Seventeenth-century English Dragons May 28, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing recently highlighted the case of a giant serpent in nineteenth-century Devon, a snake that was as thick as a thigh. Beach had assumed that this was a one off, but now he is wondering as he found a second reference to go with it. This one comes from a pamphlet with a straight-to-the-point title: The Flying Serpent or Strange News out of Essex. This was published in 1669 and tells how a beast that was spotted at Lodge Farm, Henham-on-the-Mount was
‘8 or 9 foot long, the smallest part of him about the bigness of a Man’s leg, on the middle as big as a Mans Thigh, his eyes were very large and piercing, about the bigness of a Sheep’s eye, in his mouth he had two rows of Teeth which appeared to their sight very white and sharp, and on his back h e had two wings indifferent large but not proportionable to the rest of his body, they judging them not to be above two hand fulls long, and w hen spreaded, not to extend from the top of one wing to the utmost end of the other above two foot at the most, and therefore altogether too weak to carry such an unwieldly body.
A flightless dragon then?! All this makes Beach wonder if (in imaginary terms) the Devonian snake was actually the last traces of belief in wyrms in those parts in the early eighteenth century.
Back to the Henham beast though. One writer, Alison Barnes, has gone on record with (she believes) the true identity of this beast. Crocodile? Salamander? Mutant adder? Well, actually none of the above. AB has argued that it was a practical joke. She claims that the author of the pamphlet, was also the author of the hoax: see further her ‘Ingenious William Winstanley: Poet, Journalist, Bookseller, Historian and Novelist of Saffron Walden and Quendon 1628-1698’. AB argues, in fact, that all the ‘solid witnesses’ were Winstanley’s friends and implies that lots of paper mache was employed.
So dragons were truly extinct by the seventeenth century in Britain? Well, yes and no. In 1614 another text was published whose title will speak for itself. True and Wonderfull: A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great annoyance and divers slaughters both of men and cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson: in Sussex, two miles from Horsam, in a woode called St. Leonards Forrest, and thirtie miles from London, this present month of August, 1614. With the true generation of Serpents.
Who needs annotated bibliographies when you have a hundred word titles? A description of the ‘dragon’ follows.
He is of countenance very proud, and at the sight or hearing of men or cattel, will raise his necke upright, and seem to listen and look about, with great arrogancy. There are likewise on either side of him discovered, two great bunches so big as a large footeball, and (as some thinke) will in time grow to wings
He was eight or nine feet in length and his middle part (the thickest) was, reportedly, like the axle tree of a cart.
What on earth is happening here? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The Wandering Jew in Burnley May 27, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
Today it is the turn of the Wandering Jew.
For those who have never met him WJ refused to help Christ (as he was carrying his cross) or made fun of Jesus as he hung between the thieves. This proved a bad idea. WJ now meanders cursed around the globe and will do so until the end of time in penance for his oversight. The WJ legend in some senses institutionalises European anti-Semitism: it was a medieval, perhaps a thirteenth-century creation. But it is difficult not to feel sympathy for this extraordinary individual doomed to ‘walk the earth’ like Caine. And so an anti-semitic rant actually becomes a bridge to understanding and shared humanity.
Most modern studies claim that by the nineteenth-century belief in the Wandering Jew had become purely symbolic. What then to make of this news report from that very century.
We are informed that a new race of religionists have lately risen in this locality (Burnley), who pretend to have more extensive acquaintance with the ‘mysteries of the kingdom’ that any of their predecessors. They assert with much gravity that in the darkest shades of night they are permitted to hold converse with departed spirits, and for this purpose it is their custom to meet together, and hear a sweet response from heaven. The latest intelligence they have received from the invisible world is to the effect that the Wandering Jew is in some part of Lancashire, and that he will shortly pass through Burnley, when he will make a call at a certain house and communicate such important information relative to a subject that is as yet entirely ‘unknown to mortal mind’, as will ‘astonish the natives’. Really we may inquire, what will come next?
Beach doesn’t want to set up today’s post as a Borges short story, but he found this clipping at the bottom of a pile of newspapers while preparing his tax documentation. A note says that it came from the Blackburn Times but neglects to give the date: woops… If anyone can dictate the words to any blanks here then Beach would love to fill them in. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
In the meantime Beachcombing might note that Blackburn is something of a rival to Burnley. Was this a bit of garden green slander then or some honest to God non-conformism gone very very wrong. For what it is worth Beach’s money is on the second. As a Yorkshireman Beach, in fact, can share the intelligence that folk across the border in Lancs (Blackburn, Burnley etc) are a LITTLE strange.
The Talking Dog and King’s Fellow May 25, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Horror upon horrors, today is tax day in the Beachcombing household. Somewhere in this study there are the various documents that justify Beach’s fiscal probity and he must now find them. The next twelve hours will be the most tedious of the year. Forgive then a small post as Beach plunges into the piles of paper. Here is a cute passage from R.W.Evans quoted by Jennifer Westwood in her wonderful Albion. Evans has been asked to gather evidence to settle two bets. (It goes without saying that Beach would far rather be doing this).
