tudor – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

In Our Time: Holbein at the Tudor Court

Hans Holbein the Younger was one of the foremost portrait painters to work in England during the Tudor period (and perhaps ever), and it’s his paintings that shape how we see the court of Henry VIII. Discussing his time at the Tudor court on In Our Time were Susan Foister (the National Gallery), John Guy (Clare College, University of Cambridge) and Maria Hayward (University of Southampton).

They started the programme by setting the scene for the Tudor court of 1526, when Holbein first arrives. At this point Henry VIII has been on the throne for 17 years. Cardinal Wolsey is still his right hand man, and Anne Boleyn has just arrived on the scene. In terms of international politics there has just been a bit of a shake up. Previously Henry VIII was allied with the Spanish against the French – there had been a plan that the two countries would co-ordinate an attack on France, and once successful Henry VIII would get to keep northern France (and be crowned King of France) and the Spanish would claim southern France. However the Spanish had won a victory over the French, but then not divided the spoils with England as Henry VIII thought they’d agreed. So the alliance had broken down, and now Henry VIII was allied with France. Which is another factor in the waning influence of Henry’s Spanish wife, Katharine of Aragon, and in the rising influence of the French educated Anne Boleyn. I don’t think I’d heard anyone explicitly point out this political connection before, the narrative generally focuses on the need for an heir and “true love”.

Hans Holbein’s father was also called Hans Holbein and was also an artist, so generally “the Younger” and “the Elder” are appended to their names to disambiguate them. I don’t think they said on the programme where Hans Holbein the Younger was born, but it was in continental Europe (Germany, if I remember correctly). He was probably educated alongside his brother, by their father, in a wide variety of artistic techniques and media. This included goldsmith designs and techniques, frescos and other sorts of painting, and producing illustrations for printed books. This last was particularly emphasised by the experts on the programme as a new and lucrative market for an artist at the time. In early adulthood Holbein and his brother move to Basel (Switzerland) where they make a living mostly from illustrations and engravings, but also from religious paintings.

Holbein was looking for an opportunity to become a court painter (as it was a lucrative and prestigiuos position to hold). I think they said he had tried to get employment at the French court, but not had much success. In 1526 he moved to London, with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Thomas More. He had probably sent ahead his portrait of Erasmus as a showcase for what his skills were. Thomas More was apparently not very optimistic about Holbein’s chances of employment in London. He wrote that England was “not fertile ground” – tapestries and theatrical sets where the dominant arts in the country at the time, not portraiture. But the experts suggest that with the benefit of hindsight this may have been because there wasn’t an accomplished portrait artist available until Holbein arrived.

During this first stay in London there doesn’t seem to’ve been much work – he started by being employed to paint theatrical sets, and he also undertook some commissions from Thomas More and from some other members of the elite (although not necessarily the court). Holbein returned to Basel – they weren’t clear on the programme why, nor if he originally intended to stay there. I’m not sure if that’s coz it isn’t known, or if it’s just that the programme was concentrating on his time in Tudor England so they were skipping lightly over the other information.

In 1532 Holbein returned to London. This is just as Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII finally get married, and there is some evidence that Anne Boleyn is a patron of his. There are no records available to say whether or not she actually paid him for anything, but there are several paintings with links to her. Including one painting of her in her nightgown (for which read “dressing gown” not “nightie”) – so he had access to her in informal settings such as her bedchamber which is a distinct mark of her favour. He is also first recorded on Henry VIII’s payroll during this time – so he has achieved his ambition of becoming a court painter. Although apparently he wasn’t paid as well as he might like – the French court painters received more money and more privileges from their king!

Holbein clearly had a knack for politics, or rather for staying out of politics. He remained in the employ of Henry VIII until his death in 1543, through the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and even weathered the storm surrounding Henry’s brief marriage to Anne of Cleves. When Henry was looking for his fourth wife, Holbein was the man sent to the courts of Europe to paint the potential brides. The two best known paintings are that of Anne of Cleves and that of Christina Duchess of Milan (who turned Henry down). It’s known that Holbein didn’t actually get to paint the whole Christina’s portrait from life – he had one 3 hour sitting with her, and quite probably only brought drawings back to London which he subsequently turned into a painting. It’s really quite remarkable that Holbein didn’t fall into disfavour after Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves failed almost before it began. Henry’s complaint was that he found Anne too ugly, but there’s no indication that he blamed Holbein for misrepresenting her (he did blame Cromwell, however). And the experts said that Holbein probably didn’t misrepresent Anne – despite Henry’s distaste she seems to’ve been regarded by contemporaries as a handsome woman. Probably the most Holbein did was minimise the German-ness of her clothing and headdress, so she would look more fashionable to English eyes.

As well as this overview of Holbein’s career in England the experts also discussed some of his better known paintings – you’d think that would be quite hard on a radio programme but I recognised all the works they discussed from having seen them previously, so had the right mental images. One of them was one of my favourite things in the Portrait Gallery when I visited it last year: the surviving half of the cartoon for the Whitehall Mural. The finished piece (which doesn’t survive) was a large dynastic portrait of the Tudors so far. On the left were Henry VIII and his father Henry VII, and on the right were their wives – Elizabeth of York for Henry VII and Jane Seymour for Henry VIII. The timing of this portrait is around or just after the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII & Jane’s son. The cartoon is the same size as the painting was, so we can see that the viewer would’ve been presented with a lifesize image of the King standing directly in front of them – apparently terrifying for those who saw it. Inspection of the cartoon shows that originally the figure wasn’t full frontal, but Henry apparently wanted that changed so it would have the maximum impact.

Another of the paintings they discussed was the girl with a squirrel that we’d seen in the British Museum’s Germany exhibition in 2014. This portrait combines a clever use of symbols with a warm & touching portrait – the squirrel is not just the girl’s pet, it’s also part of her family’s coat of arms. And they also discussed The Ambassadors, which I think of as “the one with the weird skull in front”. This painting is also not just a portrait of the two men – it also showcases Holbein’s skill at painting many different objects. Including the distorted momento mori motif of the skull, which looks just right if viewed from the side of the painting.

Even at the time of Holbein’s death he was regarded as a particularly good portrait painter, and his reputation has only increased since. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Holbein’s portraits are how we see Henry VIII’s court. Those paintings are what shape our mental image of “the Tudors” and are what take them from a collection of dates and facts and turn them into people in our collective imagination.

Armada: 12 Days to Save England

Back in June of this year the BBC did a three part series about the Spanish Armada and how (astonishingly) England wasn’t conquered by Spain in 1588. It was billed as “part dramatisation, part documentary” so I was a bit concerned in advance that it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. But it turned out to be on the right side of the line for my tastes – a selection of set pieces but mostly a straightforward documentary series. The main presenter was Dan Snow, who we’ve seen do a selection of history documentaries in the past, more than one with a naval theme. There were several talking heads throughout the series – the primary one was Geoffrey Parker, who is an expert on James II of Spain. He’s discovered & researched a lot of documentation kept by James II on the Armada including a report from the second in command of the fleet which gave his opinions on why the invasion failed. Another strand of the documentary segments was two naval historians discussing the tactics the Spanish & English fleets used, and showed us them by pushing ships about on a battle map. Of the two, I recognised Sam Willis who we’ve seen present other documentaries and I forget who the other chap was. The conversations between the two of them were sadly a bit stilted and at times made it feel like Willis was explaining himself and his theories to his PhD supervisor in a meeting!

