Author Archives: JuliaH

About JuliaH

I teach history courses for the Workers' Educational Association as well as giving talks on various history topics across Yorkshire and the Midlands as well as talks about the history and creation of cross stitch samplers and blackwork embroidery.

Hair Powder – taxing fashion

Posted on by
1
James Gillray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons- “Leaving Off Powder, or A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea”, March 10th 1795 

When Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 he brought with him a French fashion for wigs. Apparently the Merry Monarch’s uncle, Louis XIII, favoured them to hide his baldness and the rest is history. Wigs were rather expensive so an alternative was hair powder. By the eighteenth century if you aspired to be properly turned out you, or your wig, needed to be doused in hair lotion and then scented hair powder which stuck to the pomade.

In 1786, William Pitt the Younger introduced a tax on hair powder, perfumes and other preparations for beautification and fashion. It proved so effective that he introduced a second tax on hair powder in 1795 (The Duty of Hair Powder Act) to help fund Britain’s campaign in Europe against the French. From 5 May 1795, if you wanted to look like an accident in a BeRo factory (other flour brands are available etc) you would have to pay a guinea (21 shillings) at a stamp office for which you would receive a licence to powder your hair. In theory sellers of such cosmetics would not hand over the goods until they clapped eyes on the licence.

Obviously Pitt wasn’t completely unreasonable. A father with two unmarried daughters at home could get a discount on the amount he had to pay and you didn’t have to pay a guinea for each servant – good news for parents with teenagers everywhere as well as for people with footmen! You did not have to pay the fee if you were in service to the Crown, a member of the royal family, a vicar or in the armed services below a certain rank. And clearly if you had the time to wander around with a ton of flour/starch in your hair then you were part of the social elite in any event. If you couldn’t afford the guinea then, quite frankly, in the eyes of some, you shouldn’t be rocking the look anyway.

Unfortunately for Pitt’s calculations, rather than coughing up for their certificate, Britain’s wealthy and fashion conscious opted to stop using hair powder. Those who were caught wearing hair powder without a certificate faced a fine of £20 with an award of half the fine going to snitches who informed on the unlicensed dedicated followers of fashion. Those who did pay up were rather mockingly called ‘guinea pigs’ while proud male refusers of the new tax, ironically often members of the Whig party, had their hair cut short. Although it was sometimes hard to tell whether they objected to the tax or felt some sympathy for the revolutionary French. In either event short hair had arrived to stay. The law was eventually repealed during the nineteenth century.

Of course, if you’re smiling at this particular post, you may want to consider that today we pay VAT on most things and of course, it had its origins in Pitt’s hated stamp duties on every day items including hair powder.

And no, you really don’t want to know why I’ve suddenly and somewhat randomly started posting about a period in history which up until now I have largely avoided.

Roman maps in Britain

Posted on by
Reply
A plan of Rome showing fragments of the Forma Urbis, drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and published in Le Antichità Romane (‘Roman Antiquities’) in c. 1756. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Evidence of Imperial Rome’s charting of Britain comes in the form of the Peutinger Table, the Antonine itineraries and the Ravenna Cosmography. They are copies taken from earlier maps, tables and itineraries. The truth is that there is currently no, known, example in existence of a Roman map made in England unless you include the Rudge Cup which is thought to depict Hadrian’s Wall. However, Roman engineers and surveyors must have been present in relatively large numbers to lay out roads, forts and settlements.

Medieval copies – complete with errors of transcription are what remains and fragments of maps discovered elsewhere in the empire – and of course it’s always good if the aforementioned map is etched on stone as the materials tends to survive better than papyrus or parchment. There’s a fragment of a stone map in marble depicting the suburbs of Rome The Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan of Rome was originally 18 X 13 m when it was carved in the third century and placed in the Temple of Peace on the orders of Septimus Severus. Today it’s a jigsaw of more than 1,000 pieces with most of it missing. What the plan was used for is another matter entirely!

And while we’re on the subject of those military engineers it’s worth recalling that the Vatican hs a copy of a Roman document from the Corpus Agrimensorum which is a set of documents about surveying, some of them even include bird’s eye view maps which give an approximation of the landscape as well as planning for things such as allocation of land to military veterans.

Clearly there were maps and plans and as one of Rome’s 44 or so provinces, Britannia – or at least parts of it- will have been similarly recorded. But aside from the medieval copies historians and archaeologists initially had to rely on reconstructions made by men like William Stukeley in the eighteenth century. His interest in the past led him to create a series of detailed plans and drawings – unfortunately he was not applying modern archeological rigour to his work and so his plans of camps and towns are not always accurate. One of the places he mapped, Little Chester in Derby, or Derventio, still retained a wall above ground level at the time he mapped it. Today York Archeology have used Stukeley’s map – and modern LiDAR to gain a clearer understanding of what the fort once looked like and to decide where an archeological dig might best be located.

