Early Modern Notes

Natalie at Philobiblon yesterday posted a little nugget she’d come across in her reading:

the case of Mary Lady Broughton, “widow” and “Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison” (in Westminster). On 29 August 1670 she was accused of “wittingly and wilfully” suffering Thomas Ridley, who was in her custody on the charge of stealing a silver cup worth 25 shillings, to escape.

(I could just note that being accused of ‘negligently’ allowing prisoners to escape, with fines if convicted, was an occupational hazard of being a gaoler - or a constable - in the seventeenth century. But I digress.)

Anyway, as I commented to Natalie, I wondered if her ‘Mary Lady Broughton’ might just be related to the ‘Dame Mary Broughton’ of Marchwiail in Denbighshire, who was accused, with her two sons, of assault in Denbighshire in 1683. Natalie, unfortunately had only the bare details of the case and didn’t know anything more about Mary Broughton, the keeper of the Gatehouse Prison (ie, at the Tower of London)* - this was just an incidental snippet she came across while researching her main interest: “the Gatehouse in an earlier period, from 1633 when Lady Eleanor Davies was imprisoned there, but I know the jailer then was one Aquila Weekes".

But (says I, getting very excited, but remember I am a history nerd) - one of Dame Mary’s sons was called Aquila Wykes/Wickes!

And a little genealogical googling revealed quite quickly that the Gatehouse gaolkeeper of 1633 was Mary Broughton’s (nee Knightley) first husband and she did indeed take over running the prison after his death - and (ah, how romantic) her second husband Sir Edward Broughton was one of her Royalist prisoners just before the Restoration.

But a bit more to come. The Aquila Weekes who was running the Gatehouse in the 1630s wasn’t the first man of that name to have the job - his father Aquila Weekes/Wykes senior had done it before him, and was the gaoler there when Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned just before his execution… So we have a family ‘dynasty’ running this prison for a large part of the seventeenth century (obscured by Mary’s remarriage and change of name). She died during the 1690s; I don’t know at what point she gave up the post or whom it was passed on to after that. Maybe Google would come up with more if I dig a bit further (in the Journal of the House of Lords in 1675 the keeper of the Gatehouse prison was required to take a prisoner into ‘his’ custody, but that might be just convention…).

I think that I’ve come across references to the post of gaoler being handed down in families before; and I’ve certainly found a widow taking over from her deceased husband (but only temporarily rather than the decades Mary must have been in charge at the Gatehouse). But I can’t think right now of scholarly work - books, or even substantial chunks of books, or articles - specifically on early modern gaolers. Anybody know of anything?

And I would probably never have known about this set of connections to the Dame Mary Broughton I came across in the Denbighshire court records if it hadn’t been for Natalie blogging about this tiny piece of information that had caught her eye…

…

*Correction: My London geography is useless, but that’s no excuse for getting these prisons mixed up. The Tower of London page came up when I googled the Gatehouse, and Raleigh was on the list, so… The Gatehouse was a small prison in Westminster - as I’d already noted, in fact. D’oh.

After bouncing emails to and fro with the support people at the DNB, our people have told me that the Athens subscription to the DNB hasn’t been finally sorted out yet so no I don’t have remote access, only on campus. So why does the electronic resources web page tell me that I do, then? Thanks a bunch.

(I realise that I should probably consider myself lucky to have this access at all, and be grateful that our university is prepared to invest in so many good, and expensive, online resources - not least the OED and EEBO. I’m just pissed off that this misinformation - or pre-emptive information, shall we say - on the Aber IS website has wasted my time, not to mention the poor sods at the DNB who were getting my cranky emails. And I want DNB! I had a fun blogging idea for it!)

From Claire’s 17th-century info, a link to this site from Channel 4; they’ve rounded up historians to review a number of historical films. I hope it’ll expand in the future, but early modernists should take note as Blair Worden rips into Cromwell (1970). (Which, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t even redeem itself by being any good as a film.)

