Footnotes on Friday

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Please, please, Mr Postmaster

I’ve written before about the Penny Post in the context of Christmas Cards, but I find the whole development of mail and postage in the United Kingdom interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been researching foreign mail – letters sent from the United Kingdom to overseas countries or vice versa.

In the beginning, such mail was very haphazard and unpredictable, sent by whatever ship happened to be available. We’re talking sailing ships, so too much wind and your letter could end up at the bottom of the sea; too little and it isn’t going anywhere. Other hazards included pirates and enemy ships.

Even under the best of conditions, transport was slow, relying on navigation techniques that only slowly improved over the years before the invention of the chronometer, as well as prevailing winds and ocean currents.

Sending letters overseas

A letter from England to Australia in the early years of British settlement might take eight months or a year to reach its destination, and if it required an answer, the original request is going to be at least 18 months in the past before the response arrived.

By the nineteenth century, when most of my stories are set, you had several options for sending letters from England to places overseas.

  1. You could deliver it to a post office, pay their fee, and leave it to them.
  2. You could ask a private business with overseas links to send your letter through their system.
  3. If you lived in a seaport, and if a ship in that port was heading in the right direction, you could ask the captain to take your letter for you.
  4. If you lived in London, you could go to coffee houses where ship captains met with merchants to bargain for cargoes, and — for a small fee — add your letter to a mail sack going to the right place. The coffee house would bargain with the appropriate captain.

Sending a letter from overseas

In many parts of England’s far flung empire, there was no postal system, but any ship’s captain would accept mail for ports along his route. With no regular service, the length of time before a letter arrived could not be known.

Say you were travelling to Cape Town, like the heroine of my next Redepenning novel. Mia might write a letter to her English relatives from the Canary Islands, and leave it to be sent back to England. But the next ship might be going to England via the Caribbean and then Canada, and her letter would therefore take the long way home.

From early in the 18th century, the Royal Mail had its own ships, called Packet Boats, to cover the route between England and Ireland, and England and Europe. The Royal Mail could also send mail on private ships, under the Ship Letter Act of 1799. The captains of such ships had a legal obligation to hand letters to the Postmaster at their first port of arrival in England, and were paid a small sum for doing so.

It’s a far cry from the instant gratification of email and direct messaging, but be patient, and it worked. Mostly. Eventually.

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The Georgian population boom

Throughout early modern history, Britain’s population changed at about the same speed as the rest of Europe. A really bad epidemic of the plague would drop the total numbers for a while, but on the whole there was a gradual increase, averaging less than one percent a year up until 1625, then remaining stable for 125 years, then increasing at a slow rate again to take 150 years to double.

Britain followed the pattern until the 1700s. In 1714, George 1, the first of the Hanoverians, came to rule over a country of 5.25 million. In 1760, the population had grown to 6.15 million, a healthy 17 percent at a time population growth in most of Europe was static. But the next 50 years would see a massive change. In 1815, the population was 10.25; almost double the 1714 figure. France in the same period saw a 35 percent increase, and the Dutch figures remained much the same.

Why did the population grow so fast?

Scholars give two reasons why Britain’s growth was faster than that of other nearby countries.

The first was a drop in mortality. Britain had more people because fewer of them died. From early in the eighteenth century, Britain began imposing quarantines on imports and ships sailing from places known to have the plague or other highly feared diseases. Innoculation against smallpox helped, too. People still died of typhus, cholera, and other diseases, but the number of deaths in each epidemic dropped dramatically.

The second was the age at marriage. Before the eighteenth century, the mainly agriculture-based workforce would put off getting married until they could afford a cottage and a small piece of land. Average age at marriage for women was 26 in the 17th century, and for men it was 28.  Fertility drops (on average) after 30, so not marrying until after 26 means fewer children overall.

The enclosure acts changed all that. The biggest landowners scooped up all the land, and people who would have been small-holders had to work for wages or migrate to the new jobs in city manufactories. Our working couples no longer had a reason to wait, so they married earlier and faced the challenges of finding work together. By the 19th century, the average age of marriage was 23 for women and 25 for men. (Not in the aristocracy. They married for different reasons, sometimes as young as 13 or 14.)

Since women now had a longer fertile period in marriage, and less chance of dying of disease, the number of children per couple increased.

