo as “chief perpetrator and leader of rebellious evildoers from Kent.” 

I’ll let the documents tell the tale, because they’re what we have to draw on:

“Joanna wife of John Ferrour of Rochester in the county of Kent went as the chief perpetrator and leader of a great society of rebellious wrongdoers from Kent on Thursday 13 June 1381 to the Savoy in the county of Middlesex and, as an enemy of the king, burned the said manor; she seized a chest containing £1000 and more belonging to John, Duke of Lancaster [you may know him as John of Gaunt], and then she put the said chest into a boat on the Thames and made off with it, all the way to Southwark, where she divided the gold between herself and others.”

How much money was £1,000? In 2024, it would’ve been something along the lines of $1,000,000, although why we’ve changed from pounds to dollars there is anybody’s guess. 

“On Friday 14 June 1381 the said Joanna went as head of the said company to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England and made a fire there and completely burnt that house, and carried off two horses loaded with wool worth 6 marks. And the same Joanna together with others went as chief leader to the Tower of London, and laid violent hands first on Simon, lately archbishop of Canterbury, and then on [treasurer] Brother Robert Hales, lately Prior of St John of Jerusalem in England, and she dragged them out of the Tower of London and ordered that they be beheaded.”

The same acts are also attributed jointly to her and her husband. And no, she or they didn’t burn down a building where the sick were cared for. Hospital didn’t take on that meaning until the sixteenth century, and it didn’t mean a place to look after the needy until the fifteenth. 

It’s anybody’s guess what Jo and John’s roles were before the moments when they appear in the historical record, as is what happens afterward. That’s the problem with history: you have to work with the facts. All the damn time. And when they’re scarce you don’t get to make them up.

John was acquitted of the charges against him. Jo wasn’t executed, which implies that she was acquitted, although there’s no record of it. Both their names appear later on the paperwork for houses they gave to Walter Northampton for we’ll never know what reason. You have to be alive for that, so let’s take it as evidence that they lived on after the revolt, unlike most of its leaders. 

How’d they manage that? John might’ve saved the life of the young Earl of Derby, Henry Bolingbroke, who went on to be Henry IV. He also might not have. Some sources name the man who saved Bolingbroke as John Ferrour of Southwark, not of Rochester. One has the kid’s life being saved by a guard named John Ferrour, which wouldn’t be the John Ferrour we’re following. Basically, we’ll never know, but it’s unusual that any leaders of the revolt survived. Most were hanged, with additional killings in Essex, where the revolt hadn’t quite died out. 

No records of women being executed after the revolt  have been found. 

 

And so . . . 

. . . we leave Jo and John in the middle of their story. They lived on. They gave someone a house. John was accused of murder later on and pardoned. And that’s about all we’ve got. The work of reclaiming history’s lost figures usually comes down to filling in a picture around them and leaving the center, where they should stand, empty. 

*

I’ve focused on Jo here, and to some extent on John, which leaves the Peasants Revolt in the background. If you want the story of the revolt itself–and it’s an interesting bit of history–you can jump to an earlier post, where it’s foreground. 

Samuel Pepys, the Great Fire of London, and a wheel of parmesan cheese

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In 1666, Samuel Pepys’ maid woke him up, telling him about a fire. To which he said something along the lines of Ho hum and went back to sleep. London was a flammable town, full of wooden houses. Fire was nothing new. This one was far enough away that he wasn’t about to let it wreck a good night’s sleep. We know this because he wrote it–and endless other details of his life–down and his diaries survived him. I’ll be quoting from them extensively here. They’re online, and although each day’s entry has its own URL, I’ve only given a link to the first day. Start there. You’ll be fine.

The fire. With thanks to Wikimedia Commons

 

The next day

The next morning, September 2, the fire still didn’t look like anything to worry about, but “by and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.” 

Okay, he starts to take this seriously and walks to the Tower of London “and there got up upon one of the high places, . . . and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.” 

In other words, he thought the era-appropriate equivalent of Holy shit, this is serious and walked to the Thames, where he got a sense of just how serious. 

What he saw was “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters [they were flat-bottomed barges] that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. . . .

“Nobody, to my sight, [was] endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire . . . and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.”

 

The king and the firebreak

Pepys was a member of parliament, worked for the Navy Board, and was the kind of guy who could talk his way in to see the king and the Duke of York, which he did, telling them “that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire.”

