Tag Archives: history

Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley

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Second paragraph of third document (‘A Letter from Sir John Davies, Knight, Attorney-General of Ireland, to Robert Earl of Salisbury, touching the state of Monaghan Fermanagh and Cavan, wherein is a discourse concerning the corbes and irenahs of Ireland’):

After the end of the last term my Lord Deputy took a resolution to visit three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan, which, being the most unsettled and unreformed pasts of that province, did most of all need his Lordship’s visitation at that time.

This is rather an interesting collection. The foreword gives the reader the following instructions:

  1. first, read the last chapter
  2. then read the second chapter as far as page 330
  3. then read the first chapter
  4. then read the rest of the book from page 330 to the end of the second last chapter
  5. and finish with the appendices if you like.

I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a non-fiction book suggesting that you read the chapters out of order. (Of course, it’s standard for Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but they are not usually non-fiction.)

It’s a collection of Irish historical documents from late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, really from 1596 to 1610. The documents themselves are printed in chronological order of composition, but Edward Morley, the editor, was right to suggest that you should start with Fynes Morison’s description of Ireland, then go to John Davies’ potted history of Ireland under British rule (which was what tipped me off to the existence of the Duke of Ireland), then go to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland with that background fresh in your mind, and then read the remaining 80 pages of material from John Davies (and 15 pages of appendices).

The centrepiece of the book really is Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, the first chapter in composition order. It’s well written and brutal, and argues that the English just need to destroy Irish possessions and traditions until the Irish become tractable; the beatings will continue until morale improves. He did not live to see this put into practice by Mountjoy at the end of the Nine Years’ War, but he would certainly have approved. One senses Motley, as editor, putting this and the other pieces on the pacification of Ireland forward as a contribution to the Whig theory of Irish history, that enlightened rule from London was the inevitable and desirable end point.

Still, important primary material which I’m glad I have handy. You can get POD copies in various places.

My eye was caught by one of the observations by John Davies, that in the new settlement, the judges “do now every half-year, like good planets in their several spheres or circles, carry the light and influence of justice round about the kingdom”. It’s a really interesting astronomical metaphor. One can speculate about the likelihood (or not) of an Irish administrator in 1612 knowing about the Copernican system; Kepler’s Astronomia Nova was published in 1609, and one can imagine that even if copies were not available, it would have been the talk of educated circles in Dublin, especially around the new university.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell.

Richard II: A Brittle Glory, by Laura Ashe

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

This was a period of astonishing disparities in wealth and living. A typical workman’s daily wage in the 1380s was 4d, giving an annual income of around £5 (100s), assuming he could find work at least 300 days a year; a gallon of good ale cost just over a penny, as did two chickens or two dozen eggs. In London a goose was supposed to cost 6d, but sharp-eyed salesmen often asked seven or eight. A year’s tuition at Oxford University in 1374 cost 26s 8d, though lodgings there were significantly pricier at 104s a year (when annual rent for a cottage might be 5s, or 20s for a craftsman’s house), and the student would need 40s for his clothing. Meanwhile a merchant’s house in London (such as the one in which Geoffrey Chaucer was born) might be rented for two or three pounds a year, which was about what it would cost to send your son to a monastery school. Higher up the social scale, the numbers lose purchase. A knight’s two horses, without which he couldn’t function as a knight, would cost him about £10. His armour could total nearer £20. In 1397 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester owned armour worth £103. If a man were attendant at court he would need a fashionable gown, in silk or fur: it would certainly cost £10, and he could easily spend £50. The life annuity granted to Chaucer in 1367 (paid until 1388), of £13 6s 8d, would make him wealthy in the city of London, yet would barely support him at all at court. But as a courtier he was the recipient of largesse – robes, livery, gifts – and appointments to administrative offices from which, it was understood, he would profit. In 1389 Richard II made Chaucer Clerk of the King’s Works in London; in 1393 he presented him with £10 as a gift for good service, and in 1394 awarded him an annuity of £20.⁴
⁴ Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215 (daily wage), p. 58 (ale), p. 208 (annual rent), p. 75 (monastery school), p. 76 (armour and horses), p. 77 (duke’s armour); A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English Weapons & Warfare, 449–1660 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1979), p. 78 (chickens and eggs); A. R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 198 (geese), p. 186 (Oxford), p. 53 (fashionable gowns); Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1340–1400)’, ODNB.

