The Past brought to Life
Traditionally, Yarrow has a myriad of uses (see thefreedictionary for a comprehensive list). It was used for wounds (aka ‘Soldier’s Woundwort’); staunches nose bleeds (aka ‘Nosebleed’); inflammations …. THE PAGE HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED TO A NEW NOVEMBER 13TH PAGE HERE.
Post First published on 14 November 2022, revised 13 November 2023 and transferred to new page on 13th November 2024
A late warm patch is now often called an ‘Indian Summer’. This term was first used in the United States in the 19th Century and may refer to a warm period in which Indigenous Americans could continue hunting.
Previously, in England, a warm patch in the Autumn was called a ‘St Martin Summer’ or ‘a Halloween Summer.’ St Martin’s Day is the 11th November, and is, in a normal year, the day around when the weather turns to feel wintry.
A warm spell is, in fact beneficial to many plants. The problem comes if it is followed by a quick cold spell. Plants need time to harden off to prepare to face cold weather. A warm winter will also allow a lot of insects to survive and so in the summer plants will be adversely affected by a plague of pests.
Four Hundred and One Years ago, on 8th November in 1623, the First Folio was registered at Stationer’s Hall near the publishing district around St Pauls Cathedral in London. It was actually called:
Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
It was put together by his actor friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell seven years after his death, and they wanted to replace all the corrupt editions of his plays and poems that had been
“stol’n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors”.
The true texts of his plays and poems “are now offer’d to your view cured, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” Wikipedia
In fact, the plays were ready early as they entered in to the catalogues for the Frankfurt Book festival to appear between April and October 1622,- and how amazing is it that, that festival is still the dream of any aspirant writer?
The First Folio offers plenty of proof that Shakespeare was the author of the plays. He left gold rings of remembrance to Heminge and Condell in his Will. They were part of his Players Company, and had worked together on many of the plays. The Folio has forewords by people extolling the virtues of the writer. Enough proof for any reasonable person.
Heminge and Condell are commemorated in the Garden of St Mary Aldermary behind the Guildhall, where they were Churchwardens, and not far from where Shakespeare was living in 1611. True friends.
There was a wonderful BBC festival of Shakespeare on in 2023/24 to celebrate. Here:
Intersex Day of Remembrance, also known as Intersex Solidarity Day, is an internationally observed civil awareness day. (Wikipedia).
First Published November 2024, Intersex day added Feb 2025. To be completed November 2025
I published the following post about Hardy’s Tree on 28th December 2022. Here, follows the original post and an update which suggests the tree and the gravestones were not erected by Thomas Hardy.
This is the day that Herod ordered the slaughter of the Innocents, or Childermas, and I am glad to see that my Grandson is now older than Herod’s prescription.
Hardy’s Tree in St Pancras Church, Camden, London has fallen down. Hardy was an architect and worked in London for a while, where one of his jobs was to supervise the clearance of the graveyard. Several poems of Hardy refer to the removal of graves from their original positions and in this case, the gravestones were set around an Ash tree that inspires many, including my Central St Martin’s students who used it in a project recently. So, I was shocked to read a Guardian article (since deleted) which noted the sad demise of the Tree.
Extracts from one of several Hardy Poems about moving graves and gravestones follow, but I need to update the post about the connection to Hardy. The Guardian has now got an article which suggests the connection with Hardy is a more recent one than previously thought (Guardian article).
I (and I think the Guardian) were alerted to this by the work of Lester Hillman, who wrote a Churchyard Guide and a recent pamphlet about the Tree, which is reported in ‘Context ISSN 1462-7574’. This is the Journal of the City of London Archaeological Society. Evidence proves that the Ash Tree dates to the 1930s, and that the mound of gravestones is from burials relocated from St Giles in the Fields, and therefore unlikely to have been in St Pancras at the time Hardy was responsible for clearing it.
So it is not ‘the’ Hardy Tree, but then nor was the tree at Sycamore Gap anything to do with Robin Hood. What it was, was a beautiful piece of nature, in a poignant setting. May she rest in peace.
The Levelled Churchyard
Thomas Hardy
O Passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaimed in fear,
I know not which I am.Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or porch or place
Where we have never lain!
Salon IF reported a shocking destruction in France – this is the report, verbatim from Salon IF issue 514.