In the next 150 years, decreasing infant and maternal mortality meant the British population doubled every 40 years, providing factory workers for industrial revolution and upsetting theorists like Malthus, who thought the upwards curve was the way things had always been, and that it would continue.

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The more things change, the more they remain the same

I came across a comparison between the risks of travelling by stage coach versus steam packets. With the recent automated car accident fresh in my mind, and having often been told how much safer air travel is than road travel, I thought I’d share it. Does any of it sound familiar?

If the number of persons who have been killed, maimed, and disfigured for life, in consequence of stage-coach mishaps, could be ascertained, since the first establishment of steam-packets in this country, and on the other hand, the number who have been similarly unfortunate by steam boilers bursting, we should find that the stage-coach proportion would be in the ration of ten to one!

A solitary “blow up” of a steam-packet is “noised and proclaimed” from the Land’s End to the other extremity of the island; while hundreds of coach-accidents, and many of them fatal, occur, which are never heard of beyond the village, near to which the casualty takes place, or the neighbouring ale-house.

These affairs it is to the interest of the proprietors to “hush up,” by means of a gratuity to the injured, rather than have their property ruined by an exposure in a court of justice. Should a poor man have a leg or an arm broken, through the carelessness of a drunken coachman, his poverty prevents his having recourse to law.

Justice, in these cases, nine times in ten, is entirely out of the question, and an arrangement, between him and the proprietors, is easily effected; the unfortunate fellow, rather receiving fifty or a hundred pounds “hush money” than bring his action, when, perhaps from some technical informality in the proceedings (should he find a lawyer willing to act for him, being poor), he would be nonsuited, with all the costs of both parties on his own shoulders, and be, moreover, ruined for ever, in both purse and person.

 

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Nurturing a physical connection to history

A few weeks ago, Caroline Warfield and I, and our husbands, revisited the Buried Village, the location of Forged in Fire, my story in last year’s Bluestocking Belles’ anthology. Long ago, it was Te Wairoa, a thriving farming community set up by an enthusiastic

missionary. When Spencer set up his ideal community in 1852, he divided each allotment by fencing, and he used poplar poles, as his posts, pounded into the ground.

Later, after European farming methods depleted the soil, the Maori inhabitants found a more lucrative crop than wheat: tourists. Te Wairoa was the starting point for a visit to the Pink and White Terraces, acres of thermal ponds cascading down hillsides above a lake that could be reached only by a boat journey across Lake Tarawera.

That all ended on the night of the Tarawera eruption. By the end of the four-hour eruption, the Pink and White terraces were gone, and six villages around Lake Tarawera were wiped off the face of the earth with all their inhabitants. Te Wairoa, slightly sheltered behind a hill,  was still buried 1.5 metres deep in volcanic ash, and survivors needed to dig themselves, or be dug, out.

Over the next 126 years, those buried fence posts grew into magnificent 40 foot poplar trees. In 2010, however, they began to fall. The owners decided they were a health risk, and removed them all.

When we visited last year, we were impressed to see the mighty trunks sprouting again, and this year, we asked if we could take cuttings.

They’re on the shady side of our house: nine small cuttings in pots we are keeping damp, as poplars prefer. I hope one or more grows, a clone of the tree that was initially cut to make fence posts, that survived a volcanic eruption, that grew to shelter an archaeological dig, that was cut down when its size and age made it unsafe, and that grew again. Life is resilient.

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Horse racing in Georgian England

Writing stories set more than a hundred and fifty years ago, especially stories with characters who have a penny or two, means writing about horses — if only to mention them in passing. Many of my books include journeys, so ‘in passing’ has meant researching carriage and riding horses, including how they were bred and stabled. Along the way, I somehow managed to end up with at least two heroes who were horse breeders: almost the only ‘trade’ a gentleman could engage in without attracting social censure.

This week, I went a step further, when a subscriber-only story for my newsletter turned out to be about the heiress to a racing stud, whose marital fate will be decided by a horse race.

But what kind of horse race in the years just after Waterloo? What were the rules? How long was the course likely to be? Even, as it turned out, what might a villain slip to a horse to prevent it from running, and what symptoms of poisoning would the horse show? (Probably night shade, my vet and author friend Lizzi Tremayne and I decided.)