I was inspired to get this by my detour into the history of the Duke of Ireland a few weeks back, and also by my good friend Conrad’s reviews of the Penguin Monarchs series, of which this is one. It’s a very short and digestible book, which doesn’t waste time on chronology but just jumps straight into the question of what went wrong with Richard’s reign, assuming that the reader is familiar with the basics.

There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God.

The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.

It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.

As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.

One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.

There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.

You can get it here.

1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St Augustine in Thanet and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints. Among these were St Ive, St Pancra, the great St Bernard (originator of the clerical collar), St Bee, St Ebb, St Neot (who invented whisky), St Kit and St Kin, and the Venomous Bead (author of The Rosary).

A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.

He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next

I am particularly alert for Irish references, such as:

The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).

[King John] had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer.
N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of:
(1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin),
(2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc.

Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning’s Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.

[James I] also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating
(a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France,
(b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword,
(c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood-Orangemen.
These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King.
After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.

Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question…

It’s a firmly liberal approach: satirising the total lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the neighbouring island by England’s rulers, and admitting that Irish policy failed for centuries. The same approach is not really shown to other places formerly part of the Empire.

Anyway, it remains good fun and you can get it here.

Yes, Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

From 1969 onwards every nuance of every utterance by anybody of note, in all parties in the South, but especially in Fianna Fáil, was analysed for the minutest divergence from stated policy on the North. Any inconsistency led to an avalanche of publicity, followed by another avalanche of restatements of official policy by virtually everybody concerned; there was then relative calm until the next occurrence. Along with the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs had overall responsibility for Northern issues, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, spent much of his time abroad (much to the satisfaction of some of his own cabinet colleagues, according to one of my sources in the Department of the Taoiseach), so Conor Cruise O’Brien was given a free run at Fianna Fáil. He seemed to have Liam Cosgrave’s permission to badger the party about its Northern policy and could not resist stirring the pot from time to time.

A really interesting insider account of Irish politics particularly in the period from 1974 to 1982, when the author started out as press secretary for Fianna Fáil, then in opposition, and was then appointed spokesman of the government when they unexpectedly won a huge majority in 1977; under the Fine Gael / Labour coalition, he was not as central but still had plenty of scope to observe.

I found the first two thirds of the book totally gripping. Dunlop had a front seat as Jack Lynch built Fianna Fáil up from its bitter defeat in 1973, and takes us through the 1977 election campaign and the stunning result. He then sees Lynch slowly losing his grip over the next couple of years, until he is forced to resign in 1979 and replaced by Charles Haughey (“Charlie” to everyone). His description of the Lynch government, having won an unexpectedly huge majority which was in fact built on a very fragile electoral margin, is grimly reminiscent of the problems faced by Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in the UK today.

Dunlop defends Haughey strongly against all allegations of corruption and wrong-doing, and tells stories of his humanity – and also of monstrous behaviour and gross political misjudgements. It’s clear that Haughey was his favourite Taoiseach. Alas, Dunlop’s defence of Haughey’s probity rings a little hollow in the light of his own subsequent criminal conviction for bribing Dublin councillors, not to mention what has since come to light about Haughey. But for me, coming from a perspective where my family were distinctly not Haughey fans, it is healthy to read another view. (Even if it is wrong.)