Dozens of standing stones, erected over 7,000 years ago, have been demolished to make way for a DIY store near Carnac, in Brittany, in North West France. Some 37 stones, measuring between 0.5 – 1.5m tall, were removed despite the fact the site had long been on France’s National Archaeological Map. The stones, moreover, had been submitted to the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (although the application had not yet been approved).
The region of Carnac is famous for its ancient ‘menhir’ – heavy, raised standing stones. Indeed, the area is often described as ‘the French Stonehenge’, with over 3,000 stone megaliths at the two sites of Menec and Kermario. There, the stone columns are arranged in long, straight rows and, according to the Carnac Tourist Office, it is the largest gathering of this type of standing stone in the world.
The land at the centre of the recent controversy, along the Montauban activity zone, had been granted a building permit by the local mayor’s office in August 2022 and construction of the new store, ‘Mr Bricolage’, was already underway. According to local amateur archaeologist, Christian Obeltz, who had originally raised concerns about the ‘brutal developments’, a bulldozer destroyed the stones overnight.
The Regional Office of Cultural Affairs for Brittany, the body responsible for the protection of the monument, said ‘Given the uncertain and in any case non-major character of the remains, as revealed by
checks, damage to a site of archaeological value has not been established’, but Obeltz maintains that archaeological investigation into the area had not been sufficient.
‘The Chemin de Montauban site included two intersecting rows of small granite stelae, each spreading out over fifty meters in length. One had been exactly in its original place for 7,000 years,’ according to Obletz. ‘The small menhirs of the Chemin de Montauban were undoubtedly one of the oldest sets of stelae in the town of Carnac’ believed to date between 5480 and 5320 BC, ‘the highest dating obtained for a menhir in the west of France’.
It’s bad luck to buy, make or use a new broom in May because:
Sweep with a broom that is cut in May
You’ll sweep the head of the house away.
But you can give good luck to a friend by leaving a branch of hawthorn flowers on the doorstep. But other woody messages were not so friendly according to traditional verses:
Alder for a scrowler; pear for the fair
Nut for a Slut; plum for the glum
Bramble if she ramble; gorse for the whores
It is basically rhyming slang, so no great wisdom involved, also I’m not sure quite how some of the rhymes work, and it does seem rather at the expense of women.
Spring is time for a tansy, so time to bring out again the many stories behind this awesome plant. The tansy not flowers display a classical Fibonacci spiral, which is two counter-rotating logarithmic spirals.
Mrs Grieve in her Modern Herbal repeats the belief that their name derives from the Greek word for immortality ‘Athanaton’. This might be because they grow so well that in some areas they are proscribed they are so prolific. But Tansy was supposed to have been given to Ganymede by Zeus to make him immortal. And, they were used for preserving dead bodies from corruption. So, Tansy was placed in coffins and winding sheets and tansy wreaths placed with the dead.
Its toxicity means that it repels many insects, particularly, flies and ants, and so it was used as a medieval and early modern strewing herb. And yet there are other insects that love Tansy – it seems to have a dark side and a light side.
It was collected in August (along with meadowsweet or elder leaves) and strewn on the floors of houses (and the ‘thresh’ was held in by the threshold). But it was also placed between mattresses to keep away bugs. People rubbed meat with Tansy to keep flies off. It is now used as a natural protection for crops from insects to reduce the amount of artificial pesticides.
It was an important medical and culinary herb, said to be a substitute for nutmeg and cinnamon, and the leaves, shredded, as a flavouring for puddings and omelettes. At Easter ball games a Tansy Cake was the reward for the winners. It was symbolic of the bitter herbs eaten by the Israelites at Passover. Tansy was thought to be a very wholesome ingredient to eat after the sparsity of Lent and Winter, and voiding the body of the worms caused by eating too many fish. It was used for expelling worms from the stomachs of children.
Interestingly it contains thujone, which is also in Wormwood, the other main herb for expelling intestinal worms. Thujone can cause convulsions, liver and brain damage if too much is taken.
In the 14th Century it was used for treating wounds. It was thought to be useful both to induce abortions but also to help women conceive and to prevent miscarriages. Culpepper and Gerard suggests the root was a cure for gout.
Here is a recipe from the ‘The Closet of Kenelm Digby Opened‘ 1669. It was essentially a form of omelette. I would not try the recipe! In the BBC documentary “The Supersizers go … Restoration“, Sue Perkins suffered from the effects of the toxic tansy.