The first [bet] was as to whether so-and-so had ever been a fellow of King’s College; my researches disclosed that he had in fact once been an assistant teacher in an elementary school in King’s Road Chelsea. The second was as to a remarkable dog owned by a long-defunct classical fellow of another college; the beast had been taught to speak Latin and conversed in the most agreeable fashion with any superior person who would open the conversation by enquiring after the animal’s health. My researches showed that there was such a classical fellow attended in his old age by a servant called Airedale, who had picked up a few tags of dog-latin which, for the price of half-a-pint of beer he would recite.
Beach has long concentrated on ‘cobblers’, myth-making in history. However, he asks himself now how many of these misunderstandings are based on linguistic stupidities like this: ‘the disease of language’ of good old Max Müller. He would be extremely grateful for any extra examples, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com and, reader, PLEASE have a better day than Beach is about to have…
The Problem with Sea Apes May 24, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary, Modern
***Dedicated to Andy the Mad Monk and Invisible***
Beach has, since the early days of this site, shown a persistent interest in mermaids. It would be outrageous then to pass by the important new documentary coming out (or has it already aired?) on Animal Planet. The following is borrowed from Wikipedia (courtesy of the inestimable Invisible).
Mermaids: The Body Found is a two hour Animal Planet… The fictional film tells the story of a scientific team’s investigative efforts to uncover the source behind mysterious underwater recordings and an unidentified marine body. Two former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists tell their story on camera for the first time. After investigating mass strandings of whales, the team claimed to have recorded mysterious underwater noises coming from an unknown source. This sound resembled a sound previously recorded in 1997, called the ‘bloop’. They also claimed to have recovered 30% of the remains of an unknown creature from inside a great white shark which was said to possess attributes of the human body. They alleged that the marine creature had hands, not fins, and the hip structure of an upright animal. These findings, along with many others led the team to determine that this unknown animal was very closely related to humans, possibly a mermaid.
So a mockumentary has been created to entertain and to offer the latest theory on mermaids. And what is this theory? This time Beach borrows from part of a Fox News report (courtesy of Andy). Note how there is absolutely no mention here of the fictional content unless the word ‘compelling’ (as in ‘the punters don’t do simple facts’) is supposed to cover that!
In the two-hour CGI Special Mermaids: The Body Found, Animal Planet dives deep into the idea that mermaids may have been real, and, even better – related to humans! ‘It’s a very radical theory on human evolution, but we have approached an age-old myth and really chased its origins,’ Animal Planet honcho Charlie Foley told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. ‘It has been compiled in a way that is very compelling, making us think that mermaids might not just be mythical creatures.’ The show unravels mysterious underwater sound recordings and presents a bone-chilling argument for the Aquatic Ape Theory, which suggests that during the transition from apes to hominid, some humans went through an aquatic stage. This stage is argued to have resulted in ‘aquatic ape-like’ creatures. ‘There are striking differences between us and other primates, yet [there are] many features we share with marine mammals, like the webbing between our fingers, which other primates don’t have, a layer of subcutaneous fat, and a loss of body hair,’ Foley explained. ‘We also have an instinctive ability to swim, and control over breath. Humans can hold breath up to 20 minutes, longer than any other terrestrial animal.’ Mermaids: The Body Found ponders the concept that coastal flooding millions of years ago turned some of our ancestors inland, while another group branched off into the deep water out of necessity and for food.
Beach has already highlighted sea apes. In fact, he dug up, to the best of his knowledge, the earliest reference to the concept that dates back to the eighteenth century. And this is where the problems begin… Readers might want to flag up problem concerning biology, which Beachcombing is, sadly, not qualified to do: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com However, Beachcombing would like to stick his oar into the epistemology of sea-bourne monkeys.
If you want to explain the unicorn then it makes sense to look for a now extinct creature. After all, people no longer see unicorns (with very few exceptions) and those sightings there are usually involve travelers far from home confronted by unusual but known animals. If there was a unicorn-like animal ten thousand years ago then it is possible that this animal got trapped in an early phase of human myth and that it was passed down to us from there.
However, the problem with explaining mermaids in this way is that sightings continue into the present. There are dozens of sightings, for example, from the Hebrides (Scotland) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beach can only see three ways forward in relation to the sea-ape theory.
(i) There is a small population of sea apes that survived (or survives) on and off the British coast and yet no body or photograph has ever turned up.
(ii) The mermaids that are seen cannot be explained as physical entities. Here you can give a psychological, a theosophist or a ‘pagan’ explanation, but sea apes are out.
(iii) By some bizarre mechanism presently beyond our understanding the sea ape, which has not lived on the Scottish coast for a thousand or ten thousand years, entered ‘collective memory’ and has reappeared in the imagination of locals: go to (ii) above but with sea apes ‘in’.
Beach just might be able to conceive, against all his better judgement, that in the wild backwoods of New Zealand or in the expanses of the Rocky Mountains there are giant flightless birds or unknown hominids. But if anyone finds a sea ape community on the coast of Scotland, he’ll eat a tonne of boiled sweets. He has never seen (pace Jungians) any proof for ancestral memory. And so he would plump for number (ii), as he would for fairies.