Dunlop was less close to the centre under Garret Fitzgerald, and spent most of his time in the coalition governments of 1981-2 and 1982-7 assisting the Fine Gael minister John Boland (I must admit I had completely forgotten about him). He then retreated into private sector public affairs and lobbying, though was recruited again by Fianna Fáil for the 1992 election. The book was published in 2004, ten years after the events it describes, and contemporaneous with Dunlop singing like a bird to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is very little about ideology here and a lot about political character, psychology and motivation. In particular there’s very little about Northern Ireland, other than complaining about the difficulties it raised, praising Haughey’s attempts to build a relationship with Thatcher and explaining his own perfunctory contacts with British diplomats, and regretting the (peripheral) impact of the hunger strikes in the first 1982 election. It shows how little the reality on the ground in the North mattered for Dublin (and other southern) politicians.

I am personally sympathetic to the anthropological approach to politics, and I love gossip anyway (who doesn’t?) so I generally enjoyed Dunlop’s account. It is occasionally a little too hand-wavey – he never quite says what he thinks the facts were behind the Arms Trial, except that in his view Lynch was more guilty and Charlie less so than most people think. But some of his observations about the relations between politicians and the media, politicians and the voters, and indeed politicians and reality itself, are spot-on. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that rapidly dwindling pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R.B. McDowell.

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The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

When [James] Watt was born on 19 January 1736, his father was a substantial figure, a general merchant, builder, shipwright, carpenter and cabinet-maker, and part owner of several vessels. He made the first crane in Greenock for unloading the heavy, scented bales of tobacco, and into his workshop the captains brought their instruments for repair. This was the trade Watt set his heart on. Instrument-makers were the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution. The sixteenth-century burst of exploration had fostered the mathematics of navigation and the improvement of astrolabes, quadrants and compasses, while on land surveying instruments were vital to map new territories.¹ Meanwhile the clock- and watchmakers were developing their craft, and the spectacle-makers and glass-grinders were working on new optical instruments, telescopes and microscopes. Yet the theoretical aspects of their work had little status: in Cambridge in the 163os, ‘Mathematicks … were scarce looked upon as Academical Studies, but rather mechanical, as the business of Traders, Seamen, Carpenters, Surveyors of Land, or the like.’²
¹ For a survey see Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Scientific Instruments’, in Pietro Corsi and Paul Weidling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (1983) 243-58.
² John Wallis, in Heilbron, 10; see her careful introductory survey.

A lovely in-depth look at the men behind the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-19th century West Midlands of England, focussing especially on Erasmus Darwin as the key figure, but also looking at Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Samuel Galton, and a number of others whose names I was less familiar with. They were all members of the Lunar Society, which met monthly in Birmingham from the 1760s to around the end of the century.

There is a lot of loving detail about their lives, with common threads including Methodism and other minority Protestant traditions (especially Quakers); pottery; lots of children (Darwin had fourteen with his two wives, and maybe more besides); investments; the abolition of slavery; and of course engineering. It could have been overwhelming, but it’s broken up with black-and-white illustrations and some lovely plates. I was particularly struck by Joseph Wright’s paintings of the orrery and the air pump.

A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766)
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)

I learned a lot from this; in particular I realised how well the author had managed to gain my sympathy when I found myself horrified by the 1791 Priestley Riots, where a right-wing mob targeted the local religious minorities in Birmingham, including especially the vulnerable and visible Joseph Priestley; the local authorities appear to have colluded in the outbreak of violence and then (as usual) blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves. Some things never change.

Anyway, this is a tremendously engaging book about a part of history that I should have known more about; and now I do. You can get it here.

The Duke of Ireland

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An odd bit of historical trivia that I came across: the Duke of Ireland was killed by a wild boar in the woods near our house, on 22 November 1392.

I was not aware that there had ever been a Duke of Ireland. It was a title given in 1386, for his lifetime only, to Robert de Vere, the ninth Earl of Oxford, by King Richard II. Richard II was the only king of England to visit Ireland between 1215 and 1690. One of the ways he demonstrated his regard for Ireland was to give titles to his very good friend the Earl of Oxford. In 1385, Richard made de Vere Marquess of Dublin, the very first title of Marquess granted in England, and in 1386, Duke of Ireland, the first duke in England who was not closely related to the royal family.