Pulling down houses was pretty much the only way to stop a spreading fire. London had no professional firefighters and even if they had I doubt the technology of the day would have let them shoot any serious amount of water at a burning house. The way to keep a fire from spreading was to destroy buildings that weren’t on fire, creating a firebreak, and the king ordered the lord mayor to do that, with the D of Y offering to send soldiers if they were needed.

Off Pepys trotted to find the mayor and in the midst of this madness, with luxury goods being hauled away in carts and on people’s backs and sick people being carried in beds, he actually found him, and the mayor, basically, said, Nobody listens to me anyway, I’ve been pulling down houses all night, I don’t need any soldiers, and I’m going to bed.

He might’ve been pulling down houses all night–I don’t know–but when the fire was first starting to spread and he was asked to do exactly that, he refused. If he gave the order, the city would have to pay for the houses it had destroyed. If he waited for the king to give it, guess who had to pay then? 

Anyway, king’s order or no king’s order, he toddled off to bed.

At this point you’d expect Pepys to rush back to the king and the D of Y so they could do what the mayor wouldn’t, right? 

Nah, it was noon and he went home, where he had guests. They were all worried about the fire, “However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry, as at this time we could be.”

Then he went out and found the king and the D of Y, who were on the river, and they gave the order to pull houses down. “But little was or could be done, the fire coming upon them so fast . . . [and] the wind carries it into the City.”

Translation: this, I think, is where the wind changed direction.

By that night, Pepys was packing up his own house and worrying about where to put his gold. 

“I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place. And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts also there. . . .

“About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart; and, Lord! to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding, and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things. I find Sir W. Rider tired with being called up all night, and receiving things from several friends. . . . I am eased at my heart to have my treasure so well secured.”

 

At last we get to the cheese

“Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine [it would’ve been in barrels–in other words, large and heavy], did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”

Why would he bury a parmesan cheese? Because it was a luxury item. Even now, when you can find the stuff in any supermarket, a 36 kilo wheel of good parmesan can cost $1,450. Back then? Sorry, can’t quote you a price, but a lot. It was rare, it was valuable, and his would’ve weighed 80 to 90 kilos. 

What’s that in pounds and ounces? Make yourself a cup of coffee and multiply by 2.2. 

You’re welcome. You really don’t want me doing the math.

Are you getting the sense that this is one whale of a big hole they’ve dug? Would you like to bet that when he says they dug the pit, that means they had their servants do it for them?

But back to Pepys himself. 

“This afternoon, sitting melancholy with Sir W. Pen in our garden, and thinking of the certain burning of this office, without extraordinary means, I did propose for the sending up of all our workmen from Woolwich and Deptford yards (none whereof yet appeared), and to write to Sir W. Coventry to have the Duke of Yorke’s permission to pull down houses, rather than lose this office, which would, much hinder, the King’s business. So Sir W. Pen he went down this night, in order to the sending them up to-morrow morning; and I wrote to Sir W. Coventry about the business, but received no answer.

“Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than anything, but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it, though it kindled nothing almost.”

 

Aftermath

“Could not . . . find any place to buy a shirt or pair of gloves, Westminster Hall being full of people’s goods, those in Westminster having removed all their goods, and the Exchequer money put into vessels to carry to Nonsuch. . . . A sad sight to see how the River looks: no houses nor church near it, to the Temple, where it stopped. At home, did go with Sir W. Batten, and our neighbour, Knightly (who, with one more, was the only man of any fashion left in all the neighbourhood thereabouts, they all removing their goods and leaving their houses to the mercy of the fire), to Sir R. Ford’s, and there dined in an earthen platter — a fried breast of mutton; a great many of us, but very merry, and indeed as good a meal, though as ugly a one, as ever I had in my life. . . . Thence down to Deptford, and there with great satisfaction landed all my goods at Sir G. Carteret’s safe, and nothing missed I could see, or hurt.”

The next day he was able to borrow a shirt and wash. 

The fire burned four-fifths of the city: more than 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 livery company halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Pepys’ house did not burn and in a later entry he writes about unearthing his wine but doesn’t mention the cheese. Since he didn’t complain about losing it, we can probably assume the fire didn’t turn it into a giant grilled cheese sandwich, minus the bread.

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For an exploration of how differently the rich and the poor experienced the fire and its aftermath, watch Ruth Goodman and Rob Rinder’s 90-minute documentary The Great Fire of London.