I was interested in this site because it was one of the many palaces owned by Henry VIII, and it began as a moated manor house before a transition into a small red brick courtyarded Palace, as seen above. Henry had, if my memory serves me well, approximately 57 Palaces and Manor Houses. 16 in the London area and 11 along the River Thames
But what I really liked when I visited the website was the charm of this lovely video by the Enfield Archaeology Society. Now those who know the wonderful TV Sitcom called the ‘Detectorists’ starring Toby Jones, Mackenzie Crook, Diana Rigg and others, will recognise the styling of the amateur archaeologists – all looking like rumpled would be Indiana Jones’s! Very English.
In the East Riding of Yorkshire hiring fairs were held around this time. It was also called Pack-Rag Day as servants carried their clothes to their new place of work.
A hiring fair is how Gabriel Oak is hired by Batheseba Everdene in ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ by Thomas Harding. They were often also held at Michaelmas, and in Warwickshire called ‘the Mop’. See my post on the Mop here.
First Published on 22nd November 2022, Republished on 22nd November 2023
The frosty month of the French revolutionary calendar.
The rational calendar (which we will deal with later in another post) divided the year into 12 30 day months, plus 5 days for end of year festivities. Leap year every 4 years.
Weeks were 10 days long, 3 per month. Days were named first day, second day up to tenth day. There were ten hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. But this last part didn’t last very long, french people really objected to their day being mucked up.
Revolutionary period pocket watch
The Revolutionary Year was adopted in 1793 but began retrospectively from September 22nd, 1792 when the Republic was proclaimed.
My French correspondent tells me that, therefore, the First Republic started on: Le premier Vendémiaire de l’an 1.
Napoleon gave it up in 1806.
First published November 21st 2022, Republished on November 21st 2023
He was killed with an arrow by Vikings from the Great Heathen Army in 869. He was trying to convert them to Christianity, and they were trying to do the opposite, so, fed up, they tied him to a tree, shot him full of arrows and then beheaded him.
Afterwards, the English set up a search party for him, and as they passed nearby the head shouted ‘Here.Here. Here.’ So they were able to retrieve his head. His remains were eventually taken to Bury which was named Bury St Edmunds after him and which became one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in England.
As a Royal martyr he was, with St Edward the Confession, the saint of the monarchy. Being Kings themselves they could explain to St Peter why the King had to undertake actions which might be strictly against the Ten Commandments, and thus speed the King through to heaven from purgatory.
St Edmund Lombard Street (church at bottom left) Agas Map 16th Century
The City of London has a church dedicated to St Edmund, King and Martyr. It is in Lombard Street, by coincidence right above the South West corner of the Roman Forum. First mentioned in 1292, and rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London.
November 20th Also the day to grow garlic
Set garlic and beans, at St Edmund the King The moon in the wane, therefore hangeth a thing.
Quoted in Perpetual Almanac of Folklore Charles Kightly
Garlic ….. mingled with soft cheese ‘stauncheth’ the falling down of humours called catarrh and so is good against hoarseness’.
William Turner Herbal 1568
First Published Nov 20th 2022. Republished Nov 20th 2023
Gervase Markham Hungers Prevention: or, the Whole Art of Fowling by Water and Land. (Printed, London: for Francis Grove, 1655).
This was the period of the year for ‘Night-fowling’ Gervase Markham wrote a whole book about it in the 17th Century. It was called Hungers Prevention: or, the Whole Art of Fowling by Water and Land. (Printed London: for Francis Grove, 1655).
In it, he tells the reader to go to a stubble field in November when the air is mild and the moon not shining. There take a dolorous low bell, and net. Spread the net over the stubble where there may be fowl, ring the bell, light fires of dry straw, and the fowl will fly and become entangled in the net.
Title illustration from Gervase Markham Hungers Prevention: or, the Whole Art of Fowling by Water and Land. (Printed London: for Francis Grove, 1655).
November 19th is also World Toilet Day, which is a significant development target for the world as it impacts badly on women in those areas where decent hygiene cannot be guaranteed.
First published Nov 19th 2022. Republished Nov 19th 2023
A silhouette of a Zeppelin caught in searchlights over the City of London
Following Martinmass, farmers used to slaughter a good many of their animals because of the difficulty of feeding them during the winter. So this was the time to make sausages from all that meat and guts. Tudor Sausage recipe
Random Sausage Fact: Sausages were severely rationed in Germany in World War 1 because they used nearly 200,000 cattle guts to make gasbags for each of the Zeppelins that bombed London. This made them very difficult to shoot down as the gas was held in so many separate bags.
The second is from November 17th and is about St Cecilia and the London Proms, which you will find below:
St. Cecilia
St Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians. She was martyred in Rome in the Second or Third Century AD. The story goes that she was married to a non-believer, and during her marriage ceremony she sang to God in her heart (hence her affiliation with musicians). She then told her husband, that she was a professed Virgin, and that if he violated her, he would be punished. She said she was being protected by an Angel of the Lord who was watching over her. Valerian, her husband, asked to see the Angel. So Cecilia told him to go to the Third Milestone along the Appian Way, where he would be baptised by Pope Urban 1 and would then see the Angel. He followed her advice, was converted and he and his wife were, later on, martyred.
The Church in Rome, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, is said to be built on the site of her house, and has 5th Century origins. My friend, Derek Gadd, recently visited and let me use these photographs:
St Cecilia in London
There is a window dedicated to her in the Holy Sepulchre Church-without-Newgate, In London, opposite the site of the infamous Newgate Prison. Henry Wood, one of our most famous conductors and the founder of the Promenade Concerts, played organ here when he was 14. In 1944, his ashes were placed beneath the window dedicated to St Cecilia and, later, the Church became the National Musician’s Church.