Has anyone seen Stage Beauty? Is it any good as history or film - or even both? It sounds interesting.

I’ve just been informed that our university has the subscription to the new Dictionary of National Biography online. I haven’t checked yet whether that includes remote access using my Athens password. Hoping so. Yum yum yum.

Update: Frustration. Apparently I should be able to, but the link to the Athens login page doesn’t seem to work properly. I’ve emailed the tech support - so let’s see what happens.

Much juvenile giggling here. Thanks to scribblingwoman.

Warning: Do not visit if you think that swearing is A Bad Thing. And keep the volume down if surfing in a public space, perhaps.

… a bit of profound, eloquent advice from a commenter.

I usually do this monthly, but I have a whole pile of these I want to clear out of my inbox. So, in no particular order…

Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination Seminar, Institute for English Studies, Senate House, London. Saturdays, monthly during the academic term, 2-4 pm. “The purpose of EMPHASIS is to provide a London forum for scholars working in the history of philosophy, intellectual history and the history of science of Europe in the period 1400-1650. ” Kicks off on 9 October 2004 with Dr Raphael Hallett, ‘Words in Abstract Space: Pierre Ramus, Rhetoric and the Geometry of Print’.

With the new term, Seminars at the Institute of Historical Research at Senate House will also be restarting. There are plenty for medievalists and early modernists, and no doubt there are other relevant English Studies seminars if you look around (I’ll see if I can find a general link)…

CFP: The 8th International Milton Symposium, Grenoble, France, June 2005. Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2004. Proposals are sought for the main theme of ‘Milton, rights and liberties’ (and other aspects of Milton studies will be considered).

CFP: The Margaret Cavendish Society 6th Biennial Conference, McMaster University, Ontario, July 2005. Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2004. The theme is: “Understanding will remember me in after Ages".

CFP: Cultures in Conflict: New Perspectives on Encounters with Native Peoples of the Americas, University of Toledo, Ohio. A one-day conference on 9 April 2005 “to present new research on Native American history and ethnohistory of the contact and post-contact periods (15th thru 19th centuries). Our hope is to bring together scholars employing new methodologies to understand the experience of native peoples across the Americas. Therefore we invite contributions from scholars of diverse disciplines and all levels and encourage the submission of papers examining native societies of North America and Latin America.” Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2004. Proposals should consist of one or two paragraphs up to a page in length and be accompanied by a brief vita. “We look forward to bringing together scholars whose work may influence and inform one another of the variety of questions and methodologies as well as the diversification and connections between distinct regions of the Americas. As our conference is a one-day program we strongly encourage contributions from scholars of the north-east Mid-west. Our hope in this regard is to encourage the development of scholarly networks dedicated to native studies in the five-states region (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois). At the same time, we encourage submissions from all interested scholars nationally and internationally.” Submissions to (golly, snail mail!):
Charles Beatty Medina
University of Toledo, Department of History
Mailstop #503
Toledo, OH 43606
(419) 530-5060

Getting gravatars up and running reminded me: I did at one point attempt to put the main image up in the header, aligned against the right margin, but couldn’t quite make it work. Anyone know what I need to put where for that?

Via Crooked Timber (and a few others, but I read it on CT first): an article about academic blogging from The Guardian, featuring some familiar names. Well worth a read.

Last night, I nearly posted a disgustingly self-indulgent post about how much I have to do once I finish this research trip in November. Except, of course, when I read the blogs of most academics out there, I know perfectly well that I don’t. I have, if you don’t know, a totally cushy post-doc fellowship that means I get to do my own research for three years. I could get away with not teaching at all if I really wanted (although it’s strongly encouraged; and I do in fact want to teach, even though it still scares the crap out of me), and I get to choose how much and when (hence being able to disappear for six-month research trips); I don’t have to deal with administrative baggage or jump through the usual ‘new staff’ hoops.

