By the time of Edward the Confessor the shire reeve was responsible for collecting royal taxes and collecting rents from royal lands across a hundred hides of land. With the passage of time, the reeve, a royal official, found himself taking pledges, or oaths, and keeping the peace for the hundred, or wapentake. They were also responsible, at least since the days of Cnut, for apprehending criminals and trying them in some locations. And just to confuse matters the term sheriff was also used from Cnut. Not all sheriffs, prior to the Conquest, possessed the same powers. It depended upon the aldermen and the earls of a region from whom the shire reeve, or sheriff, derived some of his power, not to mention the relationship that existed between the king, his earl and the shire reeve or sheriff. The latter might find himself working for both the king and the earl and their wishes were not always aligned. If a monarch was weak, then it was the local lord who wielded the power and to whom the sheriff/reeve would defer. Of more interest is that the post of sheriff is the oldest secular office in Crown employment.
And just as an aside, In 1066 it was Godric, Sheriff of Berkshire who led the shire levies for the county and who was killed at Hastings and it was Ansgar, Sheriff of London and Middlesex, who negotiated with Duke William (Morris, p27). Ansgar’s father had been London’s Port Reeve – essentially meaning sheriff of the town.
After the conquest the role of sheriff became much more clear cut. Roughly equating to Norman viscount (Morris, pp 41-42) the office evolved from the necessity of the Conqueor to continue the smooth administration of his new realm. William retained the services of the sheriffs and shire reeves who served Edward and Harold unless they had fought against him during the conquest. Ansgar, once one of the most powerful men in England, was dismissed from his post and imprisoned. His ancestry was Danish which made him dangerous and he appears to have spent the rest of his life in custody while his lands were given by William the Conqueror to his own men. Geoffrey de Mandeville became sheriff in his place.
Most sheriffs at the start of their documented existence in Anglo-Saxon England were men of moderate means but now they were often the most important man in the region they administrated. The only matters that they had no say on within their area of office was in Church law. Church land lay outside the jurisdiction of common law. The sheriff became the head of the judicial authority within a shire as well taking oaths such as the giving of the frank pledge, collecting royal taxes and enforcing the king’s will. By the time that Philip Marc became the hated High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire during the reign of King John, shrievalties were much sought after, often semi-inherited positions even though the post came with no pay. Their power, which came from farming taxes, meant that they were able to keep a hefty portion for themselves.
And why you might wonder have I deviated to sheriffs? Well, mainly because several members of the Fairfax family were sheriffs of York during the latter Middle Ages and the Tudor period. By the end of the Tudor period, sheriffs retained their role ensuring law and order but it was the newly appointed Lords Lieutenants who dealt with military matters from 1547 onwards. Even then it was only in 1908 that the latter became more important, administratively, than sheriffs. Sheriffs, who also had the responsibility of returning a county’s two members of Parliament, often served in that office as well as being sheriff.
Morris, William A. The Medieval Sheriff to 1300. (1968)
Charles I set off for Scotland on 10 August 1641. At the beginning of the summer he had signed the death warrant of his friend the Earl of Strafford and Ship Money Tax had been declared illegal. How much respite the king enjoyed from the turbulence of his three kingdoms when he arrived in Edinburgh on 14 August is another matter entirely. He was still there when an Irish rebellion broke out in October.
Which brings me to November. On the 8th of November, ten days before the king left his Scottish capital, the English Parliament demanded that in future Charles should only appoint advisers and ministers approved by them. On the 23 the Commons narrowly voted in favour of the Grand Remonstrance which criticised the king’s temporal and religious policies. Even so, when he arrived back in London on 25 it was with much ceremony and popular acclaim.
Ferdinando Fairfax second Baron Fairfax of Cameron and the father of Sir Thomas Fairfax who was Member of Parliament for Yorkshire was part of the committee that presented the Grand Remonstrance. This was a list of 200 grievances against the king including his perceived abused of power as well as things like illegal taxation.
Richard of Haldingham, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Apparently there are more than 500 images on the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Scott Westrem’s book published in 2001 provides a transcription explaining the legends on the map as well as a guide to all the primary sources where the information can be discovered.
To the medieval mind the east was the oldest part of the world. It was, after all, where the Garden of Eden could be found. In the medieval mind, humanity moved westwards – placing Britain, at that period on the edge of the map and making it the newest part of civilisation. As well as Noah’s ark sitting in the mountains of Armenia. The map also depicts the city of Nineveh and Mesopotamia. We learn that Babylon was founded by a giant named Nimrod.
There are also a plethora of strange and mythical people and animals. Apparently those who live near the source of the Ganges live only on the scent of apples and if they smell something unpleasant that die – immediately. It was also believed that there were a people in India who had only one leg but who were none the less very fast (now I know where C.S. Lewis got some of his ideas). Manticores were also believed to be indigenous to India – not a pleasant creature it had a human face, a lion’s body and a scorpion’s tale.