York Archeology

Barber, Peter. (ed.) The Map Book

Parker, Philip, History of Britain in Maps

The Tabula Peutingeriana

Posted on by
Reply

Known as Peutinger’s Tabula or the Peutinger Table it shows the layout of the Roman Empire’s Road network.  Stretching across Europe, North Africa, India, Asia, and parts of the Middle East it very sadly does not include Britain which suggests that a section of the map did not either did not survive antiquity or the early Middle Ages. The version that exists today dates from about 1200 and is a copy of an early scroll, made by a monk in Colmar, which seems to date to about AD400 and which in turn was a copy of an early map. It can today be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna but is too delicate to be put on display.

Rather than looking like a modern road map it bears a greater resemblance to the London Underground map because of its schematic nature. The map was designed to be used with Roman ‘itineraries’ which identified locations and the distances between therm in typically efficient manner. The most important of the Empire’s cities – Rome, Constantinople and Antioch are decorated so that they are easy to find and then journeys can be calculated from and to these locations. In total there are 555 cities on the map as well as more than 3,000 other place names. These correspond with elements of the Antonine Itinerary.

The scroll was rediscovered in a library in Worms in 1494 and was bequeathed to Konrad Peutinger in 1508, although its not entirely certain whether the scroll was acquired by legitimate means. The map was first published in 1598 but rather distressingly Peutinger took pains to hide where the map originated when his friend Conrad Celtes ‘acquired’ it. It sounds like a novel waiting to happen if you ask me!

Today Peutinger’s Table can be explored online:

https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/space/tpeut.htm

Barber, Peter. (ed.). The Map Book.(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

l

Amesbury Abbey and Priory

Posted on by
Reply

Queen Aelfthryth founded a nunnery at Amesbury in 979 to atone for her sins – the murder of Edward the Martyr while he was visiting his step-mother at Corfe to ensure that her own son Æthelred (the Unready) became king. Until Æthelred reached adulthood it placed Aelfthryth in a position of considerable power. Whether she had a hand in killing her step-son or not, she founded two abbeys at about the same time. The second was at Wherwell. Amesbury may have been located on the site of an earlier monastic house. It was written by Sir Thomas Malory, for those of you who like Arthurian tales, that Queen Guinevere became abbess at the first of the monastic foundations upon the site.

Amesbury was mentioned in the Domesday book but in 1177 Henry II refounded the nunnery with nuns from Fontevraud. The old nuns were required to co-operate with the change but could, if they wished, be transferred to a different nunnery. Unfortunately things were not so clear cut. The existing abbess did not depart without a fight. She and thirty of her sisters were expelled – apparently they all led scandalous lives- and the abbey became a priory – a daughter house of Fontevraud.

Eleanor of Brittany, Henry II’s granddaughter, was during the reign of her uncle, Richard the Lionheart, a very marriageable young woman indeed. However, when her Uncle John ascended the throne, and personally murdered her brother Arthur of Brittany (who actually should have inherited being the son of John’s older brother Geoffrey) her situation deteriorated. John kept her a prisoner as did his son, Henry III. By the time she died she had been in custody for thirty-nine years. She was buried in Amesbury. The priory had long established royal links and its dedication to St Melor who was a Breton prince murdered by his wicked uncle was a reminder of her own life. There is no memorial to her now and nor is there a memorial to Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Province whose body was placed before Amesbury’s high altar after her death. She is known to have had her own quarters at the nunnery, having retired there in 1285, even though she was never a Benedictine nun.

It should be added that King John had other links with the priory. During the Barons’ revolt, he hid part of his treasury with the nuns while Henry III visited on several occasions and made several gifts to the sisters. Plantagenet links with the monastic foundation at Amesbury continued down the years. Edward I sent his youngest daughter, Mary, to become a nun there but she does not seem to have had a calling preferring travel, cards and potentially an affair with the Earl of Surrey to prayer. She cannot have been short of company. Many other noble girls were sent to Amesbury to receive an education. Isabel of Lancaster, Henry III’s great granddaughter, became a nun there before 1337 and ended up as prioress.

By the end of the medieval period, Amesbury was still wealthy – Cromwell ranked it in the top five nunneries in the country. A clock was commissioned during the fifteenth century that can still be found in the church.