Yes, I do have plenty to do once I get home. But - even allowing for tiredness and the being just-back-in-London effect - that hardly excused the alternately whining/self-congratulatory tone (ie, generally sounding like a spoilt brat) of last night’s almost-post. I don’t have dozens of different things to juggle; I don’t have thirty-plus hours of teaching/admin work to get through before I can get to research and writing; I don’t have children or a partner to worry about/clean up after/try to civilise. With the possible exception of getting all my research material from this trip sorted into some kind of order (!), none of my winter tasks are going to be at all uninteresting (they include preparing a new course, which I’m looking forward to, and thesis-book revision).

I think the trouble with having got this fellowship is the nagging worry that I don’t really deserve it, that I’m not doing enough to justify having it… etc. Which is also a deeply self-indulgent thing to say, but is at least honest.

It doesn’t help that I usually enjoy research (in an odd love-hate sort of way), but this time I just can’t find much enthusiasm - the ‘what might I find today’ anticipation of my PhD research seems to have disappeared. And I have no idea what I’m going to write next, which unsettles me a lot. I’ve never experienced writer’s block, but I’m anxious that that might be about to change. I’m certainly finding it quite impossible to do anything ’serious’ while I’m in London, and not simply because nearly all my books are in Aberystwyth (although that doesn’t help).

I need to be home. (I know millions of people love city life; I’m not one of them.) I need to be doing those tasks and keeping myself occupied. I need to be writing new stuff, not just reworking old material. (I’m never quite sure, by the way, whether to look on my blogging as a good thing that keeps my writing muscles exercised, or as something that’s distracting me from doing ‘real’ work. Although I really think it has kept me sane this summer.)

So please forgive me these few moments’ indulgence; it won’t happen too often, I swear. (I have some nice things planned for you all in coming days…) And if you want to administer some foot-to-arse-region tough love in comments, go ahead.

Everyone else puts up fun poetry (love this from Wolfangel). Now it’s my turn.

‘The sorrow of socks’

Some socks are loners -
They can’t live in pairs.
On washdays they’ve shown us
They want to be loners
They puzzle their owners,
They hide in dark lairs.
Some socks are loners -
They won’t live in pairs.

Wendy Cope, If I don’t know (2001)

OK, I believe that language evolves according to the needs of users rather than the petty rules of purists. And we all draw lines about acceptable new usages in different, subjective, often arbitrary ways. I certainly don’t mind the formation of new verbs from nouns. Mostly. But…

Guardian Unlimited headline on the science page:

Government appoints maths ‘tsar’
The government has tasked Professor Celia Hoyles with turning around years of decline in the subject.

Eeugh. Eeugh. Eeugh.

Why is it that when you just miss a train that went on time, the next one is always late?

On this occasion, I’m talking about the Aberystwyth train, which only runs every two hours anyway (so I just had to pop in to Birmingham and do some shopping… I have new orange suede boots from the sales!).

Before I hang up again for the next day and a half, just to say that I haven’t forgotten my promise to bring you more documents; it’s just taken longer than expected. With a bit of luck, that’ll come later this week.

See you on Tuesday.

Not much blogging over the last few days as a very good friend - my flatmate when I was doing my PhD, who’s now doing a PhD of her own - has come to stay, to go and see Kevin Brownlow films at the National Film Theatre and generally wander around London. I’m only writing this now because she’s had to pop home for tonight, but she’ll be back tomorrow later today. We always have a lot of catching up to do, which involves drinking a lot of wine and sitting up talking about history, films, music, food, politics, our respective families and whatever else comes up into the early hours (followed by skiving off work, ahem). These vitally important activities do not leave much time for blogging. So I may get a post or two in this morning, but things won’t be back to normal until Tuesday-ish.

And sorry about the breakdown in service for much of today. Something strange to do with the server side of things, the kind of thing that’s completely incomprehensible to me.

What’s going on?

Some good news for a change. As a kind of sequel to the virtues of idleness, now a group of dedicated researchers brings the news that sleeping on the job is good for you.

