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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Wiley's favorite History Guy (Daniel Snow) has just tweeted out the following.
Today in 685, the most important British battle you've never heard of was fought: Nechtansmere.
The Picts smashed a Northumbrian army in the Highlands. The north would remain a separate entity from the land of the English. |
Wiley confesses he hasn't heard of that battle.
Marc Morris, a Medieval historian provides additional info.
| The Northumbrian army was led by King Ecgfrith, who died in the battle. Just four weeks earlier, on the eve of riding north, he had founded a new monastery at Jarrow. The original dedication stone is still set in the wall. | |
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Here is the dedication.
| The dedication of the church of St Paul on 23rd April in the fifteenth year of King Ecgfrith and the fourth year of Ceolfrith Abbot and under God’s guidance founder of this same church†|
| The Northumbrian army was led by King Ecgfrith, who died in the battle. Just four weeks earlier, on the eve of riding north, he had founded a new monastery at Jarrow. The original dedication stone is still set in the wall. |
It don't look like it is still set in the wall to me. Maybe things are not as clear as presented? I hope Hats don't get to hear about this. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.....
https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2363494
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Stewart J. Brookes@Stewart_Brookes
“we may infer that the number of scholars at work in Ireland, & of sufficient eminence to be worthy of mention in the Annals" was: 4th quarter of 7th cent: 6; 1st q of 8th cent: 18; 2nd q: 13; 3rd q: 20; 4th q: 23; 1st q of 9th cent: 13; 2nd q: 39; 3rd q: 17; 4th q: 21, etc. |
My own sources would place the average nearer to zero. It's one of the paradoxes of literacy, because of its sheer usefulness, that overall numbers tend to either of two states: lots or none. But count 'em, you can't.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The University of Iceland has uploaded a map showing all the places in Iceland associated with legends/stories. I haven't counted but a rough estimate is there are over a hundred place-legend nodes, probably on a par with Ireland and Wales though Icelandic lore goes for elves, trolls and ghosts over saints.
| The database now involves a distribution map of published Icelandic legends, and is connected to both the homes of the original storytellers and collectors and those places mentioned in the legends (which can still be found). Most of these legends come from collections that were made between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. |
They don't mention 'origins' or say the legends go back to antiquity, merely when they've been collected. This is all the more significant because the project was inspired by Bo Almqvist, Professor of Irish Folklore at University College Dublin, whose life's work was researching 'old rural traditions of Ireland, Scotland, and the isles of the North Atlantic (including Iceland)'
| The Sagnagrunnur is dedicated to the memory of the late Swedish folklorist Professor Bo Almqvist (1931–2013), of University College, Dublin. Bo Almqvist had long been interested in putting together a classified catalogue of North Sea legends similar to that made in Norway by Reidar Christiansen. He had a deep interest in the folklore of Iceland, Shetland and Orkney, as well as Ireland, his research often featuring detailed comparative studies of legends and beliefs across this area. |
The project has been ongoing since 1999, this latest is part of an MA project in Public Folklore. Rather a recherché subject one might think but it has funding from prestigious bodies
| This project has been funded by RANNÃS (the Science Council of Iceland), the University of Iceland and Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur |
http://sagnagrunnur.com/en/
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Seek and ye shall always find.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A mega forgery event is taking place before our very eyes, brought to us by Cat "the Cat" Jarman https://twitter.com/CatJarman/status/1134061498169475072
O forgery, let me count thy ways! [taken from the BBC report cited]
| The large number of coins and silver ingot |
I’ve looked and I’ve looked but nobody has said how many. Why is this significant? Well, if it’s a genuine hoard i.e. hundreds and thousands then forgery can be ruled out. If it isn’t, it can’t. They must have counted the number so being coy about it is ... odd.
| were seized from properties in County Durham and Lancashire. |
So we’re dealing with a ring. It is difficult (try me!) to construct circumstances in which a genuine hoard, albeit illicitly acquired, would be spread so wide.
| Durham Police said "a number of people have been arrested" on suspicion of dealing in culturally tainted objects. |
Such a delicious phrase. I wonder what it means.
| It declined to confirm how many people were arrested or how they allegedly came to be in possession of the items. |
Fair do’s. You’ve got to keep the Art & Antiques squad muscling in from that London.
| The haul contains coins of Alfred the Great of Wessex and his less well-known contemporary Ceolwulf II of Mercia. |
Phew! I thought for a moment they were going to say two unknown Anglo-Saxons. You know, the ones that aren't worth forging.
| King Alfred inflicted a defeat on the Vikings in AD 878, and experts believe the coins belong to an undeclared hoard consistent with the location of the Viking army at that time. |
Good spot, experts! Somewhere in England then, was it?.