The two main threads running through the series were the naval tactics of the two sides and the more human side of the personalities & foibles of the key players in the war. I’m not really interested in military history per se so I hadn’t looked into the details of the Armada before – just absorbed the narrative of “superpower of the day goes up against plucky minor country and somehow fails, mostly due to inclement weather”. God Is On Our Side, and all that sort of thing. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than that. Whilst the storms around the north & west of the British Isles are what finally finished off a lot of the Spainish fleet, they’d actually already lost before they sailed through the storms. The English had got the upper hand through better tech and new tactics to go with it (including sailing in to their own gun range to fire on the Spanish, then sailing away before getting to a range where the Spanish could reply). However supply issues (Elizabeth I was both unwilling and unable to pay for sufficient ammo, or even food for the sailors) meant that this wasn’t decisive. The Spanish also lost by their own actions, largely due to a strict adherence to the original plan by the commander despite that plan having fatal flaws from its conception let alone after they met the opposing fleet.

The two fleets had similar command structures – political appointment at the top, second in command an experienced seaman. The key difference was that Francis Drake (the English second in command) was actually listened to. The Duke of Medina Sidonia (commander of the Spanish fleet) had been Spain’s second choice and wasn’t keen on taking the job because he had no naval expertise – but sadly for the Spanish his reservations about his own abilities meant he insisted on following James II of Spain’s original plan to the letter. This plan was that the fleet would sail round to the English Channel and pick up the Spanish army in Holland, together the combined forces would invade England (from Kent, iirc). But the plan didn’t include any detail for how the navy & the army would combine and communication between the two was not established in time for the plan to be put into action. And eventually after several failures to co-ordinate with the army, and battles with the English where the Spanish were at a disadvantage to begin with and then loss, finally the Duke’s nerve broke and he took the fleet round to the north & west to get away from the English fleet and back to Spain. His second in command repeatedly suggested alternate courses of action: a pre-emptive strike on Portsmouth to bottle up the English fleet; capture a deep harbour on the English coast and settle in to figure out how to meet up with the army in relative safety; etc. But the Duke wouldn’t deviate from the plan, and so they lost.

Part of the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s problem was that James II was something of a control freak. I knew pretty much nothing about James prior to this program other than: married Mary I of England, failed to have children; tried to marry Elizabeth, was refused; tried to conquer England, failed. So the characterisation of James in this documentary was particularly interesting to me (and I should really add a biography of him to my to-read mountain). He was a deeply pious man, and this fuelled much of his desire to get England under his control – rescuing it from the taint of Protestant heresy. He was also a micro-manager. In this case he’d laid down a Plan, and left the Duke of Medina Sidonia in no doubt that if he deviated from The Plan then there would be trouble. He was also a compulsive note-taker and prefered to communicate with his underlings by the written word. Which is why we know he was a micro-manager – there are archives full of his notes.

I liked the characterisation of Elizabeth I in this programme – the Gloriana myth she and her PR team promoted was talked about, but they portrayed the woman herself as the Tudor she was. Mean (in the financial sense), paranoid and a control freak. Made me think of the biography of Henry VII that I read several years ago (and am convinced I wrote up a review for a previous incarnation of this blog, but now cannot find): “Winter King” by Thomas Penn.

Overall I enjoyed this series – made me aware how little I actually knew about the Spanish Armada (and Spanish history) and then educated me about it 🙂

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman was partly a biography of a specific woman – Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare. But there’s not really enough surviving detail about her life to get the full picture from, so the gaps were filled in with more general information about the sorts of lives women (and men) of the time lead. The presenter, Michael Wood, did a good job of stitching the two sorts of information into a coherent whole, so it didn’t feel disjointed or patchy.

Mary Arden is an interesting person to look at the life of, not just because of whose mother she is, but also because of when she lived and what sort of person she was. She lived through a time of great change – she was born around 1537 near the start of the English Reformation, and died in James VI & I’s reign having lived through the whole of the Tudor changes of religion. It’s easy to forget that these changes all took place within a lifetime. Her personal situation also changed a lot over this time, showcasing some of the increased social mobility of the era.

Mary was born the youngest daughter of a relatively well-to-do husbandman, and had seven older sisters. Her family were part of the local gentry so in marrying her John Shakespeare was moving up the social scale. John & Mary Shakespeare were a part of the growing middle class in England. John was primarily a glover, but also involved in other trades. They marry in the 1550s, and begin having children – Mary was to bear eight children in all, of whom 5 survived to adulthood. William was her third child, the first son and the first to survive infancy. The programme used this as a hook to explore the dangers of childbirth in this period for both mother & offspring, and infant mortality (and the effect it would have on the parents).

John and Mary rose in the world both socially and financially during the early years of William’s life. John is a respected member of the Corporation of Stratford upon Avon and eventually even becomes Mayor of the town. They owned land both in the town and outside – Mary had inherited her father’s land when he died. Which is particularly interesting as she was the youngest daughter – perhaps she was his favourite? Perhaps she was the best at the financial management necessary to run the farm? John Shakespeare was also involved in less respectable financial trading. He leant money at interest (strictly forbidden by the church), and also got involved in the illegal wool trade. This was a very lucrative business – all wool trading was supposed to be done through Crown approved channels at Crown approved prices, and paying duty on the trade. So there was money to be made by a middleman who avoided the official routes. Michael Wood speculated that Mary was also involved in the trading – in part because as the person who would be at the house most of the time she’d be the obvious point of contact. And in part because there are indications she was good at financial management.

The wool trading was to be the Shakespeare family’s downfall. There was a clampdown on this illegal activity, and John Shakespeare was one of those who was caught. The family were financially ruined, and spent several years living in fear of their debts being called in. John stopped attending church or the meetings of the town corporation, because those were places where his creditors might find him to demand their money. This, of course, had social consequences for the family. They also had to sell off land to pay back the debts that were called in, and even take young William out of school. The family’s fortunes only turned around after William had moved to London and begun to make a name for himself (and money!) as a playwright and actor. Once he had money he provided for his parents and so Mary lived on into a comfortable old age.

I was mostly interested in the tidbits of information about Mary herself so that’s what I’ve discussed most in this blog post, but the programme also did a good job of covering the social situation & changes of the time. For instance it looked at what the religious and social changes actually meant to the ordinary person of the time. And at some issues specific to women – childbirth in particular as I mentioned. Also how women lived in general – housework, household management etc.

The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots; Churches: How to Read Them

The title of the Channel 5 documentary The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots was a little misleading – it wasn’t about Francis Walsingham (the titular spy) per se, instead it was about the Babington Plot in 1586, Walsingham’s role in that and the consequences for Mary Queen of Scots. That relatively narrow focus also meant that they elided a lot of the background for why Mary Queen of Scots was under house arrest in England in the first place and just opened with her having been so for 18 years. Whilst I’m quibbling about their narrative choices, I shall also note that I didn’t much care for all their stylistic choices for imagery. In particular whenever there was “spy stuff” going on they used very modern imagery (CCTV cameras, racks of networked servers etc) which juxtaposed extremely oddly with their actors dressed up in Elizabethan costume quoting actual letters from the era!