So it’s thousands of cheers for the East of England Development Agency (EEDA), whose researchers have concluded that, in order to help maximise our potential and increase productivity, we should all sleep more…

A new way of thinking involving 40 winks at regular intervals is a dazzling prospect, and - if taken to its logical conclusion - should lead to the installation of beds and sofas in every workplace so that crucially important sleep can be enjoyed at will.

In the news this weekend.

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a delightful essay on the beach holiday. (Much more fun than actually doing one, to my mind; I hate sunbathing…) It reminds us that the beach as a leisure space is really another eighteenth-century invention (although one, it would seem, with some seventeenth-century forebears), created as an alternative to the spa. And that frequently this took place (and still does) in some decidedly hostile climes. Scarborough, for chrissakes.

Everyone not at Cambridge will probably find it hard to resist some amusement at the university’s discomfiture at the hands of one of its own professors. Medievalist Gillian Evans has done a right old hatchet job in an innocuously titled book, Inside the University of Cambridge in the Modern World. Incompetent management and financial controls, internal power struggles, lack of accountability…

Some good news for British (not least Welsh) sheep farmers at last, although one senses it’s a fragile recovery.

To update you on my suggestion for an early modernists’ Carnival, there is going to be at least one issue of this. And I’ve set up a central homepage in the hope that there will also be more in the future. I’ve given it the working title Carnivalesque (but am also considering such things as Feast of Fools or Abbey of Misrule. Any suggestions?)

The first issue will contain blog articles from July and August ‘04, and should be up at EMN within the next week.

Early modern bloggers, this is the final call to send me links (ie, permalinks) to one or two examples of your recent work that you’d most like to see included. If you don’t, I shall choose what I’ve enjoyed. If you’ve read anything in obscure or not obviously early modernist blogs that I might have missed, send a link to that too.

I want contributions that are ‘about’ the early modern period (defined broadly; I’ll certainly consider anything that covers 1450-1850) in some way; or about studying and researching it (whether from the pov of historians, philosophers, literary scholars, or any other discipline) - both in terms of methodology or personal experiences; or perhaps about the relevance of early modern issues to current affairs. Book and web reviews are definitely welcomed. All I will say is that this is a showcase of writing, so even if they are link-rich, they should primarily consist of the blogger’s own words and thoughts. They don’t have to be very long though.

Please send suggestions to skh AT aber DOT ac DOT uk (not to comments here, please; the contents should be a surprise!), preferably by the end of Wednesday 1 September.

And finally, I would like a volunteer to host a second issue, in either a month’s or two months’ time…

Update: that deadline can be regarded as fairly flexible; I’m not likely to get this done before the weekend…

Wanted: a professional gossip

An ear-wigging, tongue-wagging, tittle-tattler is sought by The Complete Working Historic Estate of Shugborough.

Excellence in the fields of small talk, prattle and gibbering is essential while skills in artful snooping and grapevine development are desirable.

A small stipend and a gallon of small beer a day will be paid in return.

The advert got a report in today’s print Guardian (but I’m damned if I can find it in the online version). So I’m going to have to type it out.

Apparently, the successful candidate, dressed as a maid or footman, will be warned off idle chatter of goings-on in the gift shop and tea room, and confine her- or himself to the Anson family, ancestors of the present Lord Lichfield…

“This estate thrived for centuries on gossip", said Richard Kemp, Shugborough’s general manager. “We want to bring that back to life and celebrate the role of the wittering scandal-monger. If it weren’t for gossip, much of our nation’s history might have been lost.”

The same estate appointed a live-in hermit a couple of years ago.

(And isn’t Holiday a great film? No, I don’t mean Summer Holiday with Cliff Richard; I’m talking Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and the world’s coolest toy giraffe.)

I go home ‘on holiday’ to Aberystwyth tomorrow later today. Well, not quite holiday yet, since I need to put in a couple of days at the National Library of Wales (fill in some skimmed-over research for work on the thesis-book), and visit my much-neglected office, if I can still make it up the hill without keeling over. And hope that just for once nobody does the ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ line. Ha bloody ha.

