"Oh poo!" you say?

As I've no doubt mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Renaissance magazine. I devour every issue as soon as it arrives. It's largely intended for devotees of living history, specifically those who participate in Renaissance fairs. That aspect of the publication doesn't appeal to me, but their historical background and news items are fantastic. I end up tucking at least one article per issue into a research database (by photographing and emailing it to Evernote).

I dog-eared two articles in the April/May 2013 issue: one on the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in England (drool, some day I hope to go), and the other on that most secretive of topics—the privy.

I was taken aback by this remark by a travelling Italian priest in 1518:

"Whereas in Germany there are one or two tin chamber pots to every bed (in Flanders they are made of brass and very clean), in France for want of any alternative, one has to urinate on the fire. They do this everywhere, by night and day, and indeed, the greater the nobleman or lord, the more readily or openly he will do it."

I'd read of this practice — I have such a scene in my last novel, Mistress of the Sun, when a child is overtaken with the need to relieve herself — but frankly, I didn't think it so commonplace.

L'apres Dinee des Anglais

The French, in turn, are reported to have been horrified by the British habit of men relieving themselves at the dining table:

English gentlemen, known for their prodigious drinking habits, were wont to relieve themselves where they were – in the dining room, for instance, or in a common room of a public inn – where they did not always aim straight and true (as the young man at left), much to the chagrin and disbelief of French travelers, some of whom wrote about this unsanitary habit. (As reported in a review of the book Privies and Water Closets by David J. Eveleigh on the excellent blog, Jane Austen's World.)

Some details from the Renaissance magazine article that may show up in one of my novels:

"Night men"—who cleaned out the cesspits—were well paid, as much as skilled tradesmen. 

Refreshing a privy with juniper. 

One sometimes sees images of several privy holes all in a row. I have a friend who restored a house in Mexico, formerly a monastery. What's now their breakfast nook was once a three-hole privy. I suspect this was a social time. (Let's see this in fiction!)

Of course people would build their privy over a river or stream, but what to do in town? Some built a privy on a sort of bridge connecting two houses, emptying into an alley. (Gross.)

The wealthy, of course, often had more elegant solutions ...

16th century water closet

... when they weren't using the fireplace, that is. ;-(

18th century Nightcart Man. Illustration: Wikipedia

Coincidently, just this week there is a post on this subject — "Secrets of a Roman Sewer" — on the wonderful historical blog Wonders & Marvels. There is a great deal to be learned from "poo," but I'll leave it at that.

I know this subject seems like an unpleasant diversion from writing about a glamorous Hoyden or Firebrand, but when writing about such a person in fiction, one rather needs to know! As well, I confess: my husband and I had an outdoor privy when we moved to our log cabin in the country, decades ago. I think of it with great affection: as a mother of toddlers I would enjoy a quiet minute or two on what my own characters refer to as "the necessary."


Sandra Gulland


Coming in March, 2014: THE SHADOW QUEEN
"Truly magnificent and an absolute joy to read." — International bestseller, M.J. Rose
"Masterful." — Tasha Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of Death in the Floating City
"An epic feast for the senses." — Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Aviator's Wife


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Bacon's Castle

Recently I attended a seminar on 17^th-century architecture in Surry, Virginia. Bacon's Castle was built by Arthur Allen, a wealthy merchant, in 1665. It's the oldest documented brick building in Virginia, and one of only three surviving structures of Jacobean architecture (named after King James I of England) in the western hemisphere. Allen died in 1669, and his son Major Arthur Allen II inherited the property.

During the era, there was a bit of a stigma against native-born Virginians, and Major Allen was educated in England. He returned to his home and built English-style gardens and became a member of the House of Burgesses (elected representatives of the English colonists).

About September 1676, the house was seized by Nathaniel Bacon's men during Bacon's Rebellion and fortified. The men retained control of the house for over three months until their cause waned, but the occupation is how the house gained its name. Bacon never lived there, nor was he known to have visited.

For the seminar, I attended a slide presentation by Nick Luccketti on historic structures. Mr. Luccketti is an archaeologist for the James River Institute for Archaeology and had participated in excavations of Bacon's Castle in the past. He later sifted through a box of treasures, showing us some of the finds they had uncovered during their excavations, which included of all things a couple of 17^th-century eggs among the pieces of jugs and wine bottles.