Having said all that, I actually thought it was a rather good programme. First they explained the situation leading up to the Babington Plot – Mary Queen of Scots under house arrest in England, and as a Catholic and a relative of Elizabeth I’s she was a potential focus for rebellion or invasion. There had been previous unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham (as Elizabeth’s spy master) was obviously concerned about communications to & from Mary Queen of Scots, and about the potential for trouble being stirred up by her or on behalf of her. The Babington Plot was the latest in a series of attempts to free Mary Queen of Scots – it began as a conspiracy between a group of disaffected Catholic noblemen, lead by a young man called Anthony Babington. Communications with Mary were routinely intercepted and monitored, so the conspirators recruited an English Catholic priest called Gilbert Gifford who had fled to France. Gifford returned to England and made his way to the brewers who supplied Mary’s household with beer – he devised a method of smuggling messages to her inside the bungs of the beer barrels and so communication was established. In this bit of the programme they also explained how difficult it was to be a Catholic priest in England at the time and showed us several priest holes in a country house of the era.

Mary was at first very cautious about how she responded to the messages – not just using a cipher and being circumspect with her words, but also being very non-committal about proposed schemes. Gradually, however, she began to trust and to believe that just possibly this time it was going to work and she would not only be freed but also put on the English throne. Finally in a letter she said something that could be taken as endorsement of the plot, and unknown to her this is where it all started to fall apart for her. Walsingham hadn’t been sitting by in ignorance of this plot – instead he’d had a hand in it from almost the start. He’d had his eye on Babington & the other conspirators, and when Gifford had been sent back to England with his first message Walsingham had him seized. He was turned into a double agent, and it was Walsingham who designed the method of getting messages to Mary Queen of Scots. All the letters sent this way were copied by Walsingham’s people and the cipher used in them was broken. When the damning message was sent by Mary Queen of Scots, Walsingham knew he had his evidence to convict Mary of treason – but just to be sure he had his codebreaker & forger add a postscript to the letter to make it more explicit before forwarding it on to Babington.

Walsingham then swooped in and arrested the conspirators. He also lured Mary Queen of Scots into behaving as if she expected a rescue, then arresting her. All were tried and convicted of treason. The men were hung, drawn and quartered but Elizabeth did not sign Mary’s death warrant for some time. Eventually she reluctantly signed, and then tried to countermand it but the warrant had been whisked off to where Mary was being held and Mary was executed within hours. The programme was very much on the side of this being Elizabeth genuinely changing her mind and regretting signing. But from what (little) I’ve read, I’d always picked up the impression of her wanting to have her cake and eat it too – putting on a good show of remorse after the fact but only when the deed was irrevocable.

Overall a good programme, my quibbles aside 🙂

Churches: How to Read Them was a 6 part series of half hour programmes about British church architecture and decoration that we’d recorded ages ago. It was presented by Richard Taylor and covered the history of churches from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. Not that I disliked it as such, more that it seemed a bit shallow at times but I can’t really articulate what I would’ve preferred. However it did show a nice selection of surviving examples of the various sorts of architecture & decorations that he was talking about in each episode.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Episode 2 of The Crusades – series presented by Thomas Asbridge about the Crusades.

Episode 2 of Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – Richard Fortey looking at three fossil sites that changed our idea of the past.

Shakespeare and His World (Course on Future Learn)

Shakespeare and His World was a 10 week course on Future Learn which finished just a couple of weeks ago. The course was run by Warwick University and presented by Jonathan Bate (with Jennifer Waghorn as moderator). And in the 10 weeks it covered a huge amount of ground! Each week focussed on a particular theme and there were 6 or 7 video lectures, each of which featured an object from Shakespeare’s time – most of these were from the collections of the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, and most of the videos were filmed there. And eight of the weeks featured a particular Shakespeare play, which also illustrated the weekly theme. We were looking at both what the plays told us about the time they were written in, and what contemporary events & things influenced the writing of the plays. As well as this we also looked a little at the plays as plays rather than historical items – their themes & characters and so on. Obviously in the time available all of this was covered at a fairly superficial level – an overview rather than anything in depth, but there were normally links to places to find out more about the featured objects and some ideas for further investigating the plays.

Week 1 was an introductory week which looked at what we know of Shakespeare’s life story and also set him in context as an Elizabethan playwright and poet. We also read Venus and Adonis, one of Shakespeare’s poems. The second week was the first one with a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The theme was Shakespeare’s time in Stratford, in particular his schooling, and this was a good play to illustrate it because although the town in the play is Windsor there’s internal evidence that suggests Shakespeare was actually basing it on Stratford. And he made use of the sorts of people he would’ve known growing up to provide characters for the play – in particular there’s a small part for a schoolboy called Will which is generally assumed to be an author-insert.

Week 3 used A Midsummer Night’s Dream to focus on the theatre in Elizabethan England – chosen because of the play within a play sequence. Week 4 was about war, using Henry V as the illustrative play. Bate made the point in this week that Shakespeare was a war poet for the first half of his career – England was at war with Spain in this period – so Henry V isn’t just looking back to former glories but is also saying something about contemporary events in particular the defeat of the Armada. Week 5 moved on to look at finance, using the Merchant of Venice. As well as the obvious use of Shylock the moneylender to think about how Elizabethan money & finances worked, we also looked at how Shakespeare often used Venice as a mirror for London. And of course we also covered Elizabethan attitudes to Jews, as well as looking at how Shylock has been portrayed through the ages since the play was written. Shakespeare himself seems to be making a more nuanced point than some later stagings of the play.

I’m afraid this is turning into a bit of a laundry list, but I’m trying not to go into too much detail otherwise this post will go on forever!

Week 6 used Macbeth to look at witches and medicine. Because of studying the play at school around 25 years ago I was expecting the bits about witches, but I hadn’t really thought about what the play tells us about medicine of the time before. Sadly the discussion section for this week (about similarities and differences between modern & 16th Century medicine) got over-run by people enthusing over herbal remedies being better than “all those chemicals” and misplaced nostalgia so I stopped reading it before my blood pressure rose too much. The seventh week used Othello to look at the interactions between Christendom and the Islamic world. Again Shakespeare is more nuanced than some later stagings of the play – the villain of the play, after all, is Iago who is a white Christian (although notably with a Spanish name). Othello the Moor is basically a good man who is led astray by Iago’s playing on his insecurities.