Inevitably the Dissolution of the monasteries saw the end of Amesbury’s long monastic tradition. The nuns signed the surrender in 1539. The Seymour family acquired much of the foundations lands while the church remained as the parish church for the population of Amesbury. Edward Seymour, who was 1st Earl of Hertford at that time, had the abbey pulled down. Amesbury Abbey is today a seventeenth century mansion and nothing remains of the priory above ground, other than the church.

Romsey Abbey

Posted on by
2

In 907 Edward the Elder founded a nunnery at Romsey. His daughter, Elfleda, became its first abbess. The nunnery was rebounded some sixty years later after a period of decline by King Edgar who established a group of Benedictine nuns there. Not that it was all plain sailing- the Danes attacked it once in 993 forcing the nuns to seek sanctuary in Winchester. When they returned, the nunnery was rebuilt from stone and the nuns continued to welcome the daughters of kings and nobles so that they might be educated.

By 1086, another Saxon princess was abbess at Romsey. Edward the Exile’s daughter, Christina, who originally went into exile with her sister Margaret to Scotland was at Romsey. Also in residence, receiving a royal education, were her nieces Edith and Mary. Edith would eventually become Henry I’s wife and take the name Matilda. The nuns continued to thrive during the Norman period. Between 1120 and 1140 work began on the current building including the choir, transepts and a Lady Chapel. The nave which was created at this time was extended between 1150 and 1180.

The nunnery was not without its scandals. In 1160, the abbess, Mary (a daughter of King Stephen) left her post to marry a son of the Earl of Flanders by whom she had two daughters before, according to Matthew Paris, returning to the abbey.

In 1349 the Black Death wrought havoc. At the end, only nineteen of the nuns remained. But the end came in the sixteenth century with the dissolution of the monasteries. The abbey church was saved because it became Romsey’s parish church when the town paid Henry VIII’s commissioners £100.

It means that today, despite damage done during the English Civil War, that the church is a beautiful example of Norman architecture with some wonderful Saxon features remaining, including a Saxon rood (cross) inside the church and an even older eleventh century one outside the building. There is also a capital depicting King Alfred’s victory over the Vikings at the Battle of Edington. The sixteenth century reredos screen, that was once on display behind the altar, was removed after 1539 and repurposed, surviving the destruction that occurred in many other churches at the time. Also among the survivals is a fifteenth century cope that was later turned into an altar cloth. It is made from Italian green velvet with hand embroidered stars of silver thread.

A more recent and no less beautiful addition is the Florence Nightingale window which was installed in 2020.

Sackville leopards or ounces

Posted on by
Reply

In 1507 John Sackville married Margaret Boleyn of Blicking Hall. Their son Richard did rather well from the dissolution of the monasteries having a role in the Court of Augmentations. And since Margaret was Anne Boleyn’s aunt, it is perhaps not surprising that Elizabeth I, who valued her Boleyn kin, should give preferment to family after she ascended to the throne. Richard’s son, Thomas, was something of a favourite with Elizabeth and it was she who promoted the family to the peerage and granted them Knole. It was at about the same time that the Sackvilles, who’d arrived in England with the Conqueror, began to use a coat of arms supported by two snow leopards or ounces.

In 1604, Thomas was created Earl of Dorset but it was the reign of George I, in 1720, before the family attained its dukedom. The new earl rebuilt Knole, making sure to place his heraldic emblem in prominent positions in stone, wood and glass. His descendant, the duke, who added to the building, did the same. The screen in the Great Hall was carved by William Portington, Elizabeth I’s carpenter, Unsurprisingly it is topped by the Sackville coat of arms and, of course, the snow leopards.

The Sackvilles were using their heraldry to demonstrate their status – they were after all descended from someone who arrived with William the Conqueror – but the leopard has a hint of royalty about it…. and who doesn’t want to hint at that, especially if they’re building what was once described as the largest private residence in the country. Buildings associated with the family will often have an ounce on display somewhere, the almshouses in East Grinstead for example, as a code to remind people of its association with the Sackvilles.

Cathedrals in Kent

Posted on by
Reply

As regular readers are aware I do like a list. Some people might set off Munro-bagging but I prefer castles, cathedrals and stately stacks. At the moment I’m looking at cathedrals and trying to work out which cathedrals I need to visit that I’ve never been to before as well as those I have been to but which I now need to re-photograph thanks to the pesky external hard drive which still contains all my photos but which won’t let me look at them. Please don’t mention the importance of backing up. I’m still kicking myself.

