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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| We will send Hatty away on a course so she can add your name to Der Few. |
How would we ever manage without her?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It depends. 'Hatty' is just a generic name for the office dogsbody. I suppose the current one is fairly serviceable.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Franks apparently had a "tell" about how excited he was about a certain piece. If he was very excited he would touch his top waistcoat button. If he was fairly excited the middle button......and so on. Of course he could have circulated the story himself and been using fake tells.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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This beautiful coin is a James-II guinea. Under the portrait of James you will notice a cool little elephant and castle symbol. Elephant and Castles occur regularly in London, they feature as pub names, the tube station etc. Interesting that. It is the symbol of the Royal African Company. (RAC).
From its foundation in 1672, to 1688, the Governor of the RAC was a certain James, Duke of York who, by now you will have guessed, was destined to become future King of England in 1685. Under a royal charter of 1672 the RAC was granted rights of sole trade from Sallee to the Cape of Good Hope and the adjacent islands. The company was also granted the right of acquiring lands within these limits (provided such lands were not owned by any Christian prince), subject to the payment of two elephants’ teeth. In short the RAC was granted a monopoly on trade.
The charter also defined the right to buy and sell enslaved Africans, gave locations on the West African coast for their purchase and included projections for where the trade might be expanded.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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My family is from the Elephant & Castle which makes me a world authority. The tube station refers to the pub and I don't know of any others. They may be worth tracking down though since this is the start of the main road London - Continent, the most significant in Britain, so it may be the other way round, the Africa Company taking the symbol from it. On the other hand the Ivory Coast footie team are known as The Elephants so it prolly isn't. It's a rum place to site your HQ though.
Before left wing anti-slavery revolutionaries start toppling Jacobite statues, remind them that it was their hero Ollie Cromwell who founded England's West Indian empire. By the way, it would have been illegal for James to be the governor of the RAC 1672-88 on account of the Exclusion Act, which is not to say he wasn't. I haven't done any Wiki research, being the world authority, which is highly vexing -- I'd really love to, but it's a question of dignitas.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Before left wing anti-slavery revolutionaries start toppling Jacobite statues, remind them that it was their hero Ollie Cromwell who founded England's West Indian empire. |
I think the setting up of colonies in the Americas and the West Indies began before Ollie, as did being nasty to the Spanish. It appears Ollie was a supporter of both, just not very good at it. Or rather the folks he put in charge of the mission were not very good at it, so Ollie jailed them on return. If we only had the sense to still do this today, the armed forces might actually start winning wars again.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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From 1688 to 1722 The Royal African Company supplied the gold to the Royal Mint, to mint the "Guineas" (ie African Gold) with an elephant symbol. The Royal mint was situated within the Tower of London. The tower is thought to be a castle, but that might be a stretch too far. Either way if you go over Tower Bridge........
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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The Royal African Company logo.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Either way if you go over Tower Bridge........ |
This is definitely a non-starter (geddit?) at least before 1894. For your theory to work you'd have to trek to London Bridge and then spend a mile or two getting to the Elephant & Castle which presumably didn't have the gyratory though it did presumably have Newington Butts if you fancied some arrers and the pub hadn't arrived yet. By the way Isaac Newton was Master of the Mint at the time so I'd be a bit careful if I were you. Not the straightest arrow around. For instance, I certainly wouldn't subscribe to the idea that
| From 1688 to 1722 The Royal African Company supplied the gold to the Royal Mint, to mint the "Guineas" (ie African Gold) |
since the RAC wasn't founded until 1672 and nor would I put much faith in the idea of a trading company supplying gold straight out of the bag. You take specie out, not bring it back.
PS There's no way that logo is pre-19th Century (even twentieth) but note the Megalithic Hermes wings and caduceus.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: |
since the RAC wasn't founded until 1672 and nor would I put much faith in the idea of a trading company supplying gold straight out of the bag. You take specie out, not bring it back.
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You weren't wrong, it replaced an earlier company The Royal Adventurers In Africa set up by Charles II. In fact there were earlier charters going further back still.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Why is a sovereign equal to twenty shillings (i.e. a pound) but a guinea is worth twenty-one shillings? And why does English horse racing, which got into its stride thanks to Charles II, have as its basic currency the guinea? That extra shilling -- which is a complete nuisance -- must have some function.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Why is a sovereign equal to twenty shillings (i.e. a pound) but a guinea is worth twenty-one shillings? And why does English horse racing, which got into its stride thanks to Charles II, have as its basic currency the guinea? That extra shilling -- which is a complete nuisance -- must have some function. |
According to wiki it reflected the intrinsic value of the African gold content of the coins.