The eighth week looked at what Classical culture meant to the people of Shakespeare time, and also to look at how “the East” was regarded. The illustrative play chosen was Anthony and Cleopatra which obviously gives us an image of orderly moral Rome vs the opulent decadence of Egypt. And it was also a play designed to appeal to James VI & I by implying he occupies the place of Augustus in his own time, seen in the play as unifier and peacemaker. Week 9 was the last week with a play – fittingly this was The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last solo authored play. This was used to illustrate the “Brave New World” of the Americas that the Stuart age was beginning to successfully colonise. And also to think about how the art of the theatre was similar to the art of magic in The Tempest so Prospero’s final speech retiring from his art can be seen as Shakespeare’s final speech too. And the last week was a brisk trot through Shakespeare’s legacy looking at how he grew from being regarded as one of the Elizabethan playwrights into “the Greatest Playwright of All TIme”.

I’m glad the information, including videoes & links, is still available on Future Learn for those of us that did the course – I’m not sure I got everything out of the course that I could and some weeks I definitely skimped on due to lack of time. Even tho by the end I was thinking it had out stayed its welcome a bit (8 plays in 8 weeks is a lot to read and contemplate) I’m glad I did it 🙂

Tyndale Society Study Day (10 May 2014)

Last Saturday was clearly the best day to hold a study day – there were three different ones on that date that J & I between us found interesting. The one I chose to go to was organised by the Tyndale Society who are a group whose primary interest is in the life and works of William Tyndale (who translated the Bible into English in the early 16th Century). I’m not a member of the Society myself, I just spotted a poster advertising the study day a few weeks ago & signed up for it. The subject of the day was Ipswich as a late medieval port of the type whose trade & shipping links helped the spread of Reformation books, and three men with Ipswich links who played a significant role in the Reformation. It was held in St Peter’s by the Waterfront which was for a brief moment in its history the chapel for Cardinal Wolsey’s school in Ipswich. As well as the four talks there were a couple of (very short) walks to see relevant places in Ipswich – the weather was good for just long enough at just the right times for those! One of which included our lunch in the cafe attached to Dance East (nice soup & sandwiches, if a little basic). There were also a selection of books for sale (I picked up “Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry” by the third speaker, Nicholas Amor). And a rather fine (and jaunty) model of a medieval Cog:

(All photos are links to flickr, the whole album is here.)

“Thomas Wolsey as Educationalist” John Blatchly

The first talk was given by John Blatchly who is a local historian, former Head of Ipswich School and currently chairman of the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust (which includes St Peter’s by the Waterfront in the churches it looks after). After a preamble about himself and the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust he talked to us about Cardinal Wolsey, concentrating on his links with education and with Ipswich. Wolsey was born in Ipswich, the son of Robert Wolsey & his wife Joan (née Daundy). I’m sure Blatchly said he was born and lived at the Black Horse Inn – but there’s a plaque on the wall near Curzon House that suggests he was born in that part of Ipswich instead. He was born in 1470 or 1471 – this is known because on Maundy Thursday of 1530 he washed the feet of 59 old men, one for each year of his life so far.

Wolsey was first educated in Ipswich, and went to Magdalen College, Oxford at around the age of 15. A biographer of Wolsey’s writing not long after his death said that his early education was good, through the encouragement of his parents and masters. Blatchly explained that this was unlikely to be Robert Wolsey’s influence. Robert Wolsey was an innkeeper and butcher (at the Black Horse) and there are records of him appearing in court rather a lot. He was fined for several misdemeanours like letting pigs roam freely and so on. Thomas Wolsey’s mother was rather better born than her husband. Her brother was patron of St Lawrence Church, and was likely the person who encouraged the young Thomas Wolsey and got him his good education.

Blatchly mostly skipped over Wolsey’s career in the church and his involvement in Henry VIII’s government. He did, however, give us a flavour of the man with a digression on his attitude to heraldry. Obviously as the son of a butcher & innkeeper Wolsey had no coat of arms himself – and so he made one up with symbols that he felt suitable. Wolsey’s mistress, and mother of his children, was the daughter of a Thetford innkeeper which sounds a bit like Wolsey seeking out someone of a similar background to his own – but Blatchly felt her being the sister of the archdeacon who was Wolsey’s confessor was far more signficant. Their son was called Thomas Winter (discretely not using Wolsey’s name, nor his mother’s name). It would’ve been rather indiscreet for Thomas Winter to do the canonical thing of using his father’s coat of arms with an indicator of bastardy, so Wolsey made him a new one too. Blatchly said there’s some evidence that Winter was a spendthrift, so one of the symbols on his coat of arms is coins which are perhaps a nod to this tendency.

Wolsey was not on the side of Reformation as a theological/political movement, but he wasn’t against the idea of dissolving a few priories when he could “make better use” of the money. He dissolved several (I think Blatchly said generally in Norfolk and Suffolk, and no longer vibrant communities) to pay for his great educational foundations. These were Christchurch College in Oxford (taken over by Henry VIII so it still exists) and Cardinal College of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ipswich. One of the dissolved priories was what has become St Peter’s by the Waterfront. This included the church and sat on a site of around 6 acres. So what Wolsey did was to dissolve the priory and convert the church into a chapel for his college. The rest of the site was then used for the college. After Wolsey’s fall from grace the College was abandoned – the church became a parish church, the institution of the college became the ancestor of Ipswich School and the fabric of the college mostly went to London to build Whitehall.

Blatchly also talked about Wolsey’s retirement plans – he was intending to live in Curzon House next to his new Ipswich College. This was inhabited by the Curzon family at the time, but they agreed to move somewhere else (although never had to, because Wolsey fell from grace). The house itself no longer exists (there’s a rather ugly modern building in its place) but Curzon Lodge, where visitors were put up, still does. Blatchly also explained about the statue of Wolsey as an educationalist which sits outside the modern Curzon House, and after his talk he took us all on a short walk to see the statue and the Lodge (and another 15th Century merchant’s house which is now the Thomas Wolsey pub).

John Blatchy talking about the Wolsey Statue

“John Bale” Oliver Wort

The second talk of the day was given by Oliver Wort, about John Bale who wrote many books and was a Protestant Reformer. The Ipswich connection is that Bale was born in Suffolk, and spent 30 years as a Carmelite friar first in Norwich and later as the prior of the Carmelite house in Ipswich. He then converted to Protestantism, and spent 30 years as a Protestant writer. Bale wrote extensively in both his incarnations but most modern scholarship concentrates on the later Bale and ignores his earlier writing. Wort feels this is foolish – whilst the later Bale is important, his formative years were as a friar and this did have an influence on his later thinking.

One of the reasons for concentrating on his later life comes from Bale himself – as a convert he was very keen to disavow his Carmelite past and repeatedly got irritated by people who referred to him as Friar Bale. Bale published one of the first autobiographies in English, which was the fourth iteration of his own account of his life over a 20 year period (the first three were as essays at the back of books he wrote). Wort made the point that it’s necessary to take Bale’s words with a large pinch of salt. In Wort’s preamble to this talk he gave us a flavour of John Bale the man – he had somewhat of an ego. In books that he wrote he wasn’t just content to put his name on the title page and perhaps at the end. Instead he made sure his name was repeated throughout, and constantly in the text referenced the fact that these were the opinions of John Bale. In one of his books there was even a puzzle to do with the capitals at the start of each chapter, which when solved spelt out “BY ME JOHAN BALE”. This occasionally backfired – in his autobiography (which has his name on each page as part of the title) his name is at least once spelt “BAAL” instead of “BALE”. Particularly amusing as this was one way that ardent Protestants referred to the Pope.

