History in the News

So I was all set with another post in my 1810 series when I ran across three awesome historical news stories that I just had to share...so instead of the Duke of Cumberland, today you’re getting ancient Egyptian tailoring, Henry VIII's head injuries, and Sir Walter Scott’s sock puppetry. Ready?

The world’s oldest dress:  Archaeologists have carbon-dated this linen dress (yes, it looks like a shirt but the bottom half is missing, based on other younger examples that have been found) with elegant pleated yoke and sleeves and a v-neck found in an Egyptian tomb to somewhere between 5,100 and 5,400 years old, making it the oldest known piece of tailored, sewn clothing. The garment’s story is a fascinating one: originally found in a tomb at the cemetery at Tarkhan, it was sent to the Petrie Museum at the University College of London entwined in a bunch of rags and ignored for decades...until conservators got around to examining it in 1977.  Hmm...now if only there were fashion magazines from ancient Egypt. Ahkenaton’s Repository, anyone?  ☺ (photo Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London)

Henry VIII needed better head gear:  Dr. Arash Salardini and colleagues at Yale’s School of Medicine have speculated in an article in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience that Henry VIII’s famously bad temper and tyrannical behavior in his later years may have been due to repeated traumatic brain injuries in his youth.

Famously fit and athletic as a young man, Henry was an avid jouster among other things, and suffered some spectacular falls and plenty of being thumped about as a result...just like today’s football players. In his later years, Henry went from being the ideal Renaissance prince, cultured and courtly, to a cruel, capricious tyrant, suffering blinding headaches and sudden, unexplained rages. Historians have attributed this change to many things: tertiary syphilis, chronic infection, diabetes, and kidney disease...but this new diagnosis makes bunches more sense.

Oh Sir Walter, you tricksy fellow: It seems that sock puppetry is not a modern phenomenon. Two hundred years ago, a well-known author was engaging in practices that today would have gotten him banned by Amazon.

Sir Walter Scott, whose poems and books helped birth the Highland Revival, was also an important writer and reviewer for the Quarterly Review, an important and widely read journal of the day. His reviews of such books as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage helped launch their popularity. But he also used his position as a respected reviewer to thoroughly (and anonymously) lambaste one of his own books, a short story collection called Tales of My Landlord, which he’d published under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham.  But he didn’t stop there; after calling the work unoriginal and lame, he speculated about the identity of the author of the Tales, going so far as to suggest not only himself ("the author of Waverley"), but his own brother Thomas.  The result? Huge sales, because everyone wanted to see just how bad the book was and if they could guess who the author was. 

Naughty, naughty! ☺

Green and Pleasant Land, Part 7: Last Stop, Hampton Court—and Where I’m Going Next Time

Our final stop on the Doyle Family Tour of Southern England meant leaving Brighton (sigh!) after breakfast and heading for our last stop: we had plans to spend the day at Hampton Court Palace before heading to Heathrow Airport (a short drive away) and back home to Massachusetts.

I had visited Hampton Court on my last visit to England, but had only had time to see a small portion of it. Today we had a good five hours, and we still didn’t see all of it—much less the gardens, which would take a full day just on their own.

Hampton Court has seen centuries of use, from the early sixteenth century through the present day. It was built as a country retreat by Cardinal Wolsey, advisor to King Henry VIII—to whom he gave the palace as a gift when Henry’s favor had turned to Anne Boleyn and her political faction. Henry expanded the palace and did a lot of redecorating for Anne, including putting their entwined initials everywhere...which he had to hastily redo a few years later on divorcing (and beheading) Anne and marry Jane Seymour instead. The area where Henry’s kitchens were located have been restored to their former culinary use, which was pretty awesome to see.

After viewing all the Tudor areas (including his private Chapel and ) we visited the Jacobean and Hanoverian bits as well, viewing portraits and furniture and generally being staggered at the sheer size of this place. George II was really the last English monarch to used Hampton Court as a royal house; George III disliked it intensely, and instead rebuilt Windsor and Buckingham House for his family, and Hampton languished for a while until someone hit on the bright idea of using it as a sort of retirement village for old royal retainers and others who had done some service to the crown or country. It housed hundreds of people through the nineteenth and all the way up to the late twentieth centuries; though apartments stopped being given out in the late 1980s, a few residents linger on.

We had a delightful tea in one of the courtyards before departing for the airport and home...but I’m already plotting my next trip to England. Where will I go?

• London, to visit the places I didn’t get to this time: Sir John Soane’s House, the Burlington Arcade, and Kensington Palace.
• Absolutely back to Dartmoor. This time I might want to stay at Lewtrenchard House, former home of a well-loved clergyman and specialist on Dartmoor history and folklore (and author of the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”) Sabine Baring-Gould.
• Back to the Jurassic Coast...to Lyme Regis, but also to Sidmouth, which is rife with some awesome Regency architecture.
• The Isle of Wight (and this time we’ll make ferry reservations!) to see Osborne House as well as the well-preserved Roman ruins there.
• And then, north! A brief stop in Cambridge, to revisit where I spent one summer at Christ’s College, and York, which is one of the most delightful cities in England, and finally on to the Lake District to stay on Ullswater and do some more tramping about the countryside.

Thank you for following along on my trip...now, where in England would you like to go?