Footnotes on Friday

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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

Duke of Argyll, 1760s
Duke of York 1790s
Duke of Somerset 1690s

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!

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The widow’s portion

This is Part 3 of a series I began ages ago and never finished.

Part 1 was about entails

Part 2 was about wills

In this part, I want to look at dowries, jointures, and dowers. (I’ve avoided the term portion, because it is used for both dowries and jointures.

Dowries and dowers

Women of the propertied classes expected to have a dowry — land, or at least a sum of cash. The theory was that the dowry a woman brought with her into marriage provided  the income for the cost of keeping her in the same comfort as she’d enjoyed before the marriage. The principal (or the land) was often part of the dowry paid when her daughters married. In theory at least, the woman had to be party to anything done with her dowry, and could claim the dowry back when her husband died. Of course, if the land had been sold or the money all spent, that wasn’t going to go down so well.

A dower was originally the wife’s right to a third of her husband’s estate when he died. From at least the 12th century, the right to ‘thirds’ or the ‘dower’ was common law, and that continued to be the practice when the man left no will. It wasn’t hers outright, but she had it for life or until she married again. By the 19th century, in the propertied classes, the remnant of this practice was land and buildings known as the dower property or dower house.

Jointures

In time, the payment of a jointure came to replace the dower. The couple made an agreement (a settlement) that exempted the estate from the dower in return for stating how much the woman would receive if she survived her husband, as well as what would go to the children. The jointure was usually anchored on the dowry, and was generally paid out by the heir as a yearly amount (or its cash value, if the dowry was in land). The heir would need to pay the yearly amount (typically 10% of the dowry) until the woman’s death, at which point the principal was divided up among her surviving children.

The arrangement was generally regarded as providing more security for all parties. The estate didn’t need to come up with a large sum of money all at once, which might be impossible. If the heir couldn’t pay, he might lose everything and so would the widow. On the other hand, if widow lived long enough, a dowry might run out, but the jointure would continue.

Marriage settlements

The settlements contained more that the financial details about providing for a widow. They specified what was to be done with the wife’s dowry, what her discretionary income (pin money) would be, and what part of her dowry would go to her children, as well as her income after her husband’s death. The law said a husband had to provide his wife with a home, clothing, and food. Pin money was meant to allow her a little extra she could spend on luxuries without answering to her husband.

The father might also settle funds on the children from his estate, and the settlement would state the total amount.

Settlements for the landed and wealthy could be very complex. At this higher level of society, the sum of money for the wife’s use was paid to a third party. Settlements among the simpler folk tended to be much simpler. Dr Amy Erikson found that up to 10% of probate accounts included marriage settlements, and a quarter of these were for less than thirteen pounds. The two types of settlement found in these less complex situations both specified lump sums; one to be paid to the woman if she survived the husband, and one to the children of a wife’s former marriage.

As an aside

I’ve found another research rabbit hole in investigating Dr Erikson. Here’s the abstract for an article I need to get hold of: Coverture and Capitalism.

Most capital in this period was both accumulated and transferred by means of marriage and inheritance, so it stands to reason that the laws governing marriage and inheritance played a role in structuring the economy. English property law was distinctive in two respects: first, married women under coverture were even more restricted than in the rest of Europe; second, single women enjoyed a position unique in Europe as legal individuals in their own right, with no requirement for a male guardian. I suggest these peculiarities had two consequences for the development of capitalism. First, the draconian nature of coverture necessitated the early development of complex private contracts and financial arrangements, accustoming people to complicated legal and financial concepts and establishing a climate in which the concept of legal security for notional concepts of property (the bedrock of capitalism) became commonplace. Second, without the inhibiting effect of legal guardianship, England had up to fifty per cent more people able to move capital purely because that market included the unmarried half of the female population in addition to the male population. [Erikson: 2005]

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Diversity in historical England

 

I write historicals set in and around Regency England, which I try to ground in research. As a English-descended New Zealander, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, and a middle-class straight married woman, I need to always remember that the society I write about was considerably more diverse than most people realise. Given my own family history, I always include people with disabilities. I don’t even have to think about that. I do have to remember the rest.