So the autobiography is in all its incarnations the work of a man who is keen on presenting an image of himself to the world. Wort suggested that this is probably not just ego, Bale may also have been trying to overwhelm the reader with his new convert status and hoped they’d forget the earlier conformist Friar Bale. Taking it with a pinch of salt the autobiography gives us what is likely to be a historical overview of Bale’s life. He was born in 1495, and became a monk in Norwich at the age of 12 (in 1507). He was educated at Cambridge, starting in 1514, and graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. After this he rose swiftly through the Carmelite ranks, becoming Prior in Ipswich. In 1536 he left the Carmelites to become a priest. And after his conversion to Protestantism (1537ish? I haven’t got a note of what Wort said) he wrote plays at court for a few years (writing the first English history play). He fled into exile after Cromwell’s fall, and only returned when Edward VII took the throne. He also spent the years of Mary’s reign in exile abroad, returning when Elizabeth became Queen.

Wort explained that the four different versions of the autobiography can tell us something about Bale’s changing sense of himself and the ways that religious conversion was seen in England at the time. The details change depending on the political climate of the time that it was written, in particular the details of the moment of his conversion (which become more elaborate and specific). His marriage is positioned in the later versions as the capstone sealing his conversion but closer to the event he doesn’t refer to his wife at all – perhaps he was keeping her secret because it was illegal for him as a priest to marry, perhaps he didn’t actually marry her till later when it became legal! The autobiography might also be better referred to as an autohagiography. For instance Bale repeatedly compares himself to the apostle Paul, giving a whole host of (rather tenuous) correspondences between their lives. At the time this attracted rather heated disagreement from other writers about the ego involved in appropriating an apostle’s life for one’s own self-aggrandisement.

“Ipswich, a Late Medieval Port” Nicholas Amor

The third talk was after lunch, and started with a walk along the Waterfront to Isaacs where we looked at the (outside) of the oldest part of the building, which is a 15th Century merchant’s house and would’ve existed during the time period that Nicholas Amor was talking to us about.

Nicholas Amor talking about the Medieval Waterfront

Ipswich has been a port since Anglo-Saxon times, and one thing Amor told us on the walk was that when the new university buildings were built there was an opportunity for archaeologists to dig there. The Waterfront area is where the medieval port was – the river ran past there at the time (nowadays the course of the river has changed and the Waterfront is on a canal that forms the Wet Dock). Amor’s specialisation is the late medieval period, particularly the 15th Century when Ipswich was an important port. During this century Ipswich had trading links as far afield as Spain, Iceland and the Baltic – but no trans-atlantic links and no Mediterranean trade either. The bulk of the trade, however, was with the Low Countries. Amor has compared the trade through Ipswich in the 1390s, the 1460s and the 1490s to get a picture of how it changed throughout the 15th Century. This is a period with a lot of unrest in England and wars with France, and you can think of the 1390s as a sort of golden age. Trade goes significantly downhill across the whole country by the 1460s – Ipswich actually does rather better than other places because of a high concentration of German merchants operating in the town. By the 1490s trade has improved but not back to the levels of the late 14th Century.

One question he looked at was why was Ipswich important at the time. One of the reasons is changes in the wool trade in the 15th Century. Wool could only be shipped through ports designated as staples – where the wool was taxed. In the 14th Century staples were in a selection of English ports and Ipswich wasn’t one of them. In the 15th Century the staple was in Calais, so it didn’t matter which English port you shipped from so long as you went there. Ipswich is conveniently located close to London and the Stowbridge Fair (an important wool market near Cambridge). It was also a quick journey from there to Calais. Another factor that made Ipswich more important than other East Anglian ports was that its position relatively far upriver made it safer. For instance nearby Harwich was sacked by the French during the 1440s, but Ipswich never was. This meant that even though the Crown would’ve preferred to move trade to Great Yarmouth it wasn’t ever a successful move.

At first wool was the biggest export from Ipswich, later in the 15th Century its importance declined. Suffolk wool was actually quite low quality, Amor said this was because the sheep have too easy a life in East Anglia – not enough poor weather to make them grow dense wool. As wool was taxed by quantity rather than quality Suffolk wool wasn’t worth legitimately shipping to Calais, instead it was smuggled to Flanders cloth makers who wanted cheaper wool. East Midlands wool was better quality and so was the majority of the legitimate trade (and so is mentioned in the customs records that Amor has used in his work). During the 15th Century the importance of the (export) cloth trade grew and much less wool was exported to cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries. Suffolk became the industrial heartland of England at the time, manufacturing the bulk of the cloth a lot of which was then exported via Ipswich. Wine imports were also an important part of the trade through Ipswich until the loss of Gascony to France in 1453, after which significantly less wine was shipped. Beer imports were important at the beginning of the century, but by the end it was being exported back to the Continent.

The merchants involved in this trade changed over the century. At the beginning a lot of them were local, but towards the end of the century there were many more foreign merchants living in and trading through Ipswich. The big players traded with Gascony and Spain – the long haul destinations. Smaller merchants operated to & from the Low Countries. In the mid 15th Century trade was much less lucrative – the loss of Gascony was part of this, and the ongoing war closing off markets at random was another part of the reason.

Sadly Amor ran out of time before he could finish his talk – the walk had taken longer than originally planned which ate into the time.

“Thomas Bilney” Andrew Hope

The fourth and last talk was another biographical talk, this time about Thomas Bilney and given by Andrew Hope. Bilney was a Cambridge academic and one of the first such reformers to go out to preach and talk to the ordinary parishioners. The Ipswich connection is that in 1527 Bilney went on a preaching tour of East Anglia, including a visit to Ipswich in May of that year. The bulk of Hope’s talk was focussed on what we know about the sorts of topics that Bilney preached about, and what sort of reformer Bilney actually was. This last is a topic of some debate with no clear answers – even the authorities at the time weren’t sure. When he was arrested they drew up two different charge sheets while trying to figure out which heresy to charge him with – a Lutheran or a Lollard.

The two possibilities are quite different in terms of their social constructs. Lollards are a community, who meet face to face. It had existed as a movement for around a century at the time and generally Lollards became Lollards because they knew people (like their parents) who were already Lollards. At the time, however, Lutherans in England were primarily isolated academics who had read the pamphlets and books being brought through ports like Ipswich and had experienced a moment of intellectual conversion like John Bale. Bilney falls between the two groups – he is an academic, and is isolated rather than part of group, however from what we know of his preaching he agrees with some of the Lollard thinking. For instance Lutheran thinking says that pilgrimages don’t confer salvation or any sort of de facto spiritual merit. Bilney in his preaching goes beyond this in a very puritannical direction, in much the same way the Lollards do. But it’s not clear if he read some of the more radical Continentals, or if he came to these conclusions via conversations with Lollards that he preached to.