There was speculation then and now about exactly how close the relationship between King and Duke was. In 1385, when the unprecedented title of Marquess was granted, Richard II was 18 and Robert de Vere 24. Both married twice; neither is known to have had children. It should be added that de Vere married his second wife, one of the ladies of the household of Richard II’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, after a very public love affair. This of course does not exclude anything.

It all ended horribly. Richard II was not a consensus-minded guy and tried to rule England and Ireland with the assistance and advice of a very few chosen friends. The regional magnates, banding together as the Lords Appellant, rebelled against him, and defeated the pro-Richard forces, led by de Vere, at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387. De Vere was forced into exile; this medieval illustration shows him after his defeat, sadly crossing the Thames on his way to exile in Flanders.

The “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 consolidated control of England by the Lords Appellant, and condemned de Vere to death in absentia. It lasted less than a year; the Lords Appellant proved even worse at government than Richard II had, and his uncle John of Gaunt returned and brokered a restoration of power to Richard in 1389. One of the Lords Appellant who Richard persuaded to change sides was John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby. Henry and Richard were the same age and had been childhood playmates.

Richard elevated Henry to the title of Duke of Hereford (incidentally, Richard II created nine dukedoms, a record not broken until Charles II three hundred years later). But ten years later, they quarrelled, Henry was sent into exile, and so the plot of Shakespeare’s Richard II begins. I must admit that until I came across the trivial point of the identity of the Duke of Ireland, I was not aware of the whole 1380’s crisis and knmew nothing about Richard’s reign between the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the exile of Bolingbroke in 1397, leading inexorably to Richard’s overthrow and death two years later.

Although Richard regained power from 1388, he made no attempt to recall de Vere from his exile in Leuven. As I said up top, de Vere was killed in a hunting accident in the woods close to our house in 1392, aged 30. The titles of Duke of Ireland and Marquess of Dublin died with him, and his uncle inherited the title of Earl of Oxford. Three years later his body was brought back to England and reburied. It is reported (in the St Albans Chronicle) that the king had the coffin opened to kiss his lost friend’s hand and to gaze on his face one last time. Ironically, the emblem of the de Vere family was a boar, the same animal that killed the Duke of Ireland.

A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

War releases other aggressions too — all those hostilities that have been present in peacetime, but restrained — and so when war comes, other, ‘little’ wars come too: the war of the old against the young, the war of the old-fashioned against the modern, the war of the national against the foreign and of the conforming against the non-conforming. It is not surprising, then, that once the Great War had begun, conflicts of values began, and grew violent, or that qualities that cultivated Edwardians had taken to be the very signs of their nation’s civilization were seen to be the symptoms of a national disease.

I enjoyed this tremendously, a survey of the impact of the First World War on British culture – although the subtitle uses the word “English”, I’m glad to say that Ireland at least is referenced throughout. In 470 pages, Hynes looks at the brutal reset of the UK’s way of life that started in 1914, climaxed in 1916 and continued to reverberate long after the guns had formally fallen silent.

Almost every European family has a story here – my grandfather, born in 1880, was wounded three times in combat; his younger brother was gassed; one of his sisters lost her oldest son at Gallipoli, another lost her husband at Ypres. But Hynes’ focus is culture rather than combat, mainly prose writing, but also poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and the nascent cinema industry, and he weaves an intense and diverse tapestry of how art responded to crisis and horror.

A lot of the names were familiar to me – Wells and Woolf dominating, of course, and Owen in poetry. Hynes does a great job of connecting them all together, mapping their mutual influences and in particular drawing out the changing perceptions of the war over time – those directly exposed to it realising the true horror of the situation quicker than those at home.