| Det Insp Lee Gosling, of Durham Police, said: "It is not every day we get the chance to shape British history." |
So, Inspector Gosling, you’ll be really keen to pursue the forgery angle and be able to tell your grandchildren, “I was just about to reshape British history when it all turned out to be a bunch of effing forgers.†“Swearbox, granddad!â€
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| For those with a book on 17C England published since 1 July 2017, do you know about the Samuel Pepys Award? Equally, if you know of a great candidate, please encourage the author to submit! Deadline 30 June. Academic & trade welcome. £2,000 prize. |
Would they give the prize to a book that demonstrated reasonably conclusively that Samuel Pepys never wrote a diary and shouldn't have a prize named after him?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Would they give the prize to a book that demonstrated reasonably conclusively that Samuel Pepys never wrote a diary and shouldn't have a prize named after him? |
Oh my Lord! I've come to suspect the very same! Reason being that I don't believe the period of British history actually happened (I know -- that's totally crazy but I can't help where the data leads).
On what basis did you reach this conclusion???
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I wouldn't exactly call it a 'conclusion' this early in our investigation but it is a matter of 'world records'. Ask yourself which are the two most influential diaries in British (even arguably world) history and you'd likely come up with the Evelyn and the Pepys Diaries. So that gives you a sort of unique duality to play with. Remember, they have not been selected by us (well, only a bit) but by the accident of subsequent fame. Now, so we don't jeopardise your own researches and conclusions, you -- and anyone else save you-know-who -- should come up with anything that is common to the two sets of diaries.
Because, remember, their subsequent fame has nothing to do with one another. One concordance will be accident, two concordances will be interesting, three concordances should be impossible. Be our guest but do us a favour and assume seventeenth century English history is roughly what we think it is. Just as an experiment!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The British Museum has a pilgrim badge-mould thought to be 15th century with a carving of Becket's gloves, though it's 'not on display'. Historians say that thousands of pilgrim badges would have been made from this mould.
| An engraved badge-mould carved into shale, which would have been used in the manufacture of pilgrim-badges. Obverse: Bust of king or queen with septre; on the reverse there are two engraved images, the upper image shows the dying Christ held by the Virgin Mary - commonly called the Pietà - whilst the lower image represents the gloves of St Thomas Becket. |
It was found in the 19th century and given to the museum by Mrs Grey. Mary Hope Grey, a 'life-long follower of Ruskin', was a great collector very much of her time
| Mary was not alone in her interests and commitment to both the material culture of everyday life and the development of British museums during the interwar period. |
and remarkably generous with her donations
| Mary donated material to the Geffrye Museum in 1936. That makes a total of 30 institutions so far recorded as recipients of her generosity! |
This is the first I've heard of Becket's gloves. By the thirteenth or fourteenth century his heraldric emblem was three choughs but in fact there is little iconography associated with Becket.
The BM has another pilgrim badge, conjoined gloves 'probably gloves of Becket', donated by Sir Charles Read, Augustus Franks' successor as curator of the museum, and dated "400-1500 circa" (gloves, not Read). It all seems uncommonly late to come up with such artefacts of sentimental if not monetary value.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Oxford's Bodleian Library has discovered a map of China which it claims to be seventeenth-century, from the collection of John Selden, a legal antiquarian, polymath, Orientalist, royalist/parliamentarian politician (he frequently changed sides)
| This is one of the first Chinese maps to reach Europe. It came into the Library in 1659 from the estate of the London lawyer John Selden, who must have acquired it by 1653 at the latest, as in a codicil to his will dated that year he describes the Map and an accompanying compass as having been “taken both by an englishe comanderâ€. Perhaps Selden acquired it from an East India Company trader who took it from another European, Japanese, or Chinese vessel in the lawless conditions of the South China Sea, but the East India Company records make no mention of it. |
Somewhat unconvincing since the East India Company, whose trading relations with China were restricted to the periphery, mainly Canton, is unlikely to have had a map of the country.
| Striking in both size and appearance, the Map was kept on permanent display in the Anatomy School and is noted in a list of the School’s contents that was prepared by its Keeper, the antiquary and diarist Thomas Hearne, in 1721. |
Thomas Hearne was an antiquary and publisher of "many medieval English chronicles and other important historical texts" whom we are currently investigating for forgery (e.g. his copy of a manuscript, Vita Edwardi Secundi, provenance unknown).
The provenance of the Selden Map is perfunctory as is often the case with documents suddenly turning up on library shelves
| Although it was never lost sight of, its importance lay undiscovered until January 2008, when it was examined by the American scholar Robert Batchelor who noticed two features that distinguish it sharply from all Chinese maps that had been produced hitherto. |
Anyway this map throws up several conundrums. Firstly
| The depiction of China itself is not the purpose of the map, and is copied from a standard printed map of the period. |
and
| The second is the presence of shipping routes with compass bearings radiating from the port of Quanzhou on the coast of Fujian Province to all the areas covered by the Map, which charted the commercial world as no map, whether European or Chinese, had done before. It is thus the earliest example of Chinese merchant cartography, unique in not being a product of the imperial bureaucracy. It indicates the extent of China’s intercourse with the rest of the world at a time when it was generally supposed to have been isolated. |
which presumably indicates the map might not be a Chinese production and not from the period suggested
In any event it appears to be sui generis
| A third feature of the Map became apparent during the course of the conservation work that was undertaken following its discovery. When the old backing was removed, the main sea routes, identically drawn, were found on the reverse, showing not only that this was a first draft, but that the map was being drawn by systematic geometric techniques. It is the first Chinese map to be produced in this way, and its use of voyage data obtained from a magnetic compass and distances calculated from the number of watches is a technique with no western parallel. |
It transpires that the map is thought not to have been used by seafarers after all... presumed to have belonged to some rich merchant.