One topic of his preaching was against the use of miracles to imply that God approves of pilgrimages. This was the standard Catholic answer to people who doubted the worth of shrines and pilgrimage. But Bilney picked up on a biblical reference which says that Satan will be on the loose after the year 1000 AD, and used this to argue that this so-called miracles were the work of the devil (this also comes up in Bale’s writing). Bilney also preaches on salvation using terminology from both the Lutheran and Lollard schools of thought. For instance he uses the term “mediator” for Christ, which is really only used in Lutheran texts but he couples this with the Lollard imagery that praying to a saint is like putting the head at the feet. He also preaches against the Papacy, with a rather clever argument that it’s put itself in the position that conscience should take, and that conscience should be the temple of the Holy Ghost. This is clever because conscience as an idea wasn’t the same as it is now – one of the important questions of the era was how come there seems to a cross-humanity consensus on right and wrong (like, murder is bad, that sort of thing). So the medieval thinkers postulated that there is a conscience that is responsible for this, a sort of collective thing that some people were more in touch with than others. The official position of the Church was that when they put forward rules of behaviour this was them channelling this conscience and letting everyone know what it said – so if you were in doubt about the moral course, you just asked the Church. So Bilney was taking an existing concept (the Church is in some sense the conscience of society) and arguing that this was bad and that one’s own individual conscience was more important. There is evidence that his preaching on this topic is taken up by local Lollards who start using his terminology and ideas about conscience.

The Lollards of the time must’ve felt like this was a new dawn. They had been living as a heretical community for over a hundred years, and suddenly academics and mainstream thinkers are putting forward viewpoints that are close to what the Lollards believe. There’s a general idea that areas with a strong Lollard presence become strong Protestant areas, and Ipswich is an example of this. But it’s important not to assume this is always the case.

Hope finished up his talk by telling us a bit about the end of Bilney’s life. Bilney was arrested as a heretic, as mentioned before, and examined – and eventually abjures his faith. It’s clear that he’d struggled with his identity before (Lutheran or Lollard) but after this he became unsettled and struggled with the tension between his belief and the fact that he’d saved his life by denying his beliefs. After 3 years of this he went to Norwich and practically baited the authorities into arresting him – he preached and handed out tracts written by William Tyndale. After being arrested he was sentenced to death by burning at the stake (the only sentence possible for this second offence). Even though Bilney sits in this odd position between the Lollard and the Lutheran traditions of reform his influence in Cambridge at this time was second to none, so he was an important part of the English Reformation.

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History; Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History was a two part series on Channel 5 – I found out about it because it’s presented by Suzannah Lipscomb who was one of the talking heads on the programme about The Last Days of Anne Boleyn that I liked so much last year (post). The first part covered the successful part of Henry VIII & Anne’s relationship and the second part looked at the unravelling of that relationship. It had been billed as “part re-enacted” but actually there wasn’t much more than you often see in documentaries. They had a couple of actors to do Henry and Anne, and some extras, and several snippets of action (like a court scene, Henry fencing, Anne being dressed or praying). They also had the actors repeat lines that one or the other had written – quotes from letters, or other such things. But all too often that felt like filler, because Lipscomb herself would also read out the quote.

As well as the start of Henry & Anne’s relationship the first programme also talked a bit about the earlier lives of the two. In particular Lipscomb visited the house Anne grew up in (Hever Castle) and one of the palaces of the French court where Anne spent several years as a lady in waiting to the Queen of France. One of the main themes of this early part of the programme is how the legend that has grown up around Henry and Anne is both accurate and not. Although later it’s true that Henry was something of a cruel tyrant, at the beginning of his reign (and even by the time Anne and he begin to interact) he’s a charming, charismatic athlete and playboy. Anne’s sometimes talked of as “a commoner” but that’s like Kate Middleton being “a normal middle class girl” … true, but not particularly accurate (both come from significantly wealthier or higher status families than the phrase conjures up). Also Anne’s time at the French court is later held up as where she learnt “the arts of love” but actually the Queen’s court was known for being virtuous and chaste.

What her time at the French court does do for Anne is make her appear sophisticated and a bit exotic. Combined with her wit & intelligence, that’s what eventually catches the King’s eye. But Lipscomb was keen to point out that this wasn’t at once – actually the King takes Mary Boleyn as a mistress when the Boleyns come to court, not Anne. Once Henry & Anne’s relationship begins Lipscomb paints it as a passionate love affair, and says that she believes that the reason they wait and start to look for a way out of his marriage for Henry is that they want to “do things properly”. Obviously Henry must’ve already begun to worry about a lack of heir, and to think about how to change that as his first wife grew older. But Lipscomb doesn’t believe Anne played hard to get in order to hold out for marriage, instead she thinks the two fell head over heels in love and wanted to marry from the beginning – this was not just another mistress for Henry. I’m not entirely sure I agree (although obviously Lipscomb knows far more about the subject than I do!). One notable absence from Lipscomb’s narrative was any of the other men Anne may’ve had relationships with. In particular Anne had been bethrothed to Henry Percy, and that had to be formally declared as a celibate relationship (it was broken off because his father did not approve). If it hadn’t been a celibate relationship then they would’ve counted as married before Henry and Anne became a couple – so this was important, but Lipscomb didn’t mention any of this is the programme.

The second programme looked at Anne’s fall from grace, which really began shortly after the highpoint of their marriage. Through no fault of her own she failed at the primary duty of Henry’s Queen. Elizabeth was born, and was not a son. Another pregnancy came to nothing (Lipscomb noted there’s no record of a miscarriage either, so perhaps this was a phantom pregnancy). And then not long after Katherine’s death Anne miscarried a child that was far enough along development to be obviously a boy. Things were beginning to unravel. Around this time Henry also suffered a fall during a tournament that knocked him out for a couple of hours, and re-opened an old leg wound that would never completely heal again. Lipscomb speculated that this fall might actually have caused a personality change in Henry – and certainly afterwards he was the tyrant we later remember him as. However personally I’m not sure we need to speculate about frontal lobe damage from the fall, and subsequent personality changes, to explain this. Henry’s behavioural changes could also be explained by an increased sense of mortality, and the effects of chronic pain. He almost died without an heir, his nightmare scenario. And the ulcer in his old leg wound was now being treated with hot pokers on a regular basis, not something to settle anyone’s temperament.

Then we’re up to the final fall of Anne – accused of adultery, imprisoned and tried then executed. Lipscomb is firmly on the side of Anne being innocent of the charges, swayed in part by Anne’s swearing of oaths to God that she hadn’t done these things even once she was condemned to die. Anne was, after all, a pious woman. So Lipscomb’s theory (and I’m inclined to agree here) is that Anne’s “fault” was to not be submissive enough to the King – she didn’t make adultery unbelievable – and to flirt and be witty in the company of the court. The very things that had drawn her and Henry together in the first place were her downfall in the end.

A good series, even if I didn’t entirely agree with Lipscomb’s theories at all times.

As well as that recent series about the Tudors we’ve also been watching a series we recorded last year – The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. The conceit here is Ian Mortimer presenting a sort of handbook to what you’d need to know to blend into Elizabethan England if you were able to go and visit. The emphasis was on the differences to the modern day, and the potential hazards you might run into. I really liked the visual style of this series. Parts of it had Mortimer talking to us in a room that looked like an alchemist’s den – lots of bottles and curiosities and old books. In parts he was walking through a computer generated space with old pictures illustrating what he was talking about hanging in boxes in the space. And about half was filmed in real life locations which were then enhanced with white line drawings of the people and objects you’d expect to see there in Elizabethan times.