Here are some of the sources I consulted when writing The Fifth Race, which will be available in the newsletter I send tomorrow.

18th Century foundation of the Jockey Club, and silk colours by owner

Going to the races

Horse racing on the Georgian index

Regina Jeffers on Thoroughbred Horse Racing

Training the 18th century racehorse

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The smart widow’s country carriage

When I was writing the first, and even the second, draft of The Realm of Silence, I called the carriage my heroine is driving up and down the Great North Road, to and from Edinburgh, a phaeton.

A high-perch phaeton for the sporting man around town — far too dashing for my widow, and built for show, not for comfort.

I knew a phaeton was a round-town vehicle, and that I’d be smacked by those who know better, so last week I went hunting for a four-wheel two horse carriage that a dashing, fashionable, but not scandalous widow might use when travelling. (The children and servants are in a travelling coach, but Susan prefers to drive herself as much as possible. As who wouldn’t.)

The story required that the carriage had room enough for two people in comfort and three at a squeeze, with one of them driving. I allowed for space behind for a servant, and a fold up top against the weather. And I found the carriage I needed, allowing for the fact that each carriage would have been custom-made, so Susan’s did not have to fit some factory production process, but could be made to her preferences (and my story).

A cabriolet — later, many of them became taxis, giving us the term ‘cab’

I’ve found some neat resources, which I share at the bottom of this post, and some interesting information.

I knew that phaetons came in high-perch and low, and that ladies might drive the later without risk to their reputation, but probably not the former. Cabriolets were an Italian invention that reached England late in the 18th century — another sporty vehicle, but this one entirely suitable for a lady, low slung between the single wheels, and pulled by a single horse. But, again, not what I was looking for.

A phaeton from later in the century, after the name began to be applied to a vehicle with four wheels.

But the field was vast. Carriages, even more than custom-made cars today, varied according to the needs and tastes of the owner around certain defined features. Number of wheels. Number of passengers. Seat for a driver-groom or not. Type of axle, wheel, and spring. Height from the ground. Open or closed. Rain cover or no cover. One horse, two, or up to six. And lots more.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, one enterprising coach builder created a four-wheel vehicle with some of the features of a cabriolet, and some of a phaeton. This hybrid cabriolet-phaeton was not a great success, but a few years of refinement, and it gave birth to the four-wheel cabriolet, the victorian, and several other comfortable but elegant carriages for town and country driving.

I’m postulating that in 1812, my Susan had one of the early successful models, and that she might well have chosen to bring it with her from London to Edinburgh and back again, driving it herself on fine days, perhaps with one or two of the children to keep her company.

A Glossary of Carriages: http://www.arnkarnk.plus.com/glossary.htm

The Slower Road: https://theslowerroad.com/category/reference/carriages-carriage-types/page/6/

The victorian was a popular carriage in the mid-19th century.

 

 

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Twelfth Night, the end of Christmastide

The twelve days of Christmastide, celebrated with extravagant gifts in the Christmas carol, begin with Christmas day and end with the Feast of the Epiphany. The Epiphany was the day on which the Christian church remembered the ‘manifestation’ (which is what the word Epiphany means) of the Christ child to the Gentiles, in the form of the wise men, or Magi. Since at least medieval times, the Feast has been celebrated with gift giving in emulation of the Magi. And other party stuff. Those medieval types knew how to party.

Like all the great traditional Church feasts, the celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany begins the night before. AS did the Jews before them, the church counted (and counts) the new day as beginning at sundown, and  Twelfth Night Eve is part of Twelfth Day, just as Christmas Eve is part of Christmas Day, and All Hallows Eve (now called Halloween) is part of All Saints Day.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the English Catholic tradition had long been buried under a mix of Puritan reforms and pagan accretions, but many of the medieval traditions survived. The king still offered gold, myrrh, and frankincense at the Chapel Royal at St James. Mummers paraded, masked balls abounded, wassailers saluted the apple trees and one another with hot spiced cider, and at parties, a king and queen for the day were chosen to rule the festivities, usually by the randomising method of who found a bean (king) or a pea (pea) in their slice of Twelfth Night Cake. In this blog post written for a Christmas blog hop three years ago, I show Avery Hall, Candle’s home, during a Twelfth Night Eve party.