There is plenty of social commentary in the art, including the changing roles of women, and attitudes to sexuality. I had to grimly laugh at one quote from Asquith’s son, prosecuting a court-martial against a soldier for being gay, who he described in a letter to his wife as

a nephew of Robert Ross, lately a scholar at Eaton, who aroused everyone’s suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek and constantly reading Henry James’ novels.

Sounds like a wrong ’un, for sure!

The book gave me a lot to think about, and I picked up a couple of intriguing recommendations. Sonia: Between Two Worlds, a novel by Stephen McKenna, seems to pick up the Irish dimension and do a bit more with it. And the Sandham Memorial Chapel sounds like it is well worth a detour next time I have reason to venture to northern Hampshire.

This is a great summary of an awful time, and the art that it generated, some of which was great and lasting. You can get it here.

Return to Ramillies

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The Battle of Ramillies in 1706 was one of the biggest battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, also crucial for the future career of the Duke of Marlborough, and the cause of what is now Belgium switching from Spanish to Austrian rule. 62,000 troops of the Anglo-Austrian alliance inflicted s severe defeat on 60,000 French troops, a quarter of whom were killed. I have seen a claim that it was the largest cavalry battle in history. On a much more intimate level, the doctor treating one of the veteran British soldiers for injuries received at the battle realised that the patient had breasts; this was the famous Christian Davis, aka Mother Ross., who had joined the army disguised as a man many years before.

I visited the site of the Battle of Ramillies with B eight years ago, and had fun climbing the ancient tumulus from which the French commander directed his army.

But in 2016 I was unable to find any memorial of the actual battle in 1706. The memorial at the centre of the village of Ramillies is to a First World War skirmish, not to the much bigger fight of two centuries earlier.

However, dedicated Googling eventually found a small plaque, placed in 2006 beside a shrine to St Donatus way to the north of the battlefield. I have marked it on the below map (taken from Wikipedia, showing the order of battle at the beginning of the fighting) with a blue X. I’ve also marked the Hottomont tumulus, to the southwest, with a blue circle.

So I set off with B to find it today. It’s about 30 minutes’ drive from her home, and she likes car journeys. I was unable to persuade her to smile for the camera when we located it, but she gives a sense of scale.

The plaque, placed by local enthusiasts for the tercentenary of the battle, speaks for itself, though I do find the placement a bit odd; it’s at the junction of two minor, unnamed roads, some way from the most intense point of the fighting.

The chapel is in poor shape. It could date from anywhere between the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the various heritage websites offer no clue. It is referred to in some sources as “la Chapelle des Quatre Tièges”, but I am unable to find a translation for “tiège” – it could perhaps be a dialect form meaning “tree trunk” from “tige”, which means “stem”. Within the chapel, St Donatus looks out cheerfully through a protective grille. (This is probably St Donatus of Münstereifel, who protects you against lightning and was a Roman soldier, hence the tunic.)

I also tried to find the nearby caves of Folx-les-Caves, which I visited in 2005; but they have been closed since 2019.

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Information emerges on a computer screen as lines and dots, but there are pieces missing. The DNA extracted from this tooth has spent more than a millennium in the ground, resulting in incomplete genome coverage.3 It doesn’t show the individual’s eye colour or provide information on their appearance. However, while the minute sequences of the DNA prove difficult to decipher, the chromosomes are clear. The team members search repeatedly, yet across every sample they find no evidence of a Y chromosome anywhere. Instead, there is a clear pattern of two X chromosomes.
3 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al, ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 164, No. 4 (2017), pp. 853-860.

A book asserting that there are lots of interesting stories to tell about the centrality of women in the Middle Ages, which basically is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned. It starts however in 1913: Emily Davison, who was trampled to death by the King’s horse when her suffragette protest went wrong at the Derby, was a qualified and enthusiastic medievalist who saw the political empowerment of women as fully consistent with history.