The bishopric of Rochester was set up in 604, not that long after Augustine set up Canterbury. Sandwiched between London and Canterbury, it seems a bit of an unusual choice today but the Roman city was at an important river crossing. A small diocese, the medieval bishops, who were also Benedictine monks, were largely dependent on Canterbury. It was only in 1124 that a bishop was appointed who was not one of the Benedictines who lived in the monastery there. It was the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 that improved Rochester’s finances. Bishop Glanville founded a hospital for tired pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury. Then in 1201 William of Perth went to the Holy Land and was murdered on his way home by his servant in a wood near to Rochester. A woman was cured of madness having touched the murdered man’s body and William, who was a baker, promptly became a martyr and the subject of a Rochester’s own miracles and cults – bringing in more income. The revenue helped pay for building work.

Rochester’s prosperity ceased with the reign of King John and never recovered. Matters were not helped by the political intrigues of the town’s Benedictine monks. Rochester soon found itself deeply in debt. It was 1539 though, before the monks were finally evicted from the cathedral with the dissolution of the monasteries. Rochester’s most famous bishop, Fisher, had been executed four years previously for his refusal to accept the split from Rome.

It should be added that Canterbury, infinitely more wealthy, had its own problems during the medieval period, despite the wealth that poured in with the pilgrims following the brutal murder of Thomas Becket. It has also been rebuilt many times including by Simon of Sudbury who was murdered during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. In 1539 Becket’s shrine was dismantled and centuries worth of accumulated wealth, in the form of twenty-six cartloads of jewels, was sent off to the royal treasury.

Cartularies – medieval maps and legal documents

Posted on by
1
Boarstall Cartulary map – held by the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies.

It’s probably not a surprise that while I’m sorting out my thoughts for the forthcoming block of map Zoom classes that my mind should turn to monastic chartularies. These were portfolios recording monastic landownership. Essentially it was a collection of legal documents which did not always include maps but certainly included charters, deeds, land records and evidence of land transfer, privileges etc. They were usually bound in book form but on occasion the documents were attached together to make a roll. A fifteenth century map belonging to the London Charterhouse, the home of the Carthusians, depicts the monks’ water supply. The pipes crossed fields from springs to the monastery. One of the maps is a convenient 3 metres long. However, thus far it is the only map I can think of.

More famous as a map depicting a village is the chartulary map of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire. The chartulary was produced in 1444 for Edmund Rede of Boarstall but the map is older. In fact the map is the oldest surviving map of an English village and it tells the story of Nigel the Forester of Bernewood, one of Edmund Rede of Boarstall’s ancestors. Apparently a boar was terrorising the vicinity. Nigel killed the boar and presented its head to Edward the Confessor, who hunted in the forest where the boar lived. The map tells part of the story as well as depicting Nigel giving the head to the king and being rewarded and granted the charter of office of the forest of Bernewode.

Matthew Paris – mapmaker

Posted on by
Reply
Matthew Paris (c.1200-1259). Photograph by the British Library., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A new seven week Zoom class will be starting on Monday 29 September, 2025 – on the topic of a history of Britain in maps. I’ve started planning the classes in readiness to advertise them by the end of next week and have side tracked myself with Matthew Paris, the thirteenth century monk from St Albans, who I usually write about in terms of his chronicles of English history – the Chronica Majora and Historia Anglorum. I

Paris, who seems to have done his own illustrations, included a self portrait in the Historia Anglorum and for the purposes of the forthcoming class – a map that located more than 250 places. He also showed rivers, Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall. It’s thought that the monk may have used an earlier Roman map as an example. He also created a map to guide pilgrims from England to the Holy Land. Inevitably the journey started in London which was drawn with the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral as well as London Bridge.

The map of Britain, dating from about 1250, can be found at the British Library but there’s a rather wonderful online annotated version that provides additional information. Now all I have to do is to decide what I should include in the seven weeks – obviously the Hereford Mappa Mundi and the Gough Map of Britain, John Stow, Henry VIII’s coastal defence map, inevitably Gerald of Wales gets in on the act and then there’re John Ogilby’s road maps – actually I think strip maps of the kind that Ogilby made will be one session in their own right – Matthew Paris will appear alongside Ogilby, The Antonine Itinerary and Matthew Simons guidance for travellers dating to 1635.

Autumn’s class should be live for booking by the beginning of next week. There will also be a solitary Christmas class on Monday 1 December – A Bronte Christmas which I am rather excited about.

Matthew Paris Annotated Map

Christian Bruce, Countess of Devonshire

Posted on by
1
Christian Cavendish, Countess of Devonshire by Anthony Van Dyck via Wikipedia.