Ed Chappell, an archaeologist with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, led us on a tour around the house, pointing out the details of the unique architecture. A couple of the notable features include the triple-stacked chimneys, and the compass roses (a design that displays the cardinal directions) carved into many of the cross beams. As we went through the rooms, our guide pointed out where walls had been added during the 18^th century.

My favorite room was a particular one with a distinctive 17^th-century look. It had a larger fireplace than the modernized 18^th-century rooms, a canopied bed, and opaque windows. The entire environment gave me many ideas for my upcoming novel, The Dreaming: Wind Talker. I also seemed to have been the only person in attendance scribbling away in a notebook throughout the seminar.

Kim Murphy
www.KimMurphy.net

Charles II-The Lady Who Might Have Been His Queen

Henriette Catherine of Nassau

No, not Frances Stuart, who refused the king’s advances and ran off with the Duke of Richmond. This lady appeared much earlier, when Charles II was in exile during the 1650’s.

Henriette Catherine was the second to youngest daughter of Frederik Hendrik of Orange  and Amalia of Solms-Braunfels. The House of Orange had already provided a bridegroom for Charles I’s eldest daughter, Mary, Princess Royal. One of Frederick and Amalia’s daughters, Louise Henrietta, had tentatively been suggested as a bride for Prince Charles, but she married the Elector of Brandenburg.

Around 1656, while staying in Bruges during his exile, Charles was attracted to the eighteen-year-old Henriette Catherine of Orange, who had already shown her strong spirit in refusing to comply with a betrothal her parents had made for her in infancy to a Friesian prince because of her ‘unconquerable aversion’ to him.

Henriette Catherine and Charles wrote to each other diligently with Charles using a code name ‘infanta’. He extolled the lady’s virtues and the contents of her letters to Lord Taaffe, and even ordered six pairs of gloves from Paris for ‘my best friend’. On Shrove Tuesday, Charles planned to eat pancakes and draw valentines with the women, while privately drinking ‘the infanta’s health. ‘For I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be lov’d of all the sex.’

When Cromwell died two years later, even the Dowager princess of Orange, Henriette Catherine’s mother and Mary of Orange’s mother-in-law, imagined that the penniless emigree courting her daughter would soon be reinstated as a powerful king. Charles himself was equally confident in his imminent return to England, and he issued a formal proposal for Henriette Catherine's hand.

His widowed sister, Mary of Orange disapproved of the match, as did the dowager Queen Henrietta Maria, who had embarked on a romance with Harry Jermyn, a liaison of which Charles fervently and openly disapproved. Despite the change of regime in England, there still appeared no sign that Charles was about to regain his throne.

Henriette Catherine’s mother, realised they had been too hasty, and Charles’ approaches were reconsidered. The following year, a new suitor was selected for Henriette Catherine, John George of Anhalt-Dessau and they were married in September 1659.

Charles was philosophical and told Lord Taaffe that his fondness for Henriette Catherine inspired in him a real wish for her true happiness and he would not interfere. Henriette Catherine married her prince and embarked on a happy thirty-four year marriage that produced ten children.

Frederick and Amalia of Nassau with their daughters

How different the history of England might have been had Charles married this Protestant, and fertile, Dutch Princess. 

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Anita Davison is a Historical Fiction Author whose latest release, Royalist Rebel, is published under the name Anita Seymour by Claymore Press.
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Were Hildegard von Bingen's Visions Caused by Migraines?

When I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch.  

--Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias, translated by Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B., and Jane Bishop


Neurologist Oliver Sacks believes that the dazzling visions of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), the great Benedictine abbess and polymath, were caused by migraines. Hildegard struggled with chronic health problems. In Scivias, her first book of visionary theology, she describes being bedridden when she received the divine command to write and speak about her visions that she had kept secret since earliest childhood. Sacks maintains that the symptoms she describes are identical to those of migraine sufferers. He also states that the concentric rings of circles in the illuminations of her visions are reminiscent of a migraine aura.