Ramirez goes on to look at the Loftus Princess; Cyneðryð and Æðelflæd of Mercia; the Viking woman from Birka; Hildegard of Bingen; the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry; the women of the Cathars; Jadwiga of Poland; and Margery Kempe. It’s a solid piece of work which simultaneously rides the two horses of “these were remarkable individuals” and “women in general were much more important in the Middle Ages than you have probably been told”.

I didn’t know much about any of these particular cases, and had never heard of some of them – and I’ve read quite a lot of medieval history in my time. So I felt enlightened and encouraged by the end of the book. You can get it here.

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was rare for him to be home in the Persian heartlands of his youth. In the last two decades he had spent most of his time on horseback in far-flung places acquiring lucrative territory. But, for now, Cyrus was pleased to be at Pasargadae. Spring was the right time to be there and he was delighted to see how, over the years, his fine garden had matured with tall cypress trees running in straight avenues alongside bubbling streams which passed through endless stone water channels and little pools. Flowerbeds burst with the colour of exotic flora imported from each part of the empire, and every now and then Cyrus saw the red hash of a rooster’s coxcomb as the haughty bird strutted through the garden, its feathers shimmering black-blue-gold. Cyrus had a dozen cockerels, an unexpected gift of the Indian ambassador. Bas-bas they were called in Persian. They were angry and aggressive and Cyrus was shown by the ambassador how, in India, they were trained and used for sport. Consequently, he and his best friends wagered fortunes on cock-fights. But this particular cockerel did not fight. He was allowed to wander the gardens of Pasargadae and service the fat brown hens who gave Cyrus eggs on a daily basis – a new phenomenon for a society that knew only the seasonal hatchings of geese, swans, and ducks. His chickens were precious birds and Cyrus entrusted them to the safe keeping of their own warden, the Master of the bas-bas.

This book is about the Persian empire of the Achaemenids, starting with Cyrus II in the sixth century BCE, with the explicit intention of redressing history’s bias towards the Greeks whose side of the story has become the standard account.

I regret to say that I gave up on it before finishing the second chapter. I found the style too novelistic – how on earth can a historian tell us what was going through Cyrus’ mind at crucial stages, or give us details of what he was wearing on a particular day? This might have been excusable if the writing was sourced through footnotes or even GRRRRR endnotes, but there are none apart from a list of further reading.

Very disappointing; I had been looking forward to a proper analysis of a part of history I don’t know much about, but this ain’t it. You can get it here.

The easternmost dead president

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So I came across this interesting article yesterday, listing the gravesites of all of the presidents of the United States (apart from those who are still alive). It is illustrated by this lovely map:

The westernmost tomb is that of Ronald Reagan in California; the southernmost is Lyndon B Johnson in Texas; the northernmost is Calvin Coolidge in Vermont. But who is easternmost? Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams rest in the crypt of the United First Parish Church in Quincy, Massachusetts. It must be one of them.

This charming news piece has CBS reporter Levan Reid exploring the crypt and inspecting the dead presidents for himself. As seen from the entrance to the burial chamber, John Adams is on the left, followed by his wife Abigail, their son John Quincy, and finally John Quincy Adams’ wife Louisa (the only First Lady born outside the United States, apart from Melania Trump).

It’s not completely clear from this film which way round they are with respect to the rest of the church. But Openstreetmaps suggests that the crypt is at the eastern end of the church, with John Adams’s tomb the northernmost of the four and a little to the west, and John Quincy Adams therefore the easternmost of the dead presidents.

But next time I am in that part of the world, I think I will go have a look for myself.

Edited to add, 28 August 2022: I was wrong, as I discovered when I visited Quincy today. In fact the crypt is located below the portico at the western end of the church, accessed by a staircase from the interior. John Quincy Adams and Louisa are in the northern end, slightly west of John and Abigail. John Adams père is therefore the easternmost of the dead presidents.