But then I’m going to have a very idle, extended Bank Holiday weekend until at least Tuesday. I may put together pictures of documents for you if I feel like it. I shall, weather permitting, wander round the town with my new camera trying not to look too much like a bloody tourist. I might permit myself to buy a bottle of the devil’s drink (Plymouth gin). I’ll definitely go to the deli and buy naughty quantities of cheese, serrano ham, chorizo and olives. Inhale that sea air. Find something different to read at the secondhand bookshop. And visit the fab record shop with all the funk and ska records (Shall I buy that Trojan compilation I didn’t get last time? Hmm). Or the other fab record shop. Or both. (Better check bank balance first.) And watch several hours of Angel on tape.

Do not expect much blogging activity. Unless I feel like it.

I didn’t expect you all to be so keen on my obscure old documents! So, what I’ll do is sift through the files and in the next few days put up some more to illustrate the various stages of the criminal justice process, with a bit of commentary for context…

In the meantime, one more as a taster:

The Guardian has Adam Fox (author of the perfectly splendid Oral and literate culture in early modern England) commenting on past scandals at the Olympics and other sporting events (including the ‘Cotswold Games’ of 1612).

I want to be a media whore too, please. Where do I apply?

Update: On second thoughts, maybe I don’t.

Some recent online book reviews of interest to early modernists (in no particular order):

Hogarth’s harlot: sacred parody in Enlightenment England
The lion and the tiger: the rise and fall of the British Raj 1600-1947
A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany
War at Sea in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Doomsayers: Anglo-American prophecy in the age of revolution
On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: a philosophical companion
Customs and excise: trade, production and consumption in England 1640-1845
Manufacturing revolution: the intellectual origins of early American industry
Public debt and the birth of the democratic state: France and Great Britain 1688-1789
The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War: kings, courts and confessors
Puritan iconoclasm in the English Civil War
Henry VIII’s bishops: diplomats, administrators, scholars
Propaganda and the Tudor state: political culture in the west country
Fellowship of freedom: the United Irishmen and 1798
Balancing the scales of justice: local courts and rural society in south-west France 1750-1800
The hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: a story of rape, incest and justice in early America

My Reviews page at EMR has a list of sources for online reviews.

Wolfangel posted this discussion and this link about singular ‘they’/'their’ today. Brandon at Siris also discussed this some days ago.

I think it’s high time there was a concerted campaign to reinstate this singularly useful construction to respectability in the English language. We all use it informally, but as Brandon says, it would be frowned on in the formal context of a philosophy essay (I’m not sure about other disciplines? It’s obvious from the foregoing that I’d have no problem with it in a history paper…). If the greats of English literature (and several centuries of English writers and speakers before grammarians arbitrarily decided against it) could use it, why not us?

Lead by example! Use it in your papers/articles/books! And if your teachers/copy-editors complain, just tell them, well, what’s good enough for Shakespeare, Jane Austen, C S Lewis, the King James Bible, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. and George Orwell…

You might remember that I wrote a praise-post to the archaeology show Meet the Ancestors a few weeks back.

Well, now you can meet the seventh-century princess whose face has been reconstructed from skull fragments using a similar technique. And she looks like someone you wouldn’t mess with.

Talented undergraduate students who’ve been using Early English Books Online as a resource for writing literature/history essays (and their teachers) may be interested in this:

EEBO In Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition For 2004

For essays of up to 20 pages, written during the 2003/4 academic session, making use of online texts at EEBO.

First prize: $1000.
Deadline: 31 October 2004.

Oh look, we have our first Olympic medal. Am I abnormal for not really caring?

I saw somewhere recently a call for newspaper coverage to give a bit less space to national league tables of medals, and more to recording personal bests (you know, in the spirit of it’s the taking part that counts). I did like that idea. (Ah, just found the source.)