The three programmes of the series covered different levels of Elizabethan society. We started with the poor – I think because that’s what in general one knows least about, and because it would have the most shocking changes. Life really was nasty, brutish & short if you were a peasant – he covered things like the poor living conditions, the diseases, the food, the sorts of work you could do and how much (little) you’d be paid. And also the problems with travelling while poor – people could get in trouble for sheltering the homeless, so unless you could find work you wouldn’t find much shelter. The second programme looked at high society. They had many more comforts in life (and probably live a lot longer too), but disease was still an issue. And watching what you said and who you said it to would still be very important if you were visiting – informants and paranoia were not just for the lower classes. The last programme looked at the rising middle classes, and at the growing amount of innovation, exploration and culture coming from this class. Shakespeare is an obvious example, Francis Drake is another. Throughout all three programmes Mortimer also noted how social mores have changed – what we’d find particularly noticeable would be the difference in how women were treated. He talked about how wives were obliged to do what they were told, and could be beaten without that reflecting poorly on the husband. And about the way that it was almost assumed that a female servant would be coerced into sleeping with her master. Of course, if she became pregnant that was then her problem.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this series, but I really liked it. Might pick up the book it was based on at some point.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Episode 1 of Inside the Animal Mind – Chris Packham looks at how animals think and perceive the world around them.

Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World – a 90 minute documentary about the rise and fall of Gaddafi, using interviews with people who were a part of his regime in one way or another. Very much had a message, and sometimes you could see just how they were using spin to make him seem as bad as possible (even tho I agreed with the premise it felt heavy handed). Part of the Storyville series.

Captain Cook: The Man Behind the Legend – Timewatch episode from 2008/09 about Captain Cook & his voyages of exploration. I knew surprisingly little about the man in advance (beyond that he existed).

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 3); Sacred Wonders of Britain; Tudor Monastery Farm; The Brain: A Secret History

The third and final episode of Treasures of Ancient Egypt covered the period from Ramesses II through to Cleopatra. In terms of the history of the period this can be seen as a long slow decline from the height of New Kingdom power through several foreign dynasties to the annexing of Egypt by the Roman Empire. Alastair Sooke’s thesis was that in terms of the art this was a new dawn – fuelled in part by foreign Pharaohs’ desires to be more Egyptian than the Egyptians, and during times of self-rule by a renewed sense of national pride and connection with their history.

This pieces he looked at were again a mix of iconic objects we all know about, and other less well known objects. This time there were several temples – starting with the temple at Abu Simbel, and later showing us the temple of Horus at Edfu and the temple at Dendera. One of the threads he used to hold the programme together was the gradual introduction of more realism to the art – for instance he looked at the art under the Nubian Pharaohs, and pointed out how the faces were much more lifelike. And this is taken further under the Ptolemies when there is some merging between the naturalistic Greek style and the more stylised Egyptian art. One of the places he took us to illustrate this was a tomb chapel that had the traditional layout and scene types that one would expect, but the figures were drawn in a much more lifelike fashion and looked almost Greek.

The interludes with modern artists were particularly good this week. I liked the chance to see how faience and faience shabtis were made. Faience shabtis as a group were one of his treasures, the first mass produced art in the world. The expert from UCL that he talked to about this first showed him some of the shabtis in the Petrie Museum, and then showed him how he made his own shabti inspired art. The other modern artist was a graffiti artist in Cairo who has taken inspiration from both the official iconography of ancient Egypt (like the Pharaoh smiting his enemies scenes) and from the ostraca found at Deir el Medina. Inspired by the latter he paints topsy-turvy scenes with the cat & mouse instead of people. His art also had a political twist – and he talked about how the same was true for the ancient Egyptians.

This has been a very good series. Although there were a few over simplified pieces of history Sooke generally did a good job of providing enough historical info for context without turning it into a history lesson. As I’m often approaching the objects from a perspective of learning about the history that produced them it was interesting to have someone talk about them as art in their own right. I thought the mix of objects chosen was good too. The “obvious” iconic pieces were there (but looked at from a fresh perspective) and there were several less obvious pieces so the whole thing didn’t feel like we’d seen it all before. At first I was dubious about the bits where Sooke talked to modern artists, but some of the later segments of that sort were really cool.

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We finished three other serieses this week, so I shall try & keep my commentary brief! The first of these was Sacred Wonders of Britain – a Neil Oliver series that looked at sacred places in Britain from earliest prehistory through to the Reformation. This is quite a large sweep of time, and I thought the last episode was the weakest of the three. In part because it didn’t feel like it was quite Oliver’s thing, being history not archaeology, and in part because they were having to take account of the fact that Christianity is a current faith. As always with a programme presented by Oliver I thought he went too far off into flights of fancy at times – taking the expert opinion of “maybe” and turning it into a long imagined story of how it “was”.

However, criticisms aside I do like his programmes overall and this series was no exception. There were a lot of places shown that I’d not heard of or seen before which was cool to see. I was particularly struck by the prehistoric flint mine which at first didn’t seem like it was a particularly good candidate for sacred. But as the archaeologists pointed out there was plenty of flint available on the surface in the very same location of the same quality as that from the mines. There were several tools left behind in the mines which didn’t seem in poor condition, and the few skeletons that have been found (in cave ins) were of young people on the cusp of adulthood. Taking all of that together they think it might’ve been some sort of rite of passage.

Another series we finished was Tudor Monastery Farm. This was part re-enactment and part documentary, presented by Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold. It’s part of a collection of serieses called SOMETHING Farm, each taking a different period of history and telling us about farming during that time, we’ve previously watched Wartime Farm (post). This was the first of these serieses that Tom Pinfold had been in – in the previous ones the third presenter was Alex Langlands – and sadly I didn’t think he had much on screen chemistry with anyone. From a quick look around the BBC website it seems he’s pretty new to being a presenter, so perhaps he’ll improve as he relaxes into the job.

There were 6 episodes in the regular series covering the whole year of farming and life as it would have been in the year 1500, and one special afterwards which looked at Christmas festivities. They’d picked this year as it was pre-Reformation and post-Wars of the Roses. So it was a peaceful, settled era and the people still observed all the Catholic rites. The farm type they were recreating was a farm owned by a monastery, but worked by prosperous lay people. One of the key themes of the series was that farming in this period was beginning to change – more and more the tenant farmers were growing grain and raising animals to sell as well as to feed themselves and give to the monastery. One of the things I like about these serieses is that the re-enactment portion of it really shows how things worked – like how you build a fence if you’re a Tudor farmer – and the documentary side of it fills in the little details you wouldn’t get just by looking at it (which woods you choose and how you get them, in the case of the fence).