| Unfortunately, it is not known exactly when and where the map was drawn, or who drew it and for what purpose. Recent scholarship suggests that it was probably produced in the early seventeenth century by a Chinese, as Chinese sources are used for the place-names on the Map and also the shipping routes; the compiler was probably based in Southeast Asia, as the Map’s depiction of that area was to remain the most accurate for another two centuries. It is elaborately decorated with landscapes and plants, and was almost certainly produced for reference in the house of a rich merchant rather than for use at sea. |
http://seldenmap.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Wiki notes that the map was dismissed by Edmund Halley, Royal Astronomer from 1720 until his death in 1742.
| As the earliest surviving Chinese merchant map of East Asia, it has been recognized as one of the Treasures of the Bodleian. The map itself has no title, and the "Selden Map of China" was chosen by David Helliwell as curator of Chinese collections at the Bodleian. ... it was largely relegated to the status of a curiosity after Edmund Halley dismissed its accuracy.[4] There is no firm documentary evidence for the date or location of the map's composition or its whereabouts before 1653 |
If Halley examined the map in the Bodleian, Thomas Hearne (graduate of St Edmunds Hall, Oxford) might have been present, being the Assistant Keeper at the Bodleian Library. He worked on their catalogue and by 1712 was appointed Second Keeper and remained librarian until 1716 when he was forced to resign (as a non-juror).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Hatty, you were tasked with discovering whether Voltaire was gay. Just a gentle reminder. Perhaps I'd better throw that one open. Yes, all right, the map is a minor brilliancy of yours. It may hold the world record for the number of word records contained within a single artefact.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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There may be a clue to the provenance of the Chinese map. Susan Cotton, Robert Cotton's daughter, married Charles Grey, 7th Earl of Kent, and John Seldon was steward to their son, the 8th earl. Whether the map had been in the Cotton Library or not isn't clear since no-one appears to have mentioned it before Seldon's bequest to the Bod.
| Selden's studies were, even in his early days in London, not confined to the law. As early as 1605 he had made the acquaintance of Ben Jonson, Camden, and probably of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton [q. v.] the antiquary, who soon offered Selden the hospitality of his house in Palace Yard, and made him free of his invaluable library. Probably no event was so important in determining the course of Selden's studies. |
I don't know what 'steward' means exactly but in Seldon's case it sounds like a senior, even confidential, post. At any rate he was well remunerated for his efforts
Selden doubtless derived part of his ample means from his employment as steward of the Earl of Kent and from the liberality of the countess. At their country seat at Wrest in Bedfordshire he invariably spent his vacations. After the earl died, in 1639, Selden continued to manage the estate of the dowager countess. By a deed of 6 July 1648 she gave to Selden (in the event of her dying without issue, which happened) an interest for his life and twenty-one years after in her estates in the counties of Leicester and Warwick, and by her will in 1649 she gave to him all her personal estate, including leaseholds. At some date not ascertained he took up his residence in her town mansion, a large house with a garden, called the Carmelite or White Friars, situate a short distance east of the Temple.
Aubrey repeats a story, which is probably false, that Selden married the countess, but never acknowledged the fact till after her death, which took place in 1651. Her mansion he speaks of, not without pride, as 'Museum meum Carmeliticum' (De Synedr. lib. iii. c. 14, s. 9). It contained his Greek marbles, his Chinese map and compass, his curiosities in crystal, marble, and pearl, his cabinets and cases, all indicated by letters, and, above all, his incomparable library. Selden lived in considerable style (he leaves legacies to four men described as his servants); he was never without learned company, and, though personally temperate, he kept a liberal table. |
This would account for Seldon's collection of manuscripts and other valuable stuff though I can't help feeling slightly uneasy about the countess's will.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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We join the Countess and her faithful Seldon in the drawing room.
M'Lady Countess: Ah, Seldon, is that you? Do come closer, my eyesight isn't what it used to be. What have you got for me?
Seldon: M'lady, it's just the routine housekeeping. Quite a few trade person's bills to pay this week I'm afraid. Dreadfully tiresome, so I won't bore you with the details. If you could just sign the bottom of each, I promise I won't keep you long.
M'Lady Countess: Ah, Seldon, what would I do without you? |
M'Lady signs everything,
Seldon exits stage left (with a quiet snigger to himself).
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