Critics of this theory will point out that Hildegard, in her medical treatise Causae et Curae, described the migraine in detail but never connected this diagnosis to herself. Moreover she herself did not paint the illuminations that illustrated her visions. So the rings of light could be the illuminator’s stylistic interpretation and unrelated to any alleged visual hallucinations on Hildegard’s part. The migraine sufferers I know in my own life regrettably report that they’ve never beheld wondrous visions.

Thus, the migraine theory remains speculative. In our hyper-rationalistic age, I think we are too hasty to “diagnose” historical figures with readily identifiable conditions—i.e., “Mozart was autistic.” One thing we do know is that Hildegard lived in an age of faith. She and those around her sincerely believed her visions were real. Hildegard’s epic trilogy of visionary theology relates her revelations of the human struggle for redemption and imparts how the fallen world can be reconciled with the created world. Therein lies her genius, not in any catalogue of physical symptoms.

In Scivias, Hildegard describes her visions in her own words:

The visions I saw I did not perceive in dreams, or sleep, or delirium, or by the eyes of the body, or by the ears of the outer self, or in hidden places; but I received them while awake and seeing with a pure mind and the eyes and the ears of the inner self, in open places, as God willed it. How this might be is hard for mortal flesh to understand.

Long celebrated as a saint in her native Germany, Hildegard was finally canonized in May 2012. In October 2012 she was elevated to Doctor of the Church, a rare and solemn title reserved for theologians who have significantly impacted Church doctrine.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 1662

Until the late twentieth century, a member of the Church of England could travel anywhere in the world, attend any Church of England church and be guaranteed of knowing that the service they would be attending was word for word the same as that of their own regular place of worship. On every pew of the church in India, Africa or Australia there would be a familiar, well thumbed copy of the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 1662 (commonly known as the BCP).

I have in my own possession an 1824 Book of Common Prayer belonging to my ancestor "John Hill of Appleby", annotated in a spidery hand with the dates of services attended in other parishes and who preached that day. In a particularly devout stage of my growing up, I used Grandfather John's prayer book in my own church in far flung Melbourne. The words of the "modern" service I attended were exactly the same as those in the 1824 book which in turn would have been totally familiar to a worshipper in 1663. 

John Hill's 1824 BCP with original kid cover

What kept me amused during longer, more tedious sermons were the additional services, dating from 1662, not included in the modern Book of Common Prayer such as a "Comminaton or Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements against sinners" (to be used on the first day of Lent) and a "Form of Prayer for the 30th day of January" (with fasting) for "King Charles the Martyr", a Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving "For Having put an end to the Great Rebellion" and so on. 



The BCP did not spring from the printing presses in 1662 without a considerable history preceding it. Until the Reformation of the English Church beginning under Henry VIII, the form of service used in worship was the Latin rite, the forms of which were found in the Missal (the Communion), the Breviary, the Manual and the Pontifical, accompanied by prescribed music or chant found in the Gradual (for masses) and the Antiphoner (for chants).

Cranmer's Prayer Book of 1549

In 1549, in the reign of Edward VI, the first English language prayer book was produced (the legacy of Archbishop Cranmer) containing, for the first time, all the services of the Church - Mass, Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation and Funerals. An amended edition appeared in 1552, only to be banned on the ascension of Catholic Queen Mary I in 1553. Elizabeth I reinstated the 1552 version and it was further modified by James I in 1604 following a conference he convened (and presided over) at Hampton Court. 

The puritans, who had been gaining strength in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign sent representatives. They strenuously demanded the discontinuance of the Sign of the cross in Baptism, of bowing at the name of Jesus, of the ring in marriage, and of the rite of confirmation. They sought to have the  words “priest” and “absolution”  expunged from the Prayer Book, and the wearing of the surplice should be made optional. None of these points were conceded.

The ascenscion of Charles I to the throne and the increasing perception of a Romanisation" of the Church of England was one of the causes of the English Civil War.  Charles I was defeated at Naseby and in 1645, Parliament repealed the statutes of Edward VI and of Elizabeth that had enjoined the use of the Book of Common Prayer. It was decreed that only such divine service should be lawful as accorded with what was called the Directory, a manual of suggestions with respect to public worship adopted by the Presbyterian party as a substitute for the ancient liturgy.