Because this was about such a long ago period of time they didn’t just cover farming. There were, of course, a lot of details about everyday life (like clothes, or how they cooked). And they also covered more specialist things like how to make a stained glass window, how you mined and purified lead, how salt was produced, how they made fireworks and so on. All in all a rather good series 🙂

And we also finished up what we had recorded of The Brain: A Secret History – we were missing the first of the three episodes. It was a series about how the brain works and how we found out about it, presented by Michael Mosley. Of the two episodes we watched one dealt with emotions, and the other with mapping bits of the brain to functions. The emotions one was at times hard to watch as the sorts of experiments done to figure out how emotions work were generally not very nice – like frightening a young child to see if phobias could be induced (they can), or shutting up baby monkeys in too-small isolation cages to see what effect that has on their adult psyches (a bad effect). The other episode had more “wow, that’s weird” moments and less trauma – however it had a lot of footage from somebody’s brain surgery which I was too squeamish to look at (yeah, I’m a wimp).

So at times difficult to watch for a variety of reasons (and I think from the clips in the intro segment we missed the most disturbing episode) – but it was an interesting couple of programmes. There were a lot of “neat facts” about how our brains work, and the ethical quagmires of how one does experiments to find these out were well explained.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 1 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

A Tudor Feast

One of the programmes we watched this week was something originally from 2007, but repeated this summer – A Tudor Feast. It was a one hour standalone programme, and the main presenters have gone on since to do several serieses about farming in various historic programmes (including Wartime Farm which we watched last year (post) and Tudor Monastery Farm which we’re watching at the moment but I haven’t yet written about). In fact it was slightly odd watching this, because we’re watching something 6 years newer so both Ruth Goodman & Peter Ginn looked jarringly younger than in the other programmes!

The premise of the show was to cook a Tudor feast using only authentic recipes and ingredients, and only the techniques the Tudor cooks would’ve had available to them. So it was (like the $TIME Farm serieses) a mixture of pseudo-re-enactment and documentary. For instance all the people involved were dressed up in Tudor clothes, as well as explaining how to do things Tudor style. The programme was filmed in Haddon Hall, which still has Tudor era kitchens (I think they said those hadn’t been used in 400 years, presumably new kitchens have been built at various points over the years). And they picked a specific period where they have some records of the occupants of the house at the time – the 1590s. So as well as the modern recreation we got shown a list of the food used for a feast during that time.

One of the things this programme made clear was why this food was luxury food and only for the nobility. Some things were conventionally expensive – like cinnamon, because it came from far away, or gold because it’s rare. But much of it was expensive because it required a lot of labour to make. For instance one of the centrepiece items they put together was a marchpane dessert. This was basically marzipan, that was then gilded and decorated. Which sounds quite simple, but the recipe started with sugar (already conventionally expensive) that had to be ground into powder by hand. Then grind your almonds. Then finally make the marchpane with these two and rosewater. That’s hours of work, probably carried out by the mistress of the house or trusted servants under close supervision. And you haven’t carefully iced or gilded it yet, let alone constructed the decoration.

Another of their centrepiece items was a peacock pie – not a bird one eats nowadays. The programme was concentrating on the food prep – the “downstairs” side of the feast – but they did discuss the taste of things a bit. In particular Goodman mentioned that peacock is often said not to be a good eating bird, but she’s liked it when she’s tried it. This pie looked like a conventional pie until the very end stage – and then (having taken great care to select a good looking peacock and to take his skin off in one go) they put the peacock skin over the pie, with a support structure (not sure quite what, twigs? wire?), to look like a peacock once more. When that was served up they put something burning in its mouth, following a period suggestion, so it looked very spectacular when carried to the table.

They also showed us how the table was set and discussed proper manners (“courtesy”, the word etiquette wasn’t in use yet). Where you sat was determined by social status, and top table got the most impressive dishes – the centrepieces I talked about above (and others like a boar head with an apple in its mouth), the better meat, the better cutlery and tableware etc. People were given napkins, which I didn’t realise were a thing that went back that far. But instead of putting it on one’s lap or tucking it into one’s neck it was to go on the left shoulder. There it was conveniently placed to wipe your hands (most food was cut up with the knife then eaten with the fingers) and to clean your lips. Food was served not in courses like we would today, but in what were called “removes”. Instead of everyone getting their own portion of the current dish, a variety of dishes would be set out on the table and you’d help yourself to what you fancied that was near you. There’d probably be 2 or 3 removes – this feast they did two, one of primarily savoury things and one of sweeter things. Choice was part of the conspicuous display of wealth that was the point of a feast – poorer people didn’t tend to get a choice in what they ate.

I enjoyed this programme (like I do everything I’ve watched from this team). Lots of little bits & pieces I didn’t know before, and sometimes you don’t really realise what things were like till you see them done even if you’ve read about them. I’m now curious what peacock tastes like … and I rather like the idea of a centrepiece at the dinner table of a fire breathing bird containing a pie! Not quite enough to buy a turkey with its skin on for Christmas dinner, however 😉

Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 and 2 of Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities – history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

The Bridges that Built London with Dan Cruickshank – one off programme telling the history of London’s bridges across the Thames. Interesting, but got a bit woo-woo at times towards the end.

4,000-Year-Old Cold Case: The Body in the Bog. One off programme about the discovery and investigation of a body in an Irish bog. This particular one was dated to 4,000 years ago, most across north-west Europe are from about 1,500 years later. They tried to present a theory for how & why these people were killed & buried – got a bit Discovery Channel (they Solved The Mystery and Proved The Theory), and a bit unclear how general their idea was but nonetheless interesting.

Episode 1 of Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History – Sam Willis talking about shipwrecks around Britain or involving British ships, their impact on history and our culture.

Episode 3 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

King’s College, Cambridge

A few weeks ago when we went to the Fish gig (post) we spent a little bit of time in Cambridge beforehand. The original plan had been to go to the Fitzwilliam Museum, but it’s shut on Mondays so we decided to visit King’s College Chapel – first time we’d been, which seems faintly ludicrous given we actually lived in Cambridge for a while!

I didn’t have my big camera with me (coz we were going to a gig) but we did have the Lumix so got a decent number of pics 🙂 J took some of them – like the one above obviously – but I don’t think we can remember who had the camera when. This post is mostly going to be pictures – click through to flickr for bigger versions (and the whole set, not all are in this post).

The chapel was started by Henry VI – for all his failures as a King (and his mental illness) he was a deeply pious man, and his plan for the chapel was a monument to the glory of God. In his time it only got as far as the foundations & a few feet of wall. The chapel was finished off by Henry VII & Henry VIII, and is far more a monument to the glory of the Tudors than God 😉

It’s not just Tudor though, there have been additions since. I did think some of the more modern bits & pieces looked a little incongruous though – like the lights at the side near the altar. And I thought the altar looked a little sparse after the over-the-top decoration of the rest of the chapel.

(That sign is modified to say “no flash photography” I wasn’t being a dreadful person & taking photos where I wasn’t allowed, despite how it looks!)

Outside we got to walk around a little of the grounds of the college – firmly kept away from the insides of the rest though. It’s a lovely setting – sightly unbelievable that this is right in the middle of Cambridge, the views across the river look like there’s nothing else around.

So finally seen more than just the college bar at King’s! 🙂