Want to see what I’ve been reading online lately? I’ve just signed up to Furl, a rather handy way of avoiding that desperate search through your history folders for something you just know you read the other day… It’s different from bookmarks in that it’s ideal for holding links to individual articles/pages rather than site homepages. I think I’m going to like this little tool. If I get on well with it, I’ll put a permanent link in the sidebar.

Does anyone else feel that the font face here looks a bit cramped? It’s difficult, for example, to tell the difference between ‘d’ and ‘cl’ (c l). I’m sure Arial isn’t usually this tightly spaced… [Duh, this isn’t Arial; Verdana is the first choice font] But I can’t remember the code in CSS for varying the space between letters (I can’t even remember the proper ‘technical’ term for this, which would help me to look it up!). Can anyone help?

Update: I think it looks better now, though it takes a bit of getting used to. I can always tweak it back slightly, now I know what I’m looking for. (’letter-spacing’ - difficult, eh? Duh. Thanks, sepoy.)

This, in a way, leads on from the last post. Good blogging, after all, is good writing and pleasurable reading, whatever the status of the blogger. Via Arts and Letters Daily, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores ’style’ in writing.

It emerges when writers are comfortable and proficient with their tools. Style is expressed unconsciously, but shaped consciously, in revision. It is a whispering, not a shouting voice; whether readers discern it depends on their familiarity with the writer and their own skill as readers. The writer himself or herself is aware of it; identifying, developing, and shaping it is one of the main pleasures of the craft.

The delectable Tim Burke - whose writing is never less than wonderful, of course, and often inspired, even when you’re not quite agreeing with his argument - also made some highly pertinent comments about academic language recently. He’s right: if you simply parrot the formulae of academic writing, no one will believe that you really know what you’re talking about. That ‘whispering voice’ of your own, distinctive style is crucial to demonstrating that you are master of your subject, not the other way round.

I love writing. No one, I suspect, will believe me, but writing my PhD was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. (Though I’m fortunate, I think, in that history is a discipline that doesn’t impose many formal rules on the structure of a PhD thesis. I woke up one Sunday morning knowing exactly how I wanted it to be, scribbled it down on the back of an envelope with a very old bit of pencil - I’ve never managed to get into the sensible habit of keeping a notepad by the bed - and once I had that structure, somehow, everything came together.) And one of the reasons I love blogging is that I get to write, to keep practising this peculiar mystery (I use that in the early modern sense of a craft or art), in a way that’s rather different from scholarly articles and papers and all the rest of it - and yet it’s related. How do I find ways to say awkward, complicated things without using awkward, over-complicated language? Can I avoid pomposity when I want to be serious? What’s the best way to string these thoughts together to create a coherent ‘argument’? Hell, is that the time already?

Remarkable, by the way, that twentieth-century (delusional?) belief in the importance of keeping your own opinions out of writing (how can your writing not express your opinions, for heaven’s sake?). Which gives us quotes to ponder such as this, from the Chronicle article: “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.” Written by… George Orwell.

There’s been a lot of discussion out there on pseudonymous and nymous blogs of late (I don’t need to give links, really, do I?). This blog was never going to be pseudonymous, since the whole idea was to be tied into my, er, professional resources website. I don’t emblazon my full name all over this site, but you only have to follow the ‘about me’ and EMR links to find out exactly who I am and what I’m doing. I don’t at present feel a need for a more personal blog that might need to be pseudonymous (for all the reasons that have been given in the discussions).

I blog the way I blog. Other people blog the way they blog. I’m just sad to see that there are a few who can only accept one valid way of doing things. I love the diversity of blogging; in a very short space of time I’ve become part of a hugely varied network of people, academics, non-academics, people in all sorts of fields, from all around the world. (OK, I tend to be primarily attracted to certain political and social perspectives over others.) I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve had fun. There’s some beautiful writing out there.

One link only, because I liked it so much: from Mel at In Favor of Thinking (and if you need links to the debates, she gives some):

blogs are one of the most lively forms of publishing currently going on. Blogs are all about reading writing. Not only have I learned about other people’s lives – I have been daily impressed with the style, verve, thoughtfulness, and pleasure to be found in reading the words of so many diverse minds. The more the merrier.