The memorial to Henry Wood at St Sepulchre is engraved:
This window is dedicated to the memory of Sir Henry Wood, C.H., Founder and for fifty years Conductor of THE PROMENADE CONCERTS 1895-1944. He opened the door to a new world Of sense and feeling to millions of his fellows. He gave life to Music and he brought Music to the People. His ashes rest beneath.
The Concerts are now called the BBC Proms and continue an 18th and 19th Century tradition of, originally, outdoor concerts, and then indoor promenade concerts. At the end of the 19th Century, the inexpensive Promenade Concerts were put on to help broaden the interest in classical music. Henry Wood was the sole conductor.
Czech conductor Jiří Bělohlávek described the Proms as “the world’s largest and most democratic musical festival”.
The Eight-week Festival is held at the Royal Albert Hall. It moved here during World War 2 after the original venue, the Queen’s Hall, was destroyed in the Blitz in May 1941.
The anniversary was celebrated in London with bonfires and bell-ringing, lighted fire-barrels were rolled along Cheapside. It was, in a way, the precursor to Guy Fawkes Day (1605 onwards). Protestants celebrated it with such joy as it was the end of the reign of her sister Queen Mary I. ‘Bloody’ Mary, as she was named by Protestants, had 287 Protestants burnt at the stake, mostly relatively ordinary people: clergy, apprentices, artisans, and agricultural workers. 60 were women; 67 were Londoners: the majority were of the younger generation, and most from the South East of England.
The executions were overwhelmingly unpopular, ghastly exhibitions of brutality, and in 1555 the weather was very wet so the burnings an even slower form of torture. The savagery was blamed on the old religion and particular the people who came over with Mary’s Spanish husband. Ironically, Philip, in fact, urged caution. When Mary refused to be as lenient to religious dissidents as she was to political ones, he suggested they should, at least, be in private. She felt that as immortal souls were at risks the public nature of the death was a useful deterrent.
So, when, three years later, in 1558, in the early hours of the 17th November (6am) Queen Mary died, London rejoiced. An old regime, a foreign regime, a Catholic regime was sweep away by a young Queen (Elizabeth was 25), with a young Court sworn to protect the new Protestant religion.
Soon, Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s outsold all other books printed except the Bible, and enthusiasm for religious reform morphed into anti-Catholic intolerance.
One of the martyrs in the book is Thomas Tomkins, a weaver and a Londoner from Shoreditch.
Tomkins was a humble but godly man who was kept imprisoned by Bishop Bonner, the Bishop of London, at his Palace at Fulham. Here he was beaten. The Bishop personally beat him around the face and ripped off part of his beard. The beatings continued for six months. Finally, exasperated at his failure to persuade the weaver of his error, Bonner burnt Tomkins hand with a lighted taper until ‘the veins shrunk and the sinews burst’. Bonner wanted to give him a foretaste of the fires of heresy, indeed the very fires of Hell that the weaver faced.
But nothing would avail; Tomkins, simple man that he was, would not accept that bread was made into flesh. (Transubstantiation). He would not say that which he did not believe. So he met his end at Smithfield by fire with his bandaged hand in the reign of Queen Mary on 16th March 1555.
St Margaret should be better known in England because of her important rule in the blood line of the English Monarchy.
She was the grand daughter of King Edmund Ironside (Edmund II of England). When Edmund died, King Canute became King, and Margaret and her family went into exile in Hungary. In 1057 she came back to England, but had to flee when William the Conqueror took over. She went to Scotland and in 1070 married Malcolm III ( Mael Column Mac Donnchada).
Malcolm was the son of King Duncan (murdered by Macbeth (see my book Divorced, Beheaded, Died for a short biography)). In 1040, Malcolm fled to England, but returned with English help to defeat Macbeth at Dunsinane. After his first wife’s death he married the deeply pious Margaret. Their court was very influenced by Saxon and Norman ways. She helped aligned the Church more closely with the rest of Christendom, and brought up her children piously.
St Margaret’s Chapel at Edinburgh Castle. Built by her son King David. (Photos by the author)
The Royal couple had 6 sons and two daughters. Her son David became one of the most influential Kings of Scotland; introduced Norman ideas of feudalism, and created Boroughs to strengthen the Scottish economy. So, in many ways, Margeret had an influential role in ‘modernising’ the Scottish Monarchy from its Gaelic Clan based structure to a more European style that was ruled from the Lowlands and spoke the Scots version of English, rather than the Gaelic version of the Celtic branch of languages.
She died on 16th November 1093 AD and is ‘particularly noted’ for concern for orphans and poor people. There is an annual procession to her altar, followed by Evensong at Durham Cathedral on the following day. She was buried at Dunfermline following the violent death of her husband. The Abbey has recently celebrated the 950th anniversary of Queen Margaret consecrating the site.
Margaret’s daughter, Matilda married the son of William the Conqueror, King Henry I. This marriage was important for the Normans, because it added a strong dose of English Royal blood to the French Norman Royal line. Their daughter was the formidable Empress Matilda, designated heir to the throne of England and founder of the Plantagenet line of English Kings and mother of Henry II.
She has a plausible claim to having been the first ruling Queen of England. But she was never crowned because of the disruption caused by the usurpation of the throne by King Stephen.
First Published on November 19th 2021. Revised on Nov 15th, 2023
Bhai Dooj is the day sisters and brothers celebrate a meal together to eat their favourite disches. often including their favourite dishes/sweets. This year (2023) it is on November 14th/15th.
It is part of Diwali which is a 5 day festival of lights, honouring the New Year. It honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and consists of lamps, fireworks and gatherings to exchange gifts and enjoy food together, and honoring community.
first published nov 6 2021, republished Nov 15th 2023