In fact, forget sea apes, mermaids seem to be sea fairies. And in many ways the sea ape theory is to mermaids what the late nineteenth century pygmy theory was to the fey.
People sometimes see things that are not physically present: whether they are truly external or not Beach will happily leave to the philosophers. What is absolutely terrifying about this is that if our perception can play these kinds of tricks on us (or ‘pull back the veils of creation’ if you prefer) can our senses be trusted under any circumstances? On just that subject, looking forward to the documentary…
***
25 May 2012: Wade writes in ‘Your sea ape post instantly reminded me of the aquatic ape theory, first proposed by a German pathologist, Max Westenhofer, in 1942, then proposed again British marine biologist, Alister Hardy, in 1960. It has since been championed by Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer (per Wikipedia). I saw a special on this years ago. It is a fascinating idea. My impression is that most anthropologists have either actively hated or completely ignored the theory as pseudo-science. Here are two links: Elaine Morgan’s and an anthropologist’s view that examines the controversial theory and yields the sceptical response. Thanks Wade!
The Postures: A Missing Erotic Classic May 22, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beachcombing has often celebrated in this place lost books and burning libraries. Today he wants to celebrate a book that while not lost (it can be found in a modern edition on the top shelves of academic institutions around the world) got through to us by the skin of its erotic teeth. Beach refers, of course, to I modi (the postures): an opusculus best avoided by those with back problems.
I modi included a series of sixteen possible and borderline impossible positions in coitus: dressed up, this was the renaissance, in the rags of classical myths. (‘Yes, that’s Pandora giving head” etc). These images had been originally drawn by Giulio Romano who was, legend claims, so frustrated that the Vatican had not paid his bills that he drew them on the walls of the Hall of Constantine. From there Marcantonio Raimondi engraved the ‘positions’ and, in 1524, an edition was brought out. This edition may have been limited but one copy fell into the grubby little hands of the Italian poet Pietro Aretino who wrote a number of sonnets around the theme. A second edition then appeared in 1527 that included Aretino’s non-too gentle works.
The Pope, Clement VII (obit 1534), struck back. The Papal police rushed through the capital confiscating every copy and while Aretino’s poems survived the book disappeared from view: full credit to the papal security forces, getting rid of two editions is quite an achievement. A very few fragments survive in the British museum: where there are only the faces divorced of sexual activity (see the image above). There are rumours too that an edition was brought out at All Souls (Oxford) in the seventeenth century where it almost got several dons expelled: might this have come from the same book, later ripped up as it travelled archive-wards?
Apart from these BM fragments not a single copy of the original survives but by good fortune a pirated copy was brought out in Venice (Europe’s publishing capital at this date) in 1527. The fine original engravings were reproduced with blurred or missed details and, horrors!, one of the postures was missing. The lovers of Europe gnashed their collective teeth. But at least a shadow of the original survives and it was that which was brought to the university presses in 1988 with a commentary by Lynne Lawner. In the stacks of academic libraries ‘bald heads forgetful of their sins’ breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Beach is always on the look out for lost or almost lost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
23 May 2012: Angel W from robertstephenhawker writes ‘Hope this isn’t too lowbrow but I’m rather fond of Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan and the name Aretino rang a bell. Dunant structures her story (which begins in 1527) around a surviving copy of ‘Giulio’s Positions’ with Marcantonio’s original engravings and with ‘The Licentious Sonnets’ attached. If you haven’t come across it already and like that kind of thing it’s an entertaining romp, better than The Birth of Venus which I seem to remember receiving more attention.’ Thanks Angela!
The Great Snake Scare of 1828 May 16, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
A cute little WtH story from deepest Devon (Tavistock) about a cryptid snake. Beach knows that nineteenth-century newspapers had a great time making up serpents and other monsters, cue ‘the 200-foot-long Hideous Ice Worm‘ with hat tip to Invisible. But in this case local tradition seems to have done the job for them.
I think it was in the summer of 1828 that an application was made to a magistrate to issue an order, for the security of the neighbourhood, that a certain monstrous snake, first seen in Pixy Lane, and afterwards in our orchard, should be well looked after. If the magistrate had to issue this order to apprehend the snake, or to secure the attention of the constables, the applicants themselves did not very clearly define. I never heard such a story as speedily found its way amongst the lovers of the marvellous.
No doubt, however, the snake that had been seen was an extraordinary one; and, as a matter of curiosity, I set to work to learn the most credible account of it that could be met with. One boy offered to take his ‘bible oath’ that he was leading up (i.e. walking up) Pisgey Lane with another lad, and on going to the hedge to pick something, a great snake leapt out, over the little boy’s shoulder, as he was standing beneath; crossed the road with great rapidity, and an old man who was near the spot, declared that the body of the long cripple (for so they here call a snake [long creeper?]) was as thick as his thigh [!!]; and so long, that he would not say how long it could be. I also heard an old woman, considered here a wise one, declare ‘the reptile was for all the world just such another snake as tempted Eve to eat the apple’.