I haven’t blogged about the BBC TV programme Restoration (the second series) because I haven’t been able to watch it this year… (Well, I didn’t watch it religiously last year, either.) But here anyway is the news of the winner from Sunday night’s final. Viewers voted for a pair of fifteenth-century school buildings, The Old Grammar School and Saracen’s Head, in King’s Norton, Birmingham. They now get around £3 million for restoration work. Also reported at the the Independent. See also King’s Norton Team Parish, who are clearly celebrating.

Cute buildings. But not, to my mind, as fabulous as last year’s winner, Manchester’s Victoria Baths. Sadly, as the Independent comments and the Guardian reports at some length, work there has yet to begin. “The problem is that television likes quick makeovers. In the case of Victoria Baths, it skidded over the fact that this was a much bigger restoration project than it appeared.” Those running the project say that they expect it to take several years.

The BBC is to broadcast - on primetime BBC1 - a national spelling test for schoolchildren. Nerd TV? I’m so jealous; all of those stupid competitive sports things we got at school (netball, for chrissakes), and nobody ever did anything like this for kids like me to have a moment of glory. The influence is the American documentary Spellbound; maybe we’re about to see the spelling bee take off over here. But I’m not entirely convinced that it will draw the TV audiences. It’ll be interesting to see how the Truss publishers’ new book on spelling sells…

By the way, I got 10/10 in the spelling quiz at the bottom of the article. Hah.

If you’re playing with your new toy and you want to put your first photo in your blog, what would you choose?

These are the only two survivors of the tomatoes I bought yesterday at Richmond Farmers’ Market. (I scoffed the rest. Some raw, some went into my dinner: a bit of bacon, courgettes, spinach, basil, pasta and the tomatoes. Bliss in 20 minutes.)

Aren’t they gorgeous in their lumpy imperfectness? Don’t they make the shop-bought ones look insipid? The man on the stall has been promising us these for some weeks, and they were well worth the wait. But I’ll need to buy a lot more next week if they’re to last more than a few hours. Especially as they’re not going to be around for long. I’d make batches of sauce if I had a freezer here in London. If he still has them in a few weeks’ time just before I’m going home, I might buy as many as I think I can carry…

Now, what shall I do with these two? I still have some baby spinach, so I could just make a salad to go with tonight’s lamb chops. Hmm…

Perhaps it’s time I had a food blog. That could be fun.

While we’re on the subject of consuming the useless products of labour, I now own a camera for the first time in about 15 years. It’s a Kodak Easyshare DX4530, and I think it’s fab. I tell myself that it’s for work (the PRO allows us to take in digital cameras to photograph documents, and it’ll save money on photocopying). Not useless, really, honest.

So anyway, now I shall have to read the WP wiki sections on photoblogging… (Actually, I think the simplest thing is to stick photos in a folder on the main website and just link to them.)

Crooked Timber, for one, beat me to linking to this piece in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, an extract from a book by Tom Hodgkinson.

And Hodgkinson cites EP Thompson, which has to make it a winner for me. On the work patterns of artisan weavers before the coming of factory regulation: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” And I thought, hey, that’s me! And academics everywhere! Thompson again: “The pattern persists among some self-employed - artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] - today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

Because the piece isn’t about lazing about doing nothing all the time, more of a challenge to the idea that we must work all the time - and that ‘thinking’ isn’t real work. ‘Idling’ frees us to think, to ponder, to wonder. This is a celebration of the lie-in: “Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition.” (I do a lot of my best thinking and writing in the mornings before I’ve properly ‘got up’, relaxed in bed or on the sofa in my pyjamas, nestled with my laptop.)

