Footnotes on Friday

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Corn Dollies: a guest post from Alina K. Field

In researching British harvest festivals for Under the Harvest Moon, we came across the tradition of weaving corn dollies.

Corn, for American readers, refers to cereal grains such as wheat or barley, and though spirits are involved, the dolly is not a human-shaped creation like a voodoo doll!

When the harvest was almost finished, the last of the sheaves were taken and made into a corn dolly. Corn dollies are created by weaving stalks of grain, often into hollow spirals, a place where the Corn Spirit, perhaps the goddess Ceres, could stay during the winter months.

When ploughing started, a farmer would place the dolly hosting the Corn Spirit into the first furrow to be ploughed back into the earth to ensure a good growing season.

In the fictional Cheshire town of Reabridge, the harvest festival includes a corn doll contest. I can only imagine the beautiful woven designs that adorned the town’s homes and hearths!

Link to a video about making traditional corn dolls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYpcfzd4ov0

Also, Wikipedia has a good article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_dolly

Under the Harvest Moon, A Bluestocking Belles with Friends Collection

By Caroline Warfield, Jude Knight, Sherry Ewing, Cerise DeLand, Elizabeth Ellen Carter, Collette Cameron, Mary Lancaster, Alina K. Field, and Rue Allyn

As the village of Reabridge in Cheshire prepares for the first Harvest Festival following Waterloo, families are overjoyed to welcome back their loved ones from the war.

But excitement quickly turns to mystery when mere weeks before the festival, an orphaned child turns up in the town—a toddler born near Toulouse to an English mother who left clues that tie her to Reabridge.

With two prominent families feuding for generations and the central event of the Harvest Moon festival looming, tensions rise, and secrets begin to surface.

Nine award winning and bestselling authors have combined their talents to create this engaging and enchanting collection of interrelated tales. Under the Harvest Moon promises an unforgettable read for fans of Regency romance.

Universal Link: https://books2read.com/UnderHarvestMoon

Under the Champagne Moon by Alina K Field

Orphaned by the French Revolution and rescued by a British family, Fleur Hardouin was a solemn and often sullen child. She didn’t—or wouldn’t—speak, until the jolly young Gareth Ardleigh crossed her path one summer and saved her from bullies.

Fifteen years later, Fleur’s life takes another twist when she and the beloved lady she serves lose their home and return to the town of Reabridge. Determined to rescue them both through an advantageous marriage, Fleur tries to brush off the attention she receives from Captain Gareth Ardleigh, who’s home from the wars and as handsome as ever. Her heart longs for him, but her head knows he can’t provide the security she needs.

Gareth’s excuse for visiting Reabridge is to deliver the personal effects of his best friend who perished at Quatre Bras. But his real purpose is finding the little French girl he met years ago, for marriage—not to him, but to the Frenchman who helped save his life. Little does Fleur know that she’s heir to a wealthy French vintner who’s demanded Gareth’s help finding Fleur as repayment of his rescue from Napoleon’s army.

Astonished to find that Fleur has grown into a beautiful—and still intriguing—young woman, it soon becomes clear he must choose between honoring a promise or trying to win the hand of the woman he loves.

Author Biography:

USA Today bestselling author Alina K. Field earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and German literature but prefers the happier world of romance fiction. Her roots are in the Midwestern U.S., but after six very, very, very cold years in Chicago, she moved to Southern California where she shares a midcentury home with a golden-eyed terrier and a feisty chihuahua and only occasionally misses snow.

Social Media Links:

Website: https://alinakfield.com/

Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/Alina-K.-Field/e/B00DZHWOKY

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlinaKField

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/alina-k-field

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7173518.Alina_K_Field

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Ending a marriage in Regency England

In Georgian and Regency England, it was difficult to end a marriage. Basically, the options were an informal separation, a legal separation, or a divorce. In fact, in some ways, it would be fair to say that the three were stages in a process—with the couple probably no longer living together by the time one of them (usually the man) went before the Ecclesiastical Courts for a separation, and a separation being one of the requirements for a divorce.

Annulment is not one of the three for the simple reason that an annulment is a finding that the marriage was void at its beginning; that is, that the marriage ceremony was not valid, and therefore the couple were never married.

Divorce was difficult to obtain, expensive, and seldom allowed the parties to marry again. The first step was to apply to the Ecclesiastical Court. But the Court could only rule that the couple be permitted to separate (a divorce a menso et thoro, a separation from bed and board). They no longer lived together, and the husband was no longer responsible for providing a home for the wife (although he was still responsible for her debts.

