Footnotes on Friday

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Where viscounts came from

John Lord Beaumont, the first English viscount.

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll have realised that land is the fundamental building block of European nobility: particularly the province or county. The pivot point for understanding titles is what England calls an earl, whether they’re called some variation of ‘count’ or ‘jarl’ or ‘graf’ or some other term. Counts (or earls) ruled counties on behalf of the monarch. Marcher lords or marquises or margrafs ruled counties on the kingdom’s borders. Dukes ruled several counties.

When we get to viscount, we’re going the other way. The key part of the word is ‘vis’, from late Latin ‘vice’ meaning a deputy or substitute. Vicar comes from the same root word. In Carolingian times (in the empire of Charlemagne and his descendants), the vicecomites were officials appointed to exercise the powers of the comites (counts) who had delegated them to act. The man was a official who worked for the count (or higher official), just as the count was an official who worked for the king.

Vicecomes wasn’t, initially, a hereditary title, just a job title, as — for that matter — were the higher titles. Just as count became a hereditary title, in time, so did viscount.

France had hereditary viscounts  when it first began to differentiate itself from the Holy Roman Empire. The duchy of Normandy was divided into vicecomtes, ruled by vicecomes as deputies to the duke.

In England, the term vicecomes was applied to those who held the role of sherif, but the first hereditary title wasn’t applied until 1440, when John Lord Beaumont was created the first English viscount.

Other European countries retain equivalent titles. In Portugal and Spain, the rank is visconde, in France, vicomte, in Germany, the rank is burggraf.

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Stormy seas in a tall ship

What was it like, on a sailing ship that relied on human strength and skill to face the stormy oceans? No safety harnesses. No labour saving devices. In this video, sailors from an historic ship that sailed from England to Australia as late as the early 20th century look back 40 years to comment on the experience.

https://youtu.be/sUhKBZb7A7c

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Where earls came from

Earl is the oldest title still used today  for British nobility. Unlike the other two we’ve discussed, it hasn’t come down to us from a Roman military rank. Instead, it comes from the Scandinavian word for the highest nobility under the king: jarl.

The first jarls arrived in England under Canute, the Danish king of England, Denmark, and Norway. The Anglo-Saxon version of the term was eorl. Eorls governed shires, now called counties. That gives us the link with the equivalent  Roman-derived term from the Continent: count (the ruler of a county), although you’ll remember the Germans had a local term, graf.

Earls sat in the courts of each shire they ruled with the local bishop. After the Norman Conquest, they were restricted to one county each, and the official duties of government, military defense and justice became the responsibility of the sheriff. Earls were often sheriffs in their own counties. It doesn’t seem as if the jarls’ wives had a particular title, but the Normans introduced the French term, making a female earl or the wife of an earl a countess.

Whatever their other roles, earls held estates from the Crown as tenants in chief. In return, the earls owed the Crown their service, and in particular, they owed military service; they had to take their knights to fight for the Crown when asked. The estate descended to heirs of the body; that is, the earl’s children. In the early days, this meant the eldest son, if the earl had one, or the eldest daughter, if he had no sons. If the earldom (and the estate) descended to a woman, it would be held by her husband.

Until Edward III created his son Duke of Cornwall in 1337, ‘earl’ continued to be the highest English title. It’s now third, after duke and marquess.

By the late Middle Ages, the custom of primogeniture — male heirs only, was gradually taking over in England, but it continued in Scotland until the seventeenth century.

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Lighting London

‘The Blessed Effects of Gas Lights or a new method of Lighting as practised in Great Peter Street, London.’ Hand-coloured engraving published by S W Fores (50 Piccadilly, London) 10 November 1813. A humorous illustration of a group of men, a chair, floorboards and a dog being thrown upwards by an explosion from a gas pipe. Three men surround the blast exclaiming that gas smells, is poisonous and will kill many.

Until the 19th century, people going out at night needed strong moonlight, torches, or lanterns. In London, those enjoying an active social life would employ link boys with torches. The term derives from the word for the cotton tow (link) commonly used for the wick.