Beach had a couple of years ago the experience of coming (literally) face to face with a snake when one reared up and started hissing at this blogger. The effect, even with a stick in your hand, is primal: humans are evidently hardwired to fear serpents. Beachcombing can understand then how a very long adder could have been exaggerated into this semi-monster. But ‘as thick as his thigh’?!? Perhaps the old man was a consumptive with nil protein intake? Perhaps his thigh was as thick as our arms? Parallels maybe? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com In any case, our author continues.
In our orchard, however, [the presence of the snake] produced a very different effect; for the formidable monster, luckily for us, having been there last seen, proved as good a guard as any dragon to the fruits there found, so that we had fewer apples stolen that year than we ever had before. What became of the snake no one could tell; but not in the days of monkish superstition could more extravagant tales respecting a reptile have been circulated or believed. On hearing these, I no longer wondered at the credulity of the old chronicler, who recorded that marvellous story about the monstrous snake at Rouen in Normandy, which swallowed knights whole, armour, horse and all, and at last required a saint himself to kill it.
Beach doesn’t want to bore his non-fairy loving readers but Pixy/Pisgey Lane, of course, refers to the fairies of the south-west. Make of that what you will…
The Leprechauns of Liverpool and the Bowling Green from Hell May 14, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern
Beachcombing has been spending some time in the last few days looking at the fairy lore of Irish immigrants: spurred on by his continuing failure to find the New York changeling case. Not surprisingly the city of Liverpool stuck out: Liverpool was flooded by Irish workers in the nineteenth century, particularly after the horrors of the famine, and Liverpudlian is, to this day, the one English ‘accent’ that shows signs of Irish influence. Beach has managed to track down a thin gruel of nineteenth-century fairy references from Liverpool, in a period where one fifth to one third of the city was of Irish decent. He would be extremely grateful for any help here: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com However, he also stumbled upon the curious story of the Liverpool Leprechauns.
Beach should start by saying that this story is somewhat outside his normal remit. It is very modern, it involves lots of screaming children, and, worst of all, UFOs (hats off to Magonia) make an unwelcome sweep over the Mersey… But it is also entertaining and, hey, rather the Summer of the Leprechauns than the Summer of Sam.
30 June 1964 children (number unspecified) saw ‘little men’ (numbers variable) in Jubilee Park near that vortex of northern necroticism, ‘the bowling green’. (If Beach ever writes a horror short story it will be called simply, ‘the Bowling Green’ and it will be illustrated by a man with bushy eyebrows drinking piss-weak ale.) Quite what the children saw has been much debated. ‘White hats’ on the little men were noted, as were their antics in throwing sods at each other. What is documented is that very rapidly the little men were interpreted (by the press?) as being leprechauns.
Leprechauns are, of course, an Irish solitary fairy known for shoe-making and vast wealth: Beach’s daughter recently shared with him the insight that the leprechaun might be rich because he sells lots of shoes. Legend claims that if you grab and hold a leprechaun you will be able to claim the fey’s treasure. So was ‘leprechaun’ just a reflex word picked up by a local journalist: leprechaun are always male, the connection might have been as simple as that? Or do we have here third of fourth generation Irish children living the stories told them by their grandparents? And in either case was this all hysteria? Beach’s belief system requires him to nod sagely here. But some modern Liverpudlians have memories. Make what you will of the following two.
I was one of the school children that saw those leprichauns I attended Brae Street School and we all saw them popping in and out of a window overlooking the school yard , there were about 4 of them all tiny dressed like a school book idea of a typical gnome and they sat swinging their legs on the window ledge getting in and out. What they were I don’t know I only know what they looked like. I’d love to know the truth!!!
I certainly [remember leprechauns], and I actually saw a few of them on Kensington Fields, close to the library, but my parents and other adults tried to convince me that I”d been seeing things. This would be one afternoon in early July 1964, around 4.30pm, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was 10 at the time and on my way to play football with my mates and saw these little (I”d say just a few inches tall) men dressed in red and black, standing in the grass, looking at me. I’m sure one of them had some type of hat on. I panicked and ran all the way home. My mum said there had been reports of leprechauns and little men on Jubilee Drive and Edge Lane the day before. That same evening crowds turned up on Jubilee Drive, and I remember a girl with a jam jar that she was going to put the leprechauns in!
Luckily, a history blog can leave the existential questions to one side and go like a hungry ferret after the hysteria. By the 1st word was spreading among the little folk (the children not the fairies) and swarms descended on Jubilee Park to see for themselves.
It was all too much for Irish parks constable James Nolan. ‘I don’t believe in leprechauns myself’, he said. He called in the city police. Police in cars and on motorcycles arrived. They cleared the hundreds of youngsters from the bowling greens — the reported playground of the wee folk — closed the gate, and stood guard. But beyond the bowling green gates the youngsters milled, tiny tots to 14-year-olds. They crammed the top of the covered reservoir for a better view of the bowling green. Tolerant bobbies wandered about trying to get the youngsters on the move. But the kids would not believe that there were no little green men. It was not until after 10pm that the park was cleared. How the story started was not known, but last night was the second night running of the leprechaun hunt. And how did those little brownies who help the Irish housewife with her chores come to arrive in Liverpool? Maybe they flew from old Ireland. A woman resident in Crosby last night reported seeing ‘strange objects glistening in the sky, whizzing over the river to the city from the Irish Sea’. 1 July 1964
The Crosby UFO and perhaps the ‘green’ men can be dismissed. They both sound like a journalist’s fugue. But by 10 July rumour had come to nearby Kirkby where children believed that there were fairies in the churchyard of St Chad’s there. It took ten days and the intervention of clergy and policemen to get the children out from among the graves. Beach wonders very vaguely if the ‘hunting’ element, children with jam jars and (by some accounts) air rifles (!) were responding to the idea of capturing the leprechaun and his treasure.