I keep returning to Christian. She doesn’t always seem very appealing though, Dorothy Sidney, Countess of Leicester (and briefly governess to Charles I’s younger children Elizabeth and Henry following his execution) found her crafty and cold when it came to financial matters during negotiations between the Sidneys and Christian for her son to marry Lady Dorothy Sidney. The Sidneys could not supply a large enough dowry so Christian’s son ended up married to Elizabeth Cecil, a daughter of the 2nd Earl of Salisbury.

Apparently Christian Bruce, the daughter of Edward Bruce, 1st lord of Kinloss was one of Elizabeth Stuart’s companions at Combe Abbey where she was raised by John Harington of Eaton and his wife. So, she received an extensive education even if it did not contain a grounding in Latin and Greek. Combe Abbey is now a hotel but the parkland is open to the public.

She was married in 1608 to William Cavendish, 2nd Earl of Devonshire. No doubt her dowry of £100,000 helped to seal the deal. Her new husband, who was eighteen-years-old, went off to Cambridge University with his tutor, Thomas Hobbes, before tackling the Grand Tour. He departed for Europe in 1610 and got into the usual scrapes that youthful aristocracy might be expected to find themselves.

At the time Christian was only about twelve years old but the marriage was almost over before it began. William, or Wylkyn, as he was known within his family was in love with someone else. Margaret Chatterton, a servant of William’s aunt, Arbella Stuart, and formerly of Wiliam’s mother, claimed that William had promised to marry her. Quite what William’s father thought of the matter is best not speculated upon. The baron, as he was at that time, was known to take after his mother, Bess of Hardwick, when it came to careful husbanding of his assets. William’s uncle, Henry Cavendish, wrote that it was a shame that the boy wasn’t married to a ‘grown woman’ rather than a child. Henry who was the eldest of Bess of Hardwick’s sons had something of a reputation, so his view is perhaps not surprising. He died the same year that his nephew and Christian were married which meant that William’s father inherited Chatsworth.

Christian became Countess of Devonshire in 1626 when her father-in-law died. Two years later, her husband also died. Her ten-year-old son, another William, became the 3rd Earl of Devonshire. Christian set about restoring the family fortunes which were somewhat depleted thanks to the 2nd earl’s exuberant spending. This involved winning more than thirty legal cases over contested property rights. It took four years but at the end of it, in 1630, she was able to offer Thomas Hobbes a salary as tutor having declared in 1628 that her son was too young for a tutor to save the expense.

Unfortunately for Christian, her son did not understand that his father’s creditors could claim the money they were owed from his estates – it meant that mother and son were soon at loggerheads and that Thomas Hobbes was being asked to help both sides. Ultimately Parliament was called upon to pass an act which allowed the countess to sell some previously entailed land to settle her husband’s debts.

As if finances weren’t worrying enough there was the small matter of the English Civil War. William’s cousin, yet another William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, was loyal to the Crown. Christian is usually regarded as the reason why the Earl of Devonshire chose to absent himself from his country rather than join one side or the other. According to the De Lisle and Dudley manuscript – William may have enjoyed spending lavishly but generally speaking, he did what his mother told him. It was the earl’s younger brother, Charles Cavendish, who took to the field and who died for the royal cause at Gainsborough. Despite the fact that Christian was a friend of Henrietta Maria, the Devonshire estate had to be preserved – Bess of Hardwick would have approved the calculations that Christian made when she called her son home to compound for his estates before the end of the war.

Christian and William chose to live at Latimers in Buckinghamshire rather than returning to Derbyshire. She was well connected to the Parliamentarian forces. She was grandmother-in-law to Frances Cromwell, through the marriage of Robert Rich (he died soon after the marriage.) Her daughter Anne was married to Robert Rich, 3rd Earl of Warwick. Meanwhile, the Earl of Devonshire was required to remain aloof from the conflict that still raged but the countess offered the king refuge at Leicester Abbey after the Battle of Naseby and later stayed at Latimer’s while he was a prisoner. She took charge of Charles II’s belongings after the Battle of Worcester and became embroiled in the work of the Seal Knot. Even so, after the Restoration, the Earl of Devonshire chose to remain in the country rather than spending much time at court. He was made Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire and in 1663 joined the newly formed Royal Society.

Christian welcomed Charles II and Henrietta Maria to her home. When she died in 1675 she was described as being ‘affable and of sweet address’ – presumably her biographer had not been on the receiving end of financial bargain with the countess…now I just need to find out much more….