A TANSY (Do not try this at home!)
Take three pints of Cream, fourteen New-laid-eggs (seven whites put away)
one pint of juyce of Spinage, six or seven spoonfuls of juyce of Tansy, a
Nutmeg (or two) sliced small, half a pound of Sugar, and a little Salt.
Beat all these well together, then fryit in a pan with no more Butter then
is necessary. When it is enough, serve it up with juyce of Orange or slices
of Limon upon it.
Sir Kenelm Digby was a Catholic and a natural philosopher of some reputation. After his death an employee published his cookery book. His father was executed after the Gunpowder Plot, and he supported Charles 1st but found a way to work with Oliver Cromwell.
He made a great success of his idea of the ‘powder of sympathy’ – 29 editions of his book on the subject were sold. He found the powder in France and it was made with precise ‘astrological’ techniques. The most famous example of a suggested application for the powder was to win the competition for a method of working out longitude (in the 18th Century). Basically, a working method meant knowing the time, normally noon, in two different places. This allowed a triangle to be created between the two points and the Sun which allowed the distance between the two places to be discovered by triangulation. Clocks were not accurate enough (yet) to help so Digby’s famous powder of sympathy was suggested.
This is the method:
A wounded dog would be taken on board a ship, and a bandage from the wound would be left in London. At noon in London it would be sprinkled with the powder of sympathy. The dog on the ship would, perforce, yelp when the powder was administered on the bandage in London and so the Captain would know when it was noon in London! Digby was long dead when the application for the prize money was made and rejected.
‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel tells the story of the discovery of a clock-based method of calculating longitude.
Page moved to Good Friday page here
This week I received my copy of Old Moore’s Almanac. This is probably the best known Almanac in the Uk. It follows the format of Alamancs which have been published since the medieval period as I discussed in an earlier post about the Kalendar of Shepherds of the 15th Century. Almanacs became the third most popular book published in London.
Old Moore’s, which claims ancestry back to 1697, begins with a large tranche of predictions both for the world and for celebrities, based on astrology. 2024, Frances Moore says, is the ‘Year of Hope’. He says, ‘we may have a good time, [but] a severe money problem from elsewhere may surface to worry us’. Hedging his bets or what?!
He predicts astonishing advances in technology, and thinks that Britain is in a good place to profit from these advances in healthcare, IT, and Robotics.
We need good, old-fashioned leadership to get through challenging times, with Pluto in Aquarius and Saturn through Pisces, we should be steered to ‘safe management.’
Wokery will lead us down a spiral to weakness. However, the Tories will remain disorganised with the country receptive to caring Socialism, with an upsurge in local power. The UK will become a more caring society.
Old Moore hints that Putin might be indicted. The US will have deep financial and social problems. The election might be close, but he also suggests Trump’s support might be on the wane.
There is a page for each month, noting the calendar events such as Epiphany, Burns Night, Australia Day, and other days filled with very random notable events chosen to represent that day through history- 2nd Jan Conquest of Granada 1462. 9th Jan Duchess of Cambridge b. 1982, 13th Jan Trump impeached 2021 etc. It also gives a forecast for the Month. January is likely to see constitutional change, Old Moore predicts which seems very unlikely.
Next are columns for Sun rise and set, high water at London Bridge, moon at London. And a weather column. (Early cold spell followed by normal rainy pattern), which isn’t wrong yet.
It has pages of predictions for celebrities such as King Charles III, which suggests ‘communication problems’ in the family. Who could have guessed that! Anton Du Beke, Adele. Zelenskyy, whose entry suggests success will be achieved only by diplomacy; otherwise the stubbornness predicted by the stars will lead to a long stalemate.
Then there are charts for each star sign. Towards the back are astrological help for winning on Horse Racing, Greyhound Racing, Football pools, Bingo, Lottery, Lucky Lotto, Euro Millions and pages for sowing and planting times for gardening by the moon, and a Guide for Anglers.
£5.41 good value, or is it just cheap? It was £3.50 in 2022.
Photos of the River Lee and Mrs Towser (the narrow boat with the orange gaz locker) by Harriet Salisbury.
I have been busy moving my narrow boat up the River Lee to Stansted Abbotts to have her bottom seen to.
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