Like most of the West, my household follows the Victorian tradition of presents on Christmas Day rather than spreading them through Christmastide or giving them on the Feast of the Epiphany, but one tradition we stick to is taking down all the Christmas decorations before sunset on 6th January. Not that we believe goblins will invade if we ignore the tradition. But still. That’s my job for tomorrow.

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The year without a summer

The volcanic gases and particulates in the atmosphere led to spectacular sunsets, such as those later painted by Turner.

In 1816, after an unusually severe winter, the United Kingdom experienced ‘a summer more unseasonable than any former one in my remembrance’ (from correspondence between Susan Farington and Antony Hamond). Nurseryman Samuel Curtis called it ‘the most unpropitious season ever remembered’, and diariest Pegge Burnell called August ‘a most unseasonable month’, describing it elsewhere as ‘dismal, wet, and cold’.

Various studies in the United States, England, and Europe have concluded that this was more than regular climate fluctuation, although winters in the last decade of the eighteenth and early part of the century had been exceptionally cold. Sunspot numbers were down; volcanic activity was up. And then, in 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic eruption in, perhaps, thousands of years. For hundreds of miles, the sea was covered in pumice. Ash darkened the sky so that candles were needed throughout the day, and even with candles, people could see only a few metres. Tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people died. And high in the atmosphere, tonnes of sulfur dioxide thrown out of the volcano turned in sulfuric acid, making an aerosol that would block incoming solar radiation for years to come.

It took time for the effects to reach the other side of the world, but the record shows that the spring, summer, and autumn of 1816 were exceptionally wet and cold, with frequent storms and floods. Harvest failed in the United States, Britain, and across Europe and Asia, leading to famine on a wide scale and starvation among the poor. In China, peasants turned to growing opium in order to make money, and the boom in production led in time to the Opium Wars and the opium trade that still exists today.

In England, people were already suffering severe hardship and food shortages because of the long years of war, harsh economic policies that favoured the wealthy, and the vast mass of unemployed swollen by more than 400,000 men from dismissed from the army and navy after the war. Adding a volcanically enhanced winter to the mix was devastating.

…despite the long run of generally cold wet conditions experienced in the 1810s, extreme weather recorded in the spring, summer and autumn months of 1816 may have been ‘truly exceptional’ and ‘of a degree for which it is reasonable to invoke an external forcing mechanism’ (Sadler and Grattan 1999, 187).

Our sources also add further evidence in support of 1816 being a difficult year for many people across the UK. In Upper Annandale (Dumfries and Galloway), the correspondent to the Farmer’s Magazine (17, 483) described a year ‘having neither spring, nor summer, nor harvest’ and our sources too emphasise the need to recognise a sequence of unusual weather, most of it unfavourable for agriculture, within 1816. The weather hampered agricultural (and other outdoor) work, and harvests of grass, grain and vegetables were of poor quality and quantity. There was a shortage of fodder and livestock was lost in floods or heavy snowfall in some places. Storms and floods uprooted trees, and damaged homes and other buildings. Normal routines were disrupted and travel difficult. An impact on physical and emotional wellbeing is also inferred. [Veale, Endfield. Situating 1816, the ‘year without a summer’, in the UK. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geoj.12191/full]

(I am researching conditions in summer 1816, because my next book, House of Thorns, take place at that time.)

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The Christmas card custom

The first Christmas card was designed and sold in 1843. It was the brainchild of Sir Henry Cole, who had helped set up the government department that was later called the Post Office. Sir Henry had helped to introduce the Penny Post in 1840, taking advantage of the railways to move post quickly and cheaply.

And people did. The story goes that Sir Henry had lots of friends who wrote to him at Christmas. It was only polite to reply, but Sir Henry was a busy man. He came up with the idea of a card with Christmas greetings, and a space at the top to write people’s names.

John Horsley, a friend of Sir Henry’s designed the card with three panels: the outer two showing charitable works and the inner one a family Christmas dinner.

Over time, Sir Henry’s idea caught on, helped as printing methods and mass production brought printing prices down. When the cost of sending dropped to half a penny in the 1870s, Christmas cards took off, and spread around the world.