By the early 18th century, technology had progressed to oil lanterns, with fish oil and wicks. People carried lanterns, and some progressive businesses had a lantern hanging at their door to show that they were open. Certain types of business used red glass in their lantern, and to this day, areas where such businesses cluster are called red light districts.

In 1750, London installed a system of street lamps on important main thoroughfares. These were oil lamps, lit at dusk and dowsed at dawn by a lamplighter with a long brass pole with a flame on the end. To this day, London still has lamplighters (for their remaining 1,500 gas lamps). In 1760s, reflectors were added.

Oil lamps are supposed to have made the streets safer, though they gave little light and were as much as 65 yards apart. At least they were a bright point to aim for in the darkness, so perhaps lives were saved because fewer people strayed into dark alleys. Keep in mind the pools of deep shadow though, when you read of London prostitutes transacting their business up against a wall. It wasn’t necessarily the public display that we, accustomed to our never-dark cities, might imagine.

By the early nineteenth century, street lamps and lighted window displays had banished the worst of the night from the most public places.

The shop-keepers of London are of infinite service to the rest of the inhabitants by their liberal use of the Patent Lamp, to shew their commodities during the long evenings of winter. Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London During the Eighteenth Century, James Peller Malcolm, 1810,  P 383,

The first gas lights were on 13 posts set up in Pall Mall in 1807, and used several times during the next couple of years to demonstrate the feasibility of gas lighting. The pipes were made from musket barrels, and all thirteen lamps could be lit by sending a spark down the pipes.

As you’ll see from the cartoon that heads this post, people were skeptical, but by 1812, the first gas company had been approved, and plans were underway to light London. Westminster had lamps by 1813, Westminster Bridge by December of that year, and Piccadilly in 1814.

By 1823, 40,000 gas lamps covered 215 miles of streets. Gas lights were ten times brighter than oil, which still left some dark patches, but was at least an improvement.

Electric were still nearly 70 years away, but the darkness in which crime flourished had been driven back, at least a little.

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Where marquesses came from

A castle on the Welsh marches.

The title ‘marquess’ (or sometimes ‘marquis’) reaches all the way back to the Carolingian monarchs, who appointed royal officials as military governors for their border provinces. (The Carolingians were the dynasty founded by Charles Martel that ruled much of medieval Europe. Charlemange, was one, as were the Kings of France and of the Holy Roman Empire when those two territories survived Charlemange’s Empire.)

These border provinces were called ‘mark lands’ or ‘marches’. The word was Germanic, from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘edge’ or ‘boundary’.

The original Carolingian title for this military governor was markgraf, graf being the word for count. Because keeping the borders safe was a huge part of keeping the kingdom safe, the markgrafs were the most competent lords available, ranked higher than other grafs, and only a little lower than dukes.

The title came down to all the countries that the Carolingians once ruled, or that were influenced by Carolingian rulers. To this day, some provinces in Europe carry evidence of once being borderlands, including La Marche in France, Ostmark in Austria, and the entire country of Denmark (the borderland of the Danes).

As you can see from the table below, the title pops up in some form or other all over Europe.

It was imported to England in the 14th century. Up until then, the crown had appointed marcher lords. These were earls who governed land on the border with Wales (the Welsh marches) and Scotland (the Scottish marches — the monarchs of both Scotland and England relied on their marcher lords to keep the borders safe). Just as the margraves of the continent were more powerful than other counts, the marcher lords were more powerful than most earls, and governed more than one county.

The term marchis (as it was then) was introduced from France in the late 14th century. Shades of the old marcher lords survive in the English name for a female holder of the title or wife to the holder of the title: marchioness.

The French spelling became marquis, and that was the form most used in Scotland, but the usual English spelling is marquess, and that is now used today for marquesses of the peerage of Scotland and Ireland, as well as England.

Some sources say that marquess was the usual spelling in England by the 16th century, but many English marquises were spelling their title the old way all the way through to the end of the 18th century. I’ve heard quite a bit of discussion about which is correct for English lords of the regency period. In 1802, Debrett’s and other peerage books used marquis. By 1828, they’d changed to marquess. I’ve found both spellings in newspapers of that transition period.