Right through recorded history, England has had people of different ethnicities, races, religions, abilities, and genders (in the modern sense). English society has always been diverse — not always tolerant, but always diverse. Lack of religious tolerance has been a strong force behind many civil disruptions and wars. Lack of tolerance for same sex attraction and other non-cis gender behaviours led to some very nasty laws (but only when the ‘offenders’ were male). But lack of tolerance for ethnic and colour differences seems to have been a Regency and Victorian invention, perhaps prompted by the desire to justify the slave trade and the exploitations of the Raj. Just look at the image above, or think of Shakespeare, who was horrid about Jews but made a hero of Othello.

Standard historical romances tend to be about white Anglican (often only nominally Anglican) protagonists, unless the author is themselves a person of colour. Disability is rare in such romances, and even then, usually limited to PTSD or a scar. Except in LGBT romances, those who are not heterosexual are usually either villains or victims, there for the main protagonists to overcome or to rescue. Of course, a deep treasure trove of historical romances are not standard at all. But this blog is not about them.

History doesn’t support this the standard view. Even in the ton, the top level of English society, the story wasn’t nearly as monochromatic — or as dull.

As regards race, England even had two queens who, today, we would call black (although contemporary accounts confirm that they were, in fact, brown-skinned). Queen Philippa, the wife of Edward III, was the first, way back in medieval times. some historians believe her son, the Black Prince, was so called because he looked like his mother. Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, was the maternal ancestress of today’s British royalty and, through her granddaughter Queen Victoria, most of the royalty of Europe. The colonial and expansionist ambitions of England contributed, too, as just one example shows.

In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarroll, surprised him every bit as much as Kirkpatrick tended to surprise his English visitors: “She is very fair,” wrote Khan, “and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India.” He added: “The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from 16 to 19 years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans.” A great many such mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent. [https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/dec/09/britishidentity.india]

We have clear evidence in the court records, even if you ignore all the gossip, that same sex attraction was no less common then than now.

As for religion, anyone who wanted to join the army or hold a public office had to at least pretend to be an Anglican, but at least five of the great families were Catholic anyway, and other religions flourished, though if aristocrats were not Anglican they mostly kept quiet about it.

In broader society, we know that different races were present, and that they mixed (despite efforts to the contrary). Many people who consider themselves white might be very surprised if they could see back to the multi-cultural marriage in their ancestry. The same with faith. England had large numbers of Jews from medieval times, and large numbers of Muslims from at least the 18th century.

And disability, of course, can happen to anyone.

The challenge for me is to write about a diverse culture that is true to the times and respectful of people who are not me. I constantly fear I’ll get it wrong. I fully expect to be accused of tokenism. I do my research, I talk to people who would, two hundred years ago, have been in the communities I write about. I keep trying.

 

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Dressing a gentleman

In many ways, men’s evening dress in the Regency was a throw-back to day and evening wear a generation earlier, with 18th century evening clothes more ornate than those worn during the day, but similar in terms of the actual items of apparel. So as you watch the following video, think of your favourite Regency hero or villain getting ready for a formal ball or an evening at Almacks.

The following is about dressing a regency cavalry officer. Thank you, priorattire. You’ll need to click through to YouTube to view it.

https://youtu.be/pSksa0RZdio

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How to use the wheel on a sailing ship

I’ve been bringing my heroine and her entourage from South Africa to England in the latest draft of Unkept Promises, which has meant a lot of research about the type of ship, its size and configuration, what type of accommodation Mia might have found herself in, where she and children might be out of the way but also out in the air during the day, and all sorts of other things that I never mention in the book (but that I need to know so I don’t make any egregious errors).

At one point, she goes off to talk to the ship’s captain, and I set out to find out where the wheel was on a brig-rigged schooner. Which led me to wondering how the wheel worked, which led me to this YouTube clip. You’re welcome.

(The maker of the video notes that he didn’t include the use of the sails, a major factor in steering a sailing ship, as any yachtsman knows.)