Beach should end by noting that rational explanations have been offered up, as they always are in these cases. There is the circus school that claims that the leprechaun scare began with a household of travelling midgets. There is the James Nolan school that claims that Nolan (the park constable) set up the rumour mill as a prank: evidence includes the testimony of a colleague. Then there is the diminutive gardener, Brian Jones, who may have set off the leprechaun fever and who claimed as much in a Liverpool newspaper in 1982. In any case, the Liverpool-Kirkby kerfuffle would make a great final chapter for a book of modern fairy.
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14 May 2012: Southern Man quotes direct from the great Janet Bord, The Traveller’s Guide to Fairy Sites on the Liverpool episode. ‘The city was an unlikely setting for a series of reported fairy sightings in the summer of 1964. Little green people, varying from 3 inches tall to garden gnome-sized, were being seen at night in the city’s parks and golf courses, as well as at people’s houses and flats. The excitement grew so intense when the reports were widely publicised, that on one occasion a crowd of people gathered near the bowling green in Edge Hill in August 1964 hoping to see fairies (or whatever they were) and had to be restrained by the police. Later the same year, a woman living in Wavertree claimed that three little men in green clothes had been sitting on her backyard wall, throwing stones at her dog, and other women saw them climbing a tree in Wavetree Park. These events demonstrate the difficulty the researches sometimes has of easily distinguishing between reports of fairies, aliens and other non-human beings…‘ Invisible coincidentally points to the report ‘Janet Bord’s Fairies, Real Encounters with Little People for the Wollaton little people sighting–also in a park-like setting, also by children. This was in 1979 and reminded me very much of the Liverpool case you cited, except it was kept much quieter so there was no crowd hysteria and there are no mention of jam jars.’ Thanks SM and Invisible!
23 May 2012: Larry writes ‘In 1989 when the USSR started being more open about themselves, some Moscow children reported seeing robot aliens in a nearby park. At the time the Western press ate this up because the Soviets usually never reported such things. If these little green men are aliens, I hope their taxpayers never find out that they came countless light years to Earth just to throw rocks at dogs and goof off in various parks. For what this is worth, there was an experiment done circa 1982 in a local radio station where someone pretended to report seeing a UFO. Nothing fancy, just a disk shaped light zipping across the night sky. In a matter of hours the station got over 300 calls from people who also swore they saw it. And the stories ramped up to where some were reporting seeing the ship land and aliens coming out to abduct them. Yes, separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to UFO reports has always been very difficult.’ Thanks Larry!
The Ash Wednesday Supper May 12, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern
Giordano Bruno (pictured badly) was a sixteenth-century philosopher with a thing about infinity. Giordano also had an infinite capacity to create irritation. Indeed, his travels around Europe have a fascinating pattern of greeting, slighting and sprinting. Typically, GB is obliged to leave his last home in a hurry because of offence caused to the church or/and secular authorities. Giordano then turns up in his new home, is greeted as a major European thinker. Then six months later the pattern reasserts itself and Giordano is running for his life once more.
Among GB’s very many unfortunate habits were those of throwing out images of saints and that of telling anyone who cared to listen that God had created endless inhabited worlds, making Giordano a kind of patron secular saint of the UFO community. This pattern, in any case, finally went up the chimney when 17 February, 1600, Bruno was burnt as a heretic in a Roman piazza. His ashes were then scattered in the Tiber and Giordano Bruno became his ideas: all that survived of him.
Now on the subject of ashes… In 1584 Bruno had one of those legendary dinners – the Ash Wednesday Supper – that, on previous occasions, Beach has referred to as Immortal Meals. Moments when the Olympians of the human race meet over bread and wine. We know about this meal because GB wrote a pseudo-Platonic dialogue based around it that he published in the same year under the title Cena de le Ceneri. It was by any standards, perhaps particularly though by the standards of a razor-sharp Italian bon vivant, a catastrophic repast.
First GB had been invited to the house of the poet Fulke Greville, an over serious Elizabethan sonnet writer who served both Elizabeth I and James I and who was a great friend of Philip Sydney. GB had been called in to debate philosophy with some Aristotelians down from Oxford for the evening. Bruno, it goes without saying, was a Platonist.
GB probably saw this as an opportunity to educate the ‘mad barbarians’ as he called the English. But the evening turned into a sorry comedy of errors. Bruno misunderstood the time of the meal and this caused confusion with his hosts who came to pick him up but found him out. Then, when they finally met up, he and his hosts crossed the Thames on a boat and ended up lost on the wrong side of the river (don’t do this in London). We cannot be certain how much of this account is ‘allegorical’ (those damn Platonists) and even basic details may have been invented: it is argued that the meal took place, for example, in a house other than Greville’s.