That being the case, I’ve kept my Aldridge as Marquis of Aldridge, since he was born in 1780 and was a marquis from his cradle. His son Jonny will need to become a marquess, I think, in line with the change that had taken place by 1828, not long after his birth.

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Recreating the 1814 Frost Fair

Here’s something to watch for — photographs of the 1814 Frost Fair by Julia Fullerton-Batten, taken as part of her Old Father Thames historical reconstruction project.

Here’s what Fullerton-Batten says about the Frost Fair part of the project.

Frost Fairs had taken place several times before on the Thames but the one in 1814  was the last to take place before a new London Bridge was built, improving the flow of the water and stopping the freezing.  In 1814 the Thames froze between the  first London Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. Thick ice formed from early February lasting for four days and an impromptu festival took place. Londoners stood on the frozen Thames eating ginger bread and drinking gin. Oxen were roasted over roaring fires. There was entertainment – hoopla, skittles, fire-eaters, wrestling. Temporary pubs did a roaring trade and drink encouraged people to dance. The ice was even thick enough to support printing presses churning out souvenirs and an elephant walking across it.  ‘The 1814 Frost Fair’ will be an epic story and will complete the first phase of my long-term Thames project. It will also be my most ambitious story-telling to-date.

Read more at:

Julia Fullerton-Batten. Old Father Thames


https://phmuseum.com/news/recreating-historical-stories-of-the-river-thames
https://www.hasselblad.com/stories/the-tales-of-old-father-thames-julia-fullerton-batten/

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Where dukes came from

The genre I write in is infested with dukes. They hold the same place in Georgian, Regency, and Victorian romance as billionaires do in contemporary romance. However unlikely our multitudes of young handsome dukes and billionaires might be, they represent a certain type of story — one in which all the power lies with the hero, but still the heroine wins. Because of love. It is a story with a timeless appeal, obviously, but I thought a few facts might be fun.

The title comes from the Latin word dux, meaning a military leader responsible for a sizeable territory, and is found in the countries that were part of the Roman Empire. It was adopted by the barbarians of Germany, and after the Roman Empire fell the dukes kept ruling, either in their own lands or on behalf of a king.

In Germany, eleven sovereign duchies survived into the twentieth century. In France, four duchies were almost independent of the Crown in the early feudal period, but were later absorbed back into the Crown. The ancien regime also appointed dukes who were part of the French peerage rather than hereditary sovereigns: first royal princes, and later illegitimate sons and royal favourites of all kinds. More than 30 of these titles survived into the late 20th century. In Italy, the title is still widespread, not only as a result of the territorial duchies, six of which lasted into modern times, but Popes, Kings and Emperors could — and did — bestow the title.  In Spain, the territorial duchies disappeared with the Moorish conquest, but when the title was revived, it was, as in France and Italy, awarded to royal princes and royal favourites, even most recently as the 1940s. Portugal suffered the same conquest, and likewise revived the title. Fewer Portugese dukes were created than Spanish ones, though.

Britain, with whom our genre is chiefly concerned, imported the title with the Duke of Normandy, but it was Edward III who created the first English dukes. In the 14th and 15th century, all creations had royal blood, but after that it was increasingly given outside the royal family. The same timeframe and devolvement to the wider peerage applied to Scotland.

There were never many dukes in the United Kingdom. In 1814, there were 25 non-royal dukes holding 28 ducal titles:  17 English, 7 Scots only, 1 Irish. Today, there are 26 holding 31 titles. Plus the various sons and grandsons of monarchs, of course, but such historical figures are not available for us to marry off to our heroines.

Ah well. We can always bring one in from the continent. They had a few spares, it seems.

 

UPDATE: following on from some of the comments, I’ve looked up the dukes alive in 1814. Excluding the Duke of Wellington, who was a new creation in that year,  four-fifths were 40 or over in 1814, and half were 50 or over. All but two were married in 1814. One of those never married, and one (Leinster, who succeeded aged 13 and was 23 in 1814) married a couple of years later. So debutantes of the 1814 season had, on the face of it, two dukes in their twenties looking for brides, one Irish and one not interested, as it turned out.