Annie Oakley sent the first known personalised card. She was in Scotland in 1891, and sent a Christmas card back to family and friends in the United States with her own photo on it.

Do you send Christmas cards? Or a Christmas newsletter? By post or electronically? Or do you wish to do so, and just not have enough time?

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The history of mistletoe at Christmas

It’s the season for mistletoe, or at least so it would have been back in England during the 18th and 19th century. The little plant with its golden boughs, yellow-green oval leaves and sticky white berries had an important role to play in Christmas celebrations, forming the crucial part of the Kissing Bough or being hung in bunches in strategic places around the household.

Any woman standing under the tree could be asked for a kiss, and courted bad luck if she refused. In one version of the tradition, every kiss was paid for by plucking a berry from the hanging stems, and when the berries were gone, so were the kisses.

So how did a little parasite come to be a magical harbinger of romance?

There are a few stories; some from Norse tradition, some Greek, some from the druids of ancient Britain, and some with strong Christian traditions.

The plant that killed the favourite

In Norse mythology, one god was the favourite of all the others. Everyone loved Baldur. Everyone, that is, but Loki, the god of mischief. Frigga, Baldur’s mother, protected her beloved boy by travelling all the world, and asking everything that grew on land and under it to promise never to hurt Baldur.

As a result, Baldur became invulnerable to anything thrown or thrust at him, provided it was plant-based. Of course, poking Baldur with plant-based weapons became a favourite game, because boys are like that. But Frigga had forgotten one important fact.

Mistletoe doesn’t grow on land or under it. It grows on the branches of another plant — including, willow, oak, and apple trees. Loki made a dart from mistletoe wood and gave it to the blind god, Hoder, so he could join in the game. And Baldur died.

Everything in heaven and earth wept, and Frigga tried for three days to restore her son. In the end, her tears became the mistletoe berries, and Baldur woke from death. In her joy, Frigga made the mistletoe her sacred plant, and decreed that anyone standing under it would never come to harm, but would only be kissed.

Power over hell

In Greek myth, mistletoe had power even over hell. Two doves bought a golden bough of mistletoe to Aenas to light his way through the forest that blocked the way into Hades. When he showed the bough to the ferryman at the River Styx, he and the bough were instantly transported alive across the river.

The sign of peace

To the druids, mistletoe was very special. They believed it could heal just about anything. They cut it from oak trees with sickles of gold, and gathered it without letting it touch the ground. And they hung it in bunches in houses to keep away sickness and war, protect the household from sickness and ghosts, and bring happiness and fertility.

Anyone passing under mistletoe had to lay down their arms and desist from fighting until the next day, even in a forest. Even more so in a house, where guests would stand under the mistletoe to greet their hosts with a kiss of friendship.

Love conquers death

No wonder, with this history, the mistletoe was adopted by the new Christians of Northern Europe, who easily made the transition to seeing this plant of healing and peace as a symbol of Christ, who lay down his life to bring peace to the world, and who came alive out of death. Mistletoe became particularly associated with the birth of Christ, which was now being celebrated in midwinter, when mistletoe had been a traditional part of pre-Christian ceremonies.

Friendship kisses under the mistletoe translated nicely into the new Christian celebrations.

Kissing for luck

Exactly how kisses of peace became the romantic kisses we think of today, we can only guess. But the idea that mistletoe will bring prosperity and fertility might have something to do with it. Prosperity for a woman meant marriage, and by the sixteenth century, kissing under the mistletoe was wildly popular among the working classes.

By the nineteenth century, the custom had often been adopted above stairs as well as below, though not by all. Some regarded it as licentious and improper. But only the most rigid of moralists would refuse a kissing bough to the servants’ hall, even if his or her own daughters could safely pass through the family’s parlours safe in the knowledge that no errant white berry posed a risk to the sanctity of their fair lips. Poor girls.

A week today, I’m publishing the ebook version of If Mistletoe Could Tell Tales, a collection of my Christmas novellas and novelettes. The print version is already available. At 92,000 words, or 320 print pages, of stories about the magic of romance during the magic of Christmas. At $2.99 for the ebook, it represents a 40% discount over the cost of the individual books. And the print cost of $12.50 makes it a great stocking stuffer. Follow the link in the name above for blurb and buy links.