However, we can probably trust the account in terms of its intellectual content. The Oxford scholars made a terrible impression on the Italian. Bruno tried to defend the Copernican system, but he did so against men who, according to his account, barely knew how to argue (sounds like an Oxonian) and who were still trapped in medieval scholasticism.
This was all compounded by the fact that GB (an unquestionably brilliant scholar) had not troubled to learn English and by the fact that the English Professors did not know Italian. The argument (for such it quickly became) raged then in Latin. This must have been a sixteenth-century equivalent of empiricist American professors of fifty years ago, say, being confronted over table by Foucault in a furious conversation in poor Spanish.
Naturally, Bruno came off best and is praised by his host: but then Bruno wrote the account and Bruno always comes out best in those circumstances. A year later, England had chewed him up and spat him out. Then sixteen years later a fire was lit under Giordano’s toes. We’ll end with a detail that has always haunted Beachcombing: before GB was burnt his mouth was taped shut so that he could not spout dangerous sentences to the gathering crowds, something that the professors at that long ago meal would doubtless have approved of.
Beach is always looking out for remarkable meals: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Badgers, Pigs and Asses: Celtic in English May 10, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Medieval
***Dedicated to Stan and the Cowpath***
‘While I was on the ass, going to feed my dun hog, carrying only a matlock and some bannock, I saw a brock coming down from the tor that’s shaped like a bin’. It is not exactly poetry. But this sentence might stand as a memory aid for students of English. The interest lies not in the meaning of the sentence, contrived as it is. But rather in the strange collection of words that go to make it up: ass, dun (black or dark), hog, matlock (an agricultural tool), bannock (pictured: bread in Scotland and parts of Northern England), brock (badger in several English dialects), tor (a hill) and bin. These eight words have one simple thing in common. Not one is English in origin. Instead, all were borrowed into the language from the British Celts about fifteen hundred years ago and they tell us a good deal about a difficult period of British history.
Before squeezing what information we can from these Celtic relics, it is important to remember what Britain was like when ass, dun and their companions entered the English language. In about the year 400 AD, most of Britain was inhabited by the British Celts, a people whose descendants include the Cornish and Welsh, and who spoke a language (or languages) that we can call ‘British Celtic’. However, very shortly after 400 AD a massive invasion took place and several different Germanic peoples attacked the island and settled most of it. Over a matter of generations these different Germanic tribes grew together and became the English, or the Anglo-Saxons as the early English are sometimes called. Their language was Old English and sometime, early on in the history of this language, the English borrowed the eight British-Celtic words listed above. Several documents record the English invasions of the early fifth century. But almost no texts record its aftermath. We know that the English conquered most of Britain because of the end result, England. But we have few clues about what the conquest was like or what happened to the original inhabitants, the British Celts.
This is where the language archaeologists come in: their task to find out anything they can about this period of history known, because of its obscurity, as the Dark Ages. First they trawl the language, both modern English, dialects, and what records we have from earlier history and create a list: the eight words that appear in the first paragraph – a handful of other words have also been suggested, but these are more controversial. With this list to hand they then set about making deductions, some tedious, some probably wrong, but others of crucial importance for understanding early Celtic history.
A key point that arises from their studies is that the English adopted words from the British Celts that are concerned largely with the countryside and with rural life. This is surprising because we usually borrow from other languages what we do not have in our own. For example, Amerindian words that have entered English tend to be ones that describe things that early pioneers had never seen – tepee, moccasin, pocosin… But this kind of explanation does not work in the case of Britain, for the Germanic invaders that arrived there were themselves from rural backgrounds and had grown up in landscapes not unlike those found in the island. The one obvious explanation is that the British Celts who lived with the English in the early years of the conquest had a strictly servile role. And their new masters adopted only those words from British Celtic that were absolutely necessary for communication with the enslaved native population: ‘Get an ass!’ ‘Kill the hogs!’ ‘Go to the flour bin!’… Much as many ranch owners in the southern United States have a limited but effective Spanish vocabulary.
A second key point depends on the words that were not borrowed. The British Celts were an advanced people with a high standard of life and had many things that the English, coming from one of the most barbaric parts of ancient Europe, would never have seen before: cities, books, churches, theatres, factories, bureaucracy… But the early English were not interested in learning these words. They seemed to have felt no admiration for a civilisation that was more sophisticated than their own. Indeed, they (on the basis of later sources) actively despised the British Celts. Certainly you would be hard pressed to find another example from European history were an invading culture took a measly eight words from a people that it displaced. Irish and Japanese have contributed far more to English.