In 1660 Charles II returned to the throne of England (one of the Services of Thanksgiving in the 1662 version of the BCP to be held on January 29th) and immediately discussion began on an appropriate form of worship for the restored "Church of England". In his personal life, Charles leaned towards Catholocism (and is rumoured to have converted in his last years).  He was, however, a consummate politician and in order to mend his broken country, divided as it was between the Presbyterians who had held sway in the years of the Interregnum and the traditional churchmen of his father's reign.  He did what all good policitians do, he formed a committee.

Early in the spring of 1661 the King issued a royal warrant summoning an equal number of representatives of both parties—21 Churchmen (consisting of 12 Bishops and 9 other clergy) and 21 Presbyterians (12 principal men and their lesser coajutors). The "Savoy Conference" convened in April 1661 at the old Savoy Palace on the Strand. The canny King had secretly treated with both sides of the table and while the Bishops entered the conference, confident in the King's favour, the Presbyterians believed they too had the King's ear. However "possession is 9/10 of the law" and the party holding the upper hand were naturally the Episcopalians (the Bishops). They had only to profess themselves satisfied with the Prayer Book as it stood, in order to throw the 

Presbyterians into the position of assailants, and defense is always easier than attack. The Presbyterians took up the challenge and set to work at formulating their objections (producing their "Exceptions to the Book of Common Prayer"). They appointed Richard Baxter, the most famous of their number, to show what could be done in the way of making a better manual of worship than the proposed Book of Common Prayer. Baxter, may have been a wise man but his attempt to undertake to construct a prayer book within a fortnight was a disaster...the first sentence alone contained 83 words. 

The four months allowed for the conference ran out and the conference disbanded with no resolution having been reached. In the meantime the Convocation, the recognized legislature of the Church of England, had begun to sit, and the bishops undertook a complete revision of the Prayer Book with slight regard to what they had been hearing from their critics at the Savoy. The bulk of their work, which included, it is said, more than six hundred alterations, most of them of a verbal character and of no great importance, was accomplished within the compass of a single month passed by the Convocation and approved by Parliament.  It is that revision that became the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 1662.

The House of Lords Journal records that "...the Act of Uniformity was given Royal Assent on 19 May 1662. The final clause of the Act of Uniformity stated that: "...XXXII. Provided also, That the Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies of this Church of England, together with the Form and Manner of Ordaining and Consecrating Bishops, Priests and Deacons, heretofore in Use, and respectively established by Act of Parliament in the first and eighth Years of Queen Elizabeth, shall be still used and observed in the Church of England, until the Feast of St. Bartholomew, which shall be in the Year of our Lord God one thousand six hundred sixty and two…" 

On St. Bartholomew's Day (24 August 1662) the new Book of Common Prayer came into use and that  single book stood alone and essentially unaltered for three hundred years until the reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I recall the outcry that occurred in my own church when the New Australian Prayer Book was introduced. They had dared to change the Lord's Prayer (!) and I have noticed that, even forty years later, the tendency, in times of stress, is to revert to the 1662 version of the Lord's Prayer ("Our father which art in heaven...") and it is probably that version that most English speakers over the age of 40 can still recite word for word. 

Charles II Warrant of 1661

For three hundred years the citizens of the United Kingdom and its colonies and empire, were born, confirmed, married and died according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer and took comfort in the familiar words of Holy Communion or Matins (a service now long gone). Short of the Bible, there must be few books with such an influence on the world.

It is probably one of the lesser known facts about me that I am a Lay Preacher in the Anglican Church of Australia and the idea for this post came to me while I was leafing through the current prayer book during one of the vicar's sermons! Bring back the service for King Charles the Martyr I say!


*As a young law student I quickly learned that JUDGEMENT (spelt with an "e") was the correct spelling for judgements of God, a JUDGMENT (without an "e") is confined to the secular world.
**I am indebted to the Reverend William Reed, Rector of Grace Church, New York for his 1892 dissertation,  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER for this article.