| The guinea (/ˈɡɪniË/ ; commonly abbreviated gn., or gns in plural[1]) was a coin of approximately one-quarter ounce of gold that was minted in Great Britain between 1663 and 1814.[2] The name came from the Guinea region in West Africa, where much of the gold used to make the coins originated.[3] It was the first English machine-struck gold coin, originally worth one pound sterling,[2] equal to twenty shillings, but rises in the price of gold relative to silver caused the value of the guinea to increase, at times to as high as thirty shillings. From 1717 to 1816, its value was officially fixed at twenty-one shillings.[4] |
Horse racing, the sport of Kings, was banned under Cromwell. The prizes in Guineas reflect that historically horse racing is linked to the monarchy and African gold. Although the race according to wiki dates later
| The 1000 Guineas was first run on 28 April 1814, five years after the inaugural running of the equivalent race for both colts and fillies, the 2000 Guineas. |
The Gold Cup prize was £100 Guineas
Horse racing still had its opponents. The Rev. Francis Close of Cheltenham, nicknamed The Pope of Cheltenham.
| I believe that there are periods of the day and night, yea even of the Sabbath day, when the heathen festivals of Venus and Bacchus are exceeded upon a Christian race ground …. numbers of the most worthless members of society flow in from every part of the country to partake in the unholy revelry, and to increase the amount of crime and guilt which is chargeable upon us. And it is scarce possible to turn our steps in any direction without hearing the voice of the blasphemer, or meeting the reeling drunkard, or witnessing scenes of the lowest profligacy. …. Gambling is the very essence of the amusement; though it be a vice which is more pre-eminently destructive both of body and soul than any other that Satan ever devised for the ruin of mankind. |
Maybe gambling comes from Gambia?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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In true Wiley fashion. I have lost track after discovering that according to the chronicler of St Albans, Matthew Paris, there was an actual elephant in the (castle) tower of London......
King Louis IX of France when he was seeking a gift for Henry III of England, hit upon the idea that he would send something that the King did not already have. Paris wrote a short tract on the elephant, found in the Chronica maiora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi, MS 16). The elephant was 10 years old 10 feet high, grey-ish black with a tough hide, and used its trunk to obtain food and drink. Its keeper's name was Henry de Flor.
The elephant was part of a menagerie......So the tower housed both a menagerie and a mint.
I need an expert on scripts and someone who can call into question a carbon dated lion skull from the 13th century, which was discovered in 1937 (why are workmen always amazed to uncover?...I can picture it now) two very well preserved lion skulls that, err, nobody bothered with (were less amazed with) until about 2005, when some boffin discovered them at the Natural History museum and dated them......Cripes, they have been lucky enough to uncover and find probably the earliest lion from the menagerie....
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Historians chatting about ivory book covers and so on believe Anglo-Saxons were trading in the stuff and there's a 'travel guide', the Marvels of the East, said by the BL to have been originally composed in the 7th century or early 8th century
The Marvels of the East survives in three manuscripts made in Anglo-Saxon England (including this 11th-century miscellany). The version you can see here is found in a famous manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius A XV) known as the Nowell Codex, which also contains the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. The manuscript is dated to the last quarter of the tenth century or first quarter of the 11th century.
Alongside Beowulf, the manuscript includes texts about the life of St Christopher (d. c. 251) and the biblical Judith, as well as The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, a prose account of the military campaigns of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC), in which he meets many strange creatures, including snakes with two heads and flying mice. |
The Chronica maiora, dated 13th century by M.R. James, who may have been a first-rate ghost story writer but not much use as a cataloguer, has a separate preface.
| Recently, in 2003, the prefatory section to MS 16 (ff. i recto - v verso), containing lists and genealogies of kings, a diagram of the winds, itineraries, maps, and the picture of the elephant given by Louis IX to Henry III, has been bound separately as MS 16I. The part containing the chronicle text itself, ff. 1v-282r, has been rebound as MS 16II. |
We are always alert to interpolations and bits added on. This is of special interest because it's an 'earliest' event
| The earliest recorded elephant in England is the gift that King Louis IX of France presented to King Henry III of England in 1255. |
But bits of the first bit had been added to /inserted, in the seventeenth century.
| various leaves have been lost: three after folio 3v (1190–1192); one after 106v (1237), one after 117v (1238), one after 232v (1250). The missing parts (except that after 117v) have been supplied by Archbishop Matthew Parker’s secretaries. |
It would help if an elephant-giving had been recorded by French contemporaries for example, but Matthew Paris or, as it may be, Matthew Parker's secretaries, may be the only record.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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This is an interesting tidbit. During the 18th and 19th centuries, a popular April fool involved inviting unsuspecting victims to come view the annual ceremony of washing the lions at the Tower of London moat. The chumps would buy a ticket, only to discover there was nothing there.
So is it a coincidence that the workmen in 1937 claimed to have uncovered actual 13th century skulls in the Tower moat?
Not a smoking gun. Just saying.
Another April Fool version tells us that it was white bears....
| In 1252, Henry III was given a magnificent white bear, presumably a polar bear, by the King of Norway. Although it was kept muzzled and chained, the bear was allowed to swim and hunt for fish in the Thames. A collar and a 'stout cord' were attached to the bear to keep it from escaping. |
Is that likely?
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