The work of language archaeologists is obviously not precise. They are forced to talk in generalities not specifics. But in the case of the English invasions several other disciplines back their findings up. Archaeology points to the disappearance of British-Celtic culture in what is today England in the early fifth century. The study of place-names show that remarkably few British-Celtic place-names survived the English invasions – it is difficult to find another European example where the turn over of names was so quick and thorough. Admittedly, in the last generation several linguists (the always provoking and entertaining Andrew Breeze chief among them) have tried to turn this around and to show that there is a greater survival of British Celtic words than we have previously understood. There have even been attempts to show that British Celtic influenced Anglo-Saxon cases, Anglo-Saxon word order, Anglo-Saxon tenses, and the Anglo-Saxon use of the auxillary ‘do’. Personally, Beach finds these arguments either unconvincing or too slight to alter the bleak landscape painted by dun and its seven brothers. Contrary opinions welcomed! Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Then there is history. Few documents survive. But those that do suggest that the invasions were not a gentlemanly affair. Two examples are worth quoting here. One is a short poem that was written by a British Celt at the height of the wars for Britain:
‘The barbarians [the English and other enemies] push us back to the sea,
the sea pushes us back to the barbarians,
Between these two deaths we are either drowned or slaughtered’.
The second is from a British-Celtic writer of the sixth century Gildas who describes the coming of the English. ‘All the major towns were laid low…; cut down the inhabitants… as the swords glittered all around and the flames crackled. …There was no burial to be had except in the ruins of houses or the bellies of beasts and birds… A number of the wretched survivors were caught in the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others, their spirit broken by hunger went to surrender to the enemy. They were destined to be slaves forever, if, indeed, they were not killed straight away, the highest boon.’
So next time you drop something in the bin, call someone a silly ass, or put the potato peelings together to feed the hogs spare a thought for those poor British Celts who once lived in what is today England.
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14 May 2012: Tony writes: ‘I think you probably meant ” mattock ” rather than ” Matlock “… perhaps you were thinking of Derbyshire, or even ( yum yum ) subconciously imagining Bakewell tarts…..something I do all the time. The replacement of Celtic language by Anglo-Saxon is a great mystery , especially in the light of the most modern thinking about the whole A/S invasion. Might I recommend Oppenheimer’s ” The Origins of the British ” , which explains that genetically , the A/S left a very small trace indeed , suggesting a very small invasion ; and Francis Pryor’s ” Britain AD ” , which concurs that archaeologically the “invasion ” is almost undetectable. They also both incline to the idea that there was already a Germanic element settled in SE England well before the Romans leave. They both conclude that Gildas , on whom the whole A/S Fire and Slaughter invasion hypothesis is based , is unreliable as history , and far too much has been made of his remarks, if only because they are the only remarks we have. But that makes the almost total evaporation of the British language even more startling….’ Then Stephen D: ‘The first, at least, does rather alter your landsacpe. Welsh tad, father: English dad. Pwsig, a cat: puss Neither of these are Germanic at all Also: Cors, a marsh: causeway, Trwll, a spinningwheel: trolling, spinning for fish Corwgl: coracle Craig: crag Gwylan: gull Cwm: coombe Glyder: clitter, tumbled rocks Pen gwyn, white head: penguin (possibly at first a name for the great auk) Scadan, a herring: shad (a sort of herring that spawns in fresh water) There may be others: I have my doubts about punt (the boat) and quagmire.’ [Beach replies] Dad seems to appear at the end of the Middle Ages in English and others here would appear to be late borrowings too. At that point their appearance in English is a little like the appearance of, say, Irish words. Others are more difficult to dismiss though in this way. Thanks! Stephen and Tony!
Geologist Galivants with Spirits and Fairies May 9, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
John Beaumont (obit 1751) was a celebrated, to use an anachronistic word, geologist. He also experienced ‘the other side’ with a rush of spirits and ghosts that would have thrilled a wind-sock. One passage from his An Historical Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and Other Magical Practises are well known because they describe his first-hand Blake-style interaction with the spirit world. These passages were picked up by several nineteenth-century writers and they eventually found their way into Lewis Spence’s Occult Encylopedia. They give a sense of a man (however you explain his experiences) labouring under an immense mental weight.
I had two spirits, who constantly attended me, night and day, for above three months together, who called each other by their names; and several spirits would call at my chamber door, and ask whether such spirits lived there, and they would answer they did. As for the other spirits that attended me, I heard none of their names mentioned only I asked one spirit, which came for some nights together, and rung a little bell in my ear, what his name was, who answered Ariel [!]. The two spirits that constantly attended myself appeared both in women’s habit, they being of brown complexion, about three feet in stature; they had both black loose net-work gowns, tied with a black sash about the middle, and within the net-work appeared a gown of a golden colour, with somewhat of a light striking through it. Their heads were not dressed in top-knots, but they had white linen caps on, with lace on them about three fingers’ breadth, and over it they had a black loose net-work hood.
I would not, for the whole world, undergo what I have undergone, upon spirits coming twice to me; their first coming was most dreadful to me, the thing being then altogether new, and consequently most surprising, though at the first coming they did not appear to me but only called to me at my chamber-windows, rung bells, sung to me, and played on music, etc.; but the last coming also carried terror enough; for when they came, being only five in number, the two women before mentioned, and three men (though afterwards there came hundreds), they told me they would kill me if I told any person in the house of their being there, which put me in some consternation; and I made a servant sit up with me four nights in my chamber, before a fire, it being in the Christmas holidays, telling no person of their being there. One of these spirits, in women’s dress, lay down upon the bed by me every night; and told me, if I slept, the spirits would kill me, which kept me waking for three nights.