A man could be granted such a ruling when adultery was proven against a wife. A woman had to also prove that the adultery was aggravated by life-threatening cruelty, bigamy, or incest.

If she obtained such a ruling, the woman had no right to access to her children.

A husband could also sue his wife’s lover under civil law for ‘wounding another man’s property’ and for depriving him of her services as household manager. Women had no such right.

The next step, if one of the parties wanted to remarry, was to take a private bill to Parliament for ‘relief’. The proceeding were expensive, long, messy, and public. It was very rare for the divorce finding to include a clause that permitted the ‘at fault’ party to remarry.

“Between 1670 and 1857, 379 Parliamentary divorces were requested and 324 were granted. Of those 379 requests, eight were by wives, and only four of those were granted.” (Wright, 2004)

https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/bailey/

https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2017/01/divorce-regency-style.html

https://www.kristenkoster.com/a-regency-divorce-primer/
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Folk tales in human history

In most places and for most of history, folk tales have not been written down. They have instead been passed from story teller to story teller down through the generations, changing over time as the current teller of the tale adds or changes a detail.

In the book Clever Maids, the author Valerie Paradiz tells the true history of the women who collected the stories that were edited and published by the Brothers Grimm. Folk tales, she tells us, were women’s stories—the tales that women told over the laundry or the baking, or entertained children with during a long winter’s evening, or when putting them to bed. They were servant’s stories—the stories of the folk, the ordinary people.

We can see these origins in the stories themselves. In folk tales, if not in the high literature of the cultures of the world, the weak and helpless win out over the malice of the powerful. Notably, many of the protagonists of folk tale are women—women who are essential to the story, which isn’t over until they get their happy ending.

Today, romance literature is predominately a women’s literature: written predominantly for women and by women, and not over until the female protagonist gets her happy ending. It seemed to me that romance was the right place to retell folk tales, and A Twist Upon a Regency Tale is the result.

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Exploring officers

Lion’s command includes a group of exploring officers, whose job it was to collect information about enemy movements. They would have denied being spies. Spying was considered underhanded and dishonourable, and simply not the way that a British gentleman acted. Indeed, while several government officials are known to have run spy networks both within Britain and overseas, Britain didn’t have an official department for spies until the 20th century.

In real life, as opposed to books, Exploring officers in Wellington’s army worked for the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster General’s office. They operated on their own or with one or two local guides. Their task was to collect first-hand tactical intelligence by riding to enemy positions, observing and noting movements and making sketch maps of uncharted land. It was a dangerous job and they had to be fit, good horsemen, and ready to escape at any moment. They wore their uniforms at all times (at least in theory), because they were officers, not spies.

The famous exploring officer Lieutenant Colquoun Grant was captured by the French while in uniform, and treated as an officer. Grant gave his parole, which basically meant he agreed to not try to escape. However, he discovered that the French general whose prisoner he was had written a letter that said  ‘His Excellency thinks that he should be watched and brought to the notice of the police’.

In other words, the French consider Grant a spy, to be dealt with by the police and not the army. Grant decided that the French had broken their agreement so his parole no longer counted, and he escaped.

Another job of the Intelligence Branch was intercepting letters, such as those sent from French generals to their officers.

They also collected information from networks of local spies. In my books, I have my exploring officers joined by a Greek spy and his niece, who claim to working with the British because the British are the enemies of the Turks.

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Property developers Georgian and Regency style

Most British cities, and particularly London, grew significantly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only did agriculture changed forcing rural workers to move to cities to seek work. The population of Britain nearly doubled in the eighteenth century and quadrupeled in the nineteenth.

Wealthy families who owned land in and around large cities, especially London, were the Georgian era’s property developers. Great landowners developed well planned streets and squares on the western side of London, obtaining local acts of Parliament to allow them to levy rates so they could finance paving, lighting, cleaning, and watchmen.

The standard of construction was generally high, and many—from grand aristocratic residences to more modest workers terraced houses—still remain today, giving many cities and towns their character.

Lesser developers built with cheap materials and little planning, and left slums and neglect These dwellings are almost all gone.

Most buildings were designed by owners and builders together—until the middle of the eighteenth century an architect was anyone who cared to call themselves one.

Regency flip or flopper

The regency house flipper who is the hero of Grasp the Thorn is an invention of my own. But why not? In a world where fortunes were being made and lost, renovating houses for the upwardly mobile seems like a good thing to do. If people like Bear didn’t exist, it was necessary to create one. So I did.