And this is just glorious:

René Descartes, in the 17th century, was similarly addicted to inactivity. Indeed, it was absolutely at the centre of his philosophy. When young and studying with the Jesuits, he was unable to get up in the morning. They would throw buckets of cold water over him and he would turn over and go back to sleep. Then, because of his obvious genius, he was granted the special privilege of getting up late. This was his modus operandi because, of course, when he was lying in bed he was thinking. It is easy to see how someone so inactive should conclude that the body and the mind are separate entities. Laziness produced Cartesian duality. For him, lying in bed and thinking was the very essence of being human: Cogito, ergo sum, or, in other words, I lie in bed thinking, therefore I am.

And idling is political too:

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world… Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.

Go and read the whole thing. To be savoured, languorously, in a prone position.

… into central Europe.

So the BBC has conducted a poll that shows that British youth are ignorant of their own history (also reported at the Guardian and Telegraph).

Actually, the poll is about military history. There are some intriguing nuggets thrown up by comparisons of age groups: somewhere along the line, it seems that we stopped teaching children about the Battle of the Boyne (I’m well into my thirties and I knew nothing about it when I left school). Whether that means those older generations were genuinely better informed about the tortured history of Northern Ireland is, I’d venture to suggest, another matter. The generalised anti-Irish prejudice for which mainlanders have frequently been infamous (’No Irish’ to go with the ‘No Blacks’ signs of the ’60s…) might not suggest it.

Traditionalists mouthing off about the state of history education, however, clearly need to be careful. One fifth of over-65s didn’t know (or remember) that the Romans invaded Britain. Overall, 31 per cent of the respondents couldn’t place the Battle of Britain in World War II. Again, there was an age gap: only half the 16-24 year olds got it right. But 1 in 10 over-65s also got it wrong.

Now, wait a minute right there. Generally, how could anyone (in Britain) not know that the Battle of Britain took place during WWII? (I could understand haziness on the exact year.) This is something that’s plastered over the TV and other media on a regular basis. I don’t know how anyone manages to miss it. This isn’t about history education in schools. This is about cultural awareness. And, frankly, amongst the over-65s, I’m slightly surprised that as many as 10 per cent don’t know it. We can’t surely write that off as fading memory; this was a key event for that generation. (And were the pollsters doing any checks, if such things are possible, to distinguish between what had been recently forgotten and what had never really been known?)

And then we get on to the kind of silliness that, to some extent, undermines the whole credibility of these polls. Do we really think that teenagers and young adults who answer ‘Gandalf’ to questions they don’t know genuinely think that Gandalf was a historical person? (Apart from anything else, surely no one who’s ever read Tolkien/watched the films could confuse it with the real world?) In the case of a fictional character like Horatio Hornblower, some confusion might be genuine. But I’d place a few bets that when they say that Gandalf discovered the Americas (6%, apparently), they’re taking the bloody piss. And then you start to wonder: if the respondents weren’t taking this seriously, how can we?

I don’t like these polls. I’ve already hinted that I think the questions they ask are superficial and they don’t tell us much at all about historical knowledge (except within very narrow limits) and even less about historical understanding. (Oh, for the occasional poll that tries to find out what people do know rather than testing for what they don’t.) I like even less that people then claim that the results demonstrate something is horribly wrong with our education system. The basic gaps in knowledge often displayed suggest worrying levels of indifference to history, amongst too many people of all ages, for which you can’t merely blame schools. And if more young people get the wrong answers, does that mean that there’s a particular problem with education now, or has indifference to the past always been higher amongst the young? Is it educational or generational? Would there have been similar patterns in such polls 20, or 50, or 70 years ago?

Because I was there once, too. I didn’t just not know about the Battle of the Boyne when I left school, believe me. I knew bugger all about history (or politics), full stop. And I just wasn’t very interested in knowing more.

(… And then I re-discovered reading - proper reading, not just fluff. And so this article really, really does strike a chord. )

Sometimes I think that I became an early modernist because the recent past is too unbearable.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the first World War, and the 60th anniversary of the arrest of the Frank family in Amsterdam.

Friday will be the 59th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb (Nagasaki on the 9th).

Maybe.

Later.

Come back later.

It will be worth it.