In the meantime, a near relation of mine went (though unknown to me) to a physician of my acquaintance, desiring him to prescribe me somewhat for sleeping, which he did, and a sleeping potion was brought me; but I set it by, being very desirous and inclined to sleep without it. The fourth night I could hardly forbear sleeping; but the spirit, lying on the bed by me, told me again, I should be killed if I slept; whereupon I rose and sat by the fireside, and in a while returned to my bed; and so I did a third time, but was still threatened as before; whereupon I grew impatient, and asked the spirits what they would have? Told them I had done the part of a Christian, in humbling myself to God and feared them not; and rose from my bed, took a cane, and knocked at the ceiling of my chamber, a near relation of mine then lying over me, who presently rose and came down to me about two o’clock in the morning, to whom I said, ‘You have seen me disturbed these four days past, and that I have not slept: the occasion of it was, that five spirits, which are not in the room with me, have threatened to kill me if I told any person of their being here, or if I slept; but I am not able to forbear sleeping longer, and acquaint you with it, and now stand in defiance of them’; and thus I exerted myself about them and notwithstanding their continued threats I slept very well the next night, and continued to do so, though they continued with me above three months, day and night.
Beach has not unfortunately been able to get his hands on the Treatise yet. However, he has been reading, with great interest, The Gleanings by the same author, where Beaumont is rather more contemplative about these etheral beings in a notable appendix entitled Notes Concerning Genii or Familiar Spirits. Here, indeed, Beaumont says things that would have got him burnt a hundred years and hung fifty years prior to publication.
And as I have averr’d my own Experience in this kind, I mud declare, that as often as those Genii have appear’d to me, it has always been with that swimming Motion through the Air, and not setting one Foot before the other, as usual with Men, when they pass from one place to another. I know many Persons laugh at all Apparitions; and it’s not for those I record these things, but for those to whom such Genii may appear ; who, as they will be much surprized at the first Sight of them, I know will be glad to find that others have had the like Experiences, and to be instructed in the manner of their Appearance, and in what they may portend. I shall farther here observe to you, that whenever such Genii have appeared to me, I have always look’d on my self to have been, for that time, in an extatick State of Mind; and conclude, that most: Persons, who see Apparitions, unseeen by others, present with them, are in such a state, tho’ many times unobserv’d by themselves, the various Dispositions of Men’s Minds not being to be understood without a good share of philosophical Learning, and much Application used. In this extatick state of Mind, Men are said to dream waking and the antient Poets call this a dreaming on Parnassus, in which Dream their Minds were opened, and they were led into Knowledges.
Beaumont goes on to speculate on some other facts of the spirit world including the question of whether or not second sight is transmitted to children when one parent in an ‘extatick’ state while ‘creating’ the child. He also wonders whether much of the familiars of witchcraft and the evidence of the witch trials cannot be explained by such phenomenon.
Beach is always curious about the relation between spirits and fairies in the popular imagination and he was interested to read in a short biographical sketch of Beaumont in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Beaumont (allegedly) married his wife on the instructions of a fairy. (‘Sloane claimed that fairies had instructed Beaumont to marry Dorothy, daughter of John Speccot, of Penheale, Egloskerry, Cornwall, who did indeed become his wife’.) However, he’s not yet tracked down a source for this. Can anyone help? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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14 May 2012: With characteristic kindness Wade writes in with the source. ‘Here’ s Beaumont’s treatise: It must be the same person even though the date of death as 1731.’ No references to Beaumont’s wife unfortunately. Invisible speculates: ‘On John Beaumont’s fairy visitations, I wonder if it is possible that he was suffering from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which is characterized by elaborate visual hallucinations. Some sufferers also report auditory hallucinations, although the music and bell sounds Beaumont reports sound more like tinnitus. So many fairy/spirit appearances; so little chance of matching them with modern medical diagnoses…. Then JK writes ‘I just read your latest article and found it fascinating. I also looked for the book and was rather surprised to find it (if real) on iTunes! Such books are usually buried in the Gutenberg Project or Archive.org. Such a panoply of subjective experiences would tend to make me suspect psychological issues. His self-described ‘ecstatic state of mind’ may have been symptoms of something akin to Bipolar Disorder; sleep disorder and visual/auditory hallucinations would go hand-in-hand. I’ve suspended judgement when it comes to apparently *supernatural* mischief and incidents. Over the years, my parents’ home has been scene to a range of incidents not easily explainable. These peculiar incidents have been experienced by friends, family and visitors despite occurring infrequently. I say this so as not to give the impression of knee-jerk scepticism when faced with the unknown. It’s simply the extent and variety of Beaumont’s experiences that causes me to doubt their objective spookiness (technical jargon). The amount of his experiences reminds me of Reverend Edmund Jones and the carnival of horrors he placed in Monmouth. What a character he must have been!’ More on EJ another day. For now thanks to Wade, JK and Invisible!!