Most of the dukes around in 1814 had already married while still heirs, and nearly all of them married in their twenties. Eight married after they succeeded to the peerage. Seven of these were children at the time of succession. One was 69 at succession and was 80 when his only son was born. I’ll bet there’s a story there.

 

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Nuns, oaths, and penalties

Daniel O’Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, stood for parliament and refused to take the Oath of Supremacy.

I’m a purist when it comes to historical fact. Not that I get every single detail right myself, but when I hit something in a story that is factually incorrect, it takes me right out of the story and spoils my enjoyment. Sometimes, as with calling a duchess ‘Lady Surname’ or a duke ‘my lord’, it’s such a fundamental part of the culture of the peerage of historical times that I find it hard to forgive and keep reading. Sometimes, it seems to me that what I’m seeing is leakage from modern assumptions.

Recently, I’ve read a couple of stories that completely ignore the status of Catholics at the time (and nearly everyone that wasn’t Church of England, but in this case, Catholics). Set in the early Regency, one had the heroine sent to a convent (in England) for three years as a punishment and the other had the heroine taking refuge with some nuns who were running an orphanage. Catholic nuns were out, because before the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, Catholic convents were outlawed, and before the Victorian era, Anglican convents didn’t exist.

Being a Catholic between 1558 and 1829 meant penalties, punishments, and various exclusions. The details varied from monarch to monarch and from year to year, as a succession of statutes tried to keep all but Anglicans from the public life of the nation. Charles Butler, a lawyer who was the first Catholic to be appointed King’s Council after the 1829 Act, wrote that the law meant Catholics:

…were deprived of many of the rights of English subjects, and the common rights of mankind. They were prohibited, under the most severe penalties, from exercising any act of religion, according to their own mode of worship.

They were subject to heavy punishments for keeping schools, for educating their children in their own religious principles at home ; and to punishments still more severe for sending them for education to foreign establishments.

They were incapacitated from acquiring landed property by descent or purchase, from serving in his majesty’s armies and navies, from all offices, civil or military, from practicing the law or physic, and from being guardians and executors.

They were liable to the ignominious and oppressive annual fine of a double land-tax, deprived of the constitutional right of voting for members of parliament, and disqualified from setting in house of commons.

Their peers were deprived of their hereditary seats in the house of lords, and their clergy, for exercising their religious functions, were exposed to the heaviest penalties and punishments and, in some cases, to death.

A popular mechanism for separating the Anglicans from everyone else was a series of tests and oaths that people had to take when joining the armed forces, taking public office, or joining a trade corporation. The Test Acts required people to do something to show they were practicing members of the Church of England: from 1672, this meant submitting a certificate that confirmed they’d taken Holy Communion according to Anglican rites. The oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration required the oath taker to swear allegiance to the monarch as supreme governor of the Church of England. They had, in other words, to say that the monarch was the highest spiritual authority of all.

Sometimes, the oath was part of the process of joining a profession, and refusing to take it meant you couldn’t get into your preferred trade, the army, the navy, parliament, or local government. At other times, a local justice could require anyone over the age of 18 to take the oath, and those who wouldn’t could be punished for high treason, which meant:

  • drawing, hanging and quartering
  • corruption of blood, by which heirs became incapable of inheriting honours and offices, and
  • forfeiture of all property.

So no nuns, then.

UPDATE: On the Historical Novel Society FaceBook page, one commenter has pointed out that the Discalced Carmelites, an order of contemplative nuns, arrived back in England in 1794. They kept a very low profile, wore secular clothes, and lived in hired houses supported by local benefactors. But nuns were in England before the date I gave, even if they were outlawed. They were hiding and living the Carmelite life of prayer, silence, and solitude. They weren’t running orphanages or providing secure prisons for recalcitrant aristocratic daughters. I stand by my assumption that the plot lines I read were ridiculous, but I have to concede that there were at least three tiny communities of nuns in England during the Regency. I just love the way history never fails to surprise!