Footnotes on Friday

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In Regency England, what was a curate? What is a solicitor?

The lawyer writes the gentleman’s will while the curate acts as a witness.

My editor questioned a couple of terms in my book Jackie’s Climb, because she’d seen them in a different context. Here’s my answer, written into the author’s notes, in case other people have the same concerns. The question? Did the Anglican church at the time have curates? And what did they do? And should I have said attorney instead of solicitor?

In the Regency era Anglican church, a curate was an ordained minister of any age who was paid by the vicar to assist him in the parish.

A post as vicar of a parish was called a living, because it guaranteed a fixed amount of property or income (which the vicar would live on). This income came from tithes paid to the holder of the living, either great tithes or small tithes. A great tithe was 10% of all cereal grown or all wool shorn in the parish, and a small tithe was 10% of all other agricultural produce.

A vicar with a big parish, or one who simply didn’t want to do the work, could employ a curate to help him out.

In England, to this day, practitioners of law are either solicitors or barristers. A solicitor is a legal practitioner who undertakes a variety of legal work, and also prepares cases for a barrister. A barrister is a legal practitioner who pleads cases in court. In New Zealand, where I live, most lawyers are both.

In England prior to the 19th century, the term solicitor was used only for those who prepared cases for Chancery. A legal practitioner who prepared other cases was an attorney at law, or public attorney. This is the term that has prevailed in the United States, but in England during the 19th century it fell into disrepute because of the behaviour of private attorneys. A private attorney was anyone with the power to act on behalf of another person–to this day, we talk about “power of attorney”.

I could have chosen the term lawyer, which simply meant (and means) one whose profession is suits in court or client advice on legal rights. Solicitor is more specific.

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Titles and inheritance

I saw it again, today. The idea that a duke can decide not to leave his title to his eldest legitimate son. Wrong! That isn’t true, even today.

He might be able to strip the title of any unentailed property and leave that to someone else. But the title and the entailed property do not belong to the duke (or other peer), but are held in trust for his descendants.

 

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The lady with the wheelbarrow

My next newsletter subscriber story is in part inspired by a true story that I read many years ago. A man emigrated from England to New Zealand, and then sent for his wife and children to join him. However, when his wife arrived in Dunedin, New Zealand, her husband was not there to meet the ship.

The place he had settled was 120 or more miles away, through rough country trails, in Southland. Our intrepid wife was not defeated, however. She purchased a wheelbarrow, loaded her luggage and the younger children into it, and set off.

History records that she joined him on the farm he was carving out of the wilderness, went on to have more children, and lived to a ripe old age, matriarch of a clan of children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.

The enduring memory I have of her, though, is of the woman who did not allow a small matter of four (or was it five) children and 120 miles to stop her, but simply looked for a solution and put it into action. They were tough women, those pioneers.

Maggie’s wheelbarrow tells the story not of a pioneer but of another type of woman, equally tough–a soldier’s wife who followed the drum with her husband. When my Maggie arrives in Southhampton with two children and a long way to go, she buys a wheelbarrow. I hope my subscribers enjoy her story as much as I enjoyed the original.

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Tam Lin and other such faery abduction stories, interpreted for the Regency era

My book Hold Me Fast has just gone up on preorder. It is a dark and gritty story, but the story that inspired Hold Me Fast lends itself to some sordid and heart-stopping detail. The story is Tam Lin (and all its variants), in which a faithful sweetheart is determined to rescue her beloved from the Faery.

I say “story” rather than “stories” because they are, in essence, the same tale told in different ways by different bards, poets, or story tellers. The Queen of the Faeries steals away a human to entertain her and her court. He is sometimes a musician, sometimes a poet, and sometimes both. He is always called some variant of the name Thomas. He becomes the Queen’s lover and remains with her for seven years. (In some stories, it is seven years in faery time, but much longer passes in the everyday world.)

In the tale of True Thomas, the Queen sends him home at the end of his time, with the “gift” that he cannot tell a lie.

In other versions, she plans to offer him to Hell to pay a tax owed by the faeries. Shortly before the tax falls due, he meets Janet (Margaret in some versions), who determines to rescue him. This involves pulling him from his horse during a midnight ride of the faery court and holding him while the Queen turns him into all sorts of dangerous and dire things.

When the Queen realizes she has lost her pet, she loses her temper still further, but her threats and ranting cannot now keep the two lovers apart. Tam (Tom) is saved from his fate and is back in the human world.

This is one of my favorite folk tales, and I wanted to do it justice. As soon as I began to think about the mechanics of Regency-era people with the underlying viciousness and cold-hearted hedonism of the faeries in the oldest tales, I knew I had a group of selfish entitled aristocratic men with too much money and too little conscience. And what is more likely than that a person in withdrawal from drug addiction is going to be changeable, near mindless, and dangerous?

By the way, I use the spelling faery, for the Fae of the old tales do not at all resemble the sweet creatures of more modern stories, with their butterfly wings, and their human-like lives and morals.

Hold Me Fast will be published on 19th September, and can be preordered from Amazon.