Study the map more closely and you can find giants, people who drink from the skulls of their enemies, griffins, minotaurs, lynx that can see through solid walls, a marsok which is an animal that can change shape, pelicans that suck the blood of their parents, fauns, dragons, phoenixes, mandrakes, salamanders, basilisks and people who have no heads but have faces in their torsos. There’s an elephant with a tower on its back as well as a unicorn and a rhinoceros. There is, just in case you wanted to know, also a tiger which was believed to be very vain.
Everyone who looked at the map was invited, if they could read, to hear its message. Presumably the author of the script was thinking of the illustration of Sodom and Gomorrah, not to mention the Judgement at the top of the map. No surprise that the snake is sitting nearby the Garden of Eden.
The question is what do the 43 or so animals and birds that populate the rest of the known world have to say – aside from stealing clear of the more deadly ones? They all have some moral or spiritual significance whatever their origins. The bestiaries that were so popular during the medieval period underline this point from the pelican who sacrifices itself for its young and a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice would have been widely recognised, appearing as it does in imagery throughout the Middle Ages. Wondering about the lynx that can see through solid walls? That’s not what it’s on the map for. It was also thought to urinate black healing stones, except rather than share the benefit the lynx always buries what it produces, so that its no help to anyone.
And let’s not forget the bonnacon which had the head of a bull but which is able to escape its pursuers with what can only be described as deadly expulsions from its rear end. I have no idea how Pliny managed to turn a bison into a creature that could literally leave scorched earth behind it. It had no moral message to impart. It was a medieval joke…something to make the viewers of the Mappa Mundi laugh, presumably just before they realised that they needed to mend their ways or face eternal damnation.
Westrem, Scott. The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Terrarum Orbis, 1)
It’s thought that long established parishes are based on pre-Conquest manors. Some of them may even have had their boundaries established as early as the Iron Age. After the Conquest the manor became the basis of the feudal system, so that by the twelfth century the parish system extended across England. Over time larger manor and parishes were broken down to smaller units while others merged together. Even so, until the Reformation the parish was the basic administrative unit not only for the local lord but also for the Church.
In 1086 the Domesday book recorded manors but by 1188 it was parishes that formed the basis of Henry II’s Saladin Tithe which required the payment of a tax of 10% on all movable property and income – the only exception to this was that men in holy orders were not required to pay a tax on their books, vestments and horses. Rather than the local sheriff doing the job of assessing the amount t to be tax it fell to the local priest or bishop. If you decided to join the crusade to win back Jerusalem you were not required to pay the tithe. Oh yes and if you failed to pay you could be imprisoned or excommunicated which came with the threat of eternal damnation. Ultimately Henry II never went on crusade, it was his son Richard who joined the Third Crusade.
Aside from taxing folk, the manor/parish was also the smallest area for justice to be applied, often by the lord of the manor, at the manor court. By the sixteenth century the parish was an essential component in the relief of poverty not to mention the maintenance of roads.
Unfortunately rather than using maps in medieval England charters relied upon descriptions to detail tenure and grants. This means that Thomas Elham’s map of Thanet in his Historia Monasterii S Augustini Cantuariensis dating to about 1414 is sometimes described as the oldest surviving parish map. He used the map to illustrate the foundation myth of Minster in Thanet, a stretch of land given as wergild to Domne Eafe after the murder of her brothers by their cousin King Ecgberht of Kent. An article by D.W. Rollason explores the accuracy of the parish boundary with Elham’s map which also contains illustrations of the churches on Thanet at the time.
Of course once the sixteenth century arrived estate owners became much more proactive in the commissioning of estate maps. One reason is that the parish system which had been in place for so many years was disrupted by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and by various enclosure acts. Estate maps were created for their ease of use in legal and administrative use. Wealthy landowners were better able to overview their estates than they might have done through a chartulary which included charters and terriers, although a notable exception is the Boarstall Cartulary map dating to the fifteenth century which is the earliest known map depicting a village. Like Elmham’s map, the Boarstall Cartulary map also enshrines the semi-mythical origins of the landowner on its vellum.
And of course a map enable the landowner to enjoy sight of his, or occasionally her, domains at a glance.
Throughout the history of Christian England, from Anglo Saxon times onwards parishes were required to pay tithes to the church – one tenth of a parish’s produce was paid to the vicar, curate or abbey who owned the rights to the church. After the dissolution these tithes were sometimes paid to private landlords. Unsurprisingly people increasingly resented paying these tithes. In 1836 an act was passed allowing parishioners to pay cash rather than goods and an accurate series of maps were drawn up to identify all the land in a parish so that tithes could be calculated accurately. And, it was the landowners who were required to pay for the survey of their land. These maps are now in the National Archives at Kew.
Today parish maps are often created by local communities to identify the things that are valued and to celebrate what makes the community from its wildlife and history to its people and buildings. They are about a sense of place rather than created for legal or administrative reasons. Somewhat ironically they often share more in common with medieval maps than modern cartography in that there is often no scale, bird’s eye illustrations of rivers, roads and bridges and used and houses are often pictorial rather than represented by symbols.
Today I’m delighted to welcome Sam Mee to the History Jar. It’s always interesting to meet people who have a specialist field of interest. He is the founder of the Antique Ring Boutique (https://www.antiqueringboutique.com/), which sells rings from the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and Art Deco eras. He has several guides on his website for buying rings from different historical periods. Sam is a member of both Lapada (https://lapada.org/dealers/antique-ring-boutique/) and BADA (https://www.bada.org/dealer/antique-ring-boutique). Speaking personally, I shall certainly be finding out more about Stony Jack!
Digging up historical artifacts is usually the work of archaeologists. But in the summer of 1912, workmen demolishing a 17th-century building cellar in Cheapside, London, made an astounding discovery. Beneath the floor was a rainbow mix of more than 400 pieces of jewellery that had lain undisturbed since about 1640. This find is now known as the Cheapside Hoard and is the biggest collection of Elizabethan and early Stuart jewellery ever uncovered. It gives a unique insight into those eras.
Evidence of London’s role in global trade
In the early 17th century, the goldsmiths’ quarter in Cheapside, north east of St Paul’s Cathedral, was London’s main jewellery district. It was filled with workshops and showrooms. The trade was regulated by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, which originated in twelfth-century London and was one of the city’s powerful livery companies.
The find was a mix of mostly finished jewellery, mixed in with ash and rubble. The theory is that the pieces had been poured into a box, long since decayed, by an owner, most likely a goldsmith or jeweller (hence some unfinished items), who buried it but then never returned. Some historians suggest this was due to the political unrest of the English Civil War (1642–1651). Others pin the cause on the plague. It’s hard to be sure as the date of the burial can’t be certain – historians put it between 1640 and 1666.
Among the finds were pendants, brooches, rings, chains, and even a hollowed Colombian emerald fashioned into the case of a watch. There is vivid enamel work, Renaissance-inspired cameos and intricate settings. And the variety reveals two things about the early 17th Century.
First, Cheapside’s jewellers clearly catered to a wide clientele, selling to nobles and courtiers but also to rich merchants and professionals. A rise in the wealth of the professional classes meant an increase in demand for jewellery that had previously only really been worn in royal and religious circles. Enforcement of sumptuary laws, which dictated who could wear what (reserving purple and pearls for royalty, for instance), was also declining.
Second, analysis of the find discovered New World metals plus gems sourced from Colombia, India, Burma and Brazil. These materials reached London through complex commercial networks. The East India Company, chartered in 1600, had opened direct routes to Asia. The Levant Company traded with Ottoman and Persian markets. And Spanish bullion fleets were transporting New World gold and silver through Seville from where they spread across Europe. The Hoard, therefore, proves England’s participation in this early global market economy.
The Hoard also shows how fashions had evolved during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Tudor jewellery had been very bold and ostentatious. Think of Holbein’s famous 1537 mural image of King Henry VIII where his powerful stance, multiple chains and solid rings all signal his authority.
By the early 1600s, styles had started to become more refined, due to both technological improvements and wider societal changes. Enamelwork was now more delicate. Symbolic pendants as well as miniature cases reflected Renaissance styles. This was also the start of jewellery becoming more about personal identity and private relationships. Now, jewellery could be used more widely as currency in marriage: gifts cemented alliances, posy rings sealed vows and lockets with miniature portraits could signal loyalty to a patron.
There is also evidence of how clothing influenced design. Women’s high-necked ruffs and low square necklines meant that pendants and elaborate bodice jewels were visible focal points. Earrings grew longer to frame the face. Men used jewellery to decorate hats, swords, buttons and belts as well as standard chains and rings.
Symbolism appeared to matter as much as style – evolving from the raw projection of power found in Tudor portraits. The Hoard includes love tokens, fede rings (clasped hands symbolising faith and union) and posy rings with secret inscriptions inside the band. There were also more devotional pieces and memento mori jewels with skulls, skeletons and coffins (reflecting the time’s high mortality rates). Emeralds at that time signified renewal, pearls meant purity (again, think of the famous paintings of Elizabeth I wrapped in strings of pearls) with rubies or garnets signifying passionate love. Jewellery had become a visual language for expression emotion and loyalty.
One of the most interesting pieces is that emerald watch case. It’s a large Colombian emerald, hollowed out and fitted with a tiny watch. It’s a unique find – nothing like it has been found from the period. And it shows both the technical skill of the gem cutters (to hollow a stone without it shattering) together with the idea of a timepiece as a luxury rather than functional object.
Caption: There’s a book about the find: “London’s Lost Jewels: The Cheapside Hoard” by Hazel Forsyth
There’s also an enamelled parrot pendant set with small gems. The exotic bird is a symbol of the New World and overseas trade, with parrots prized due their mimicry and often included in portraits of the time. The piece shows how jewellery reflected society’s wider fascinations. And its playful design is in contrast to the more traditional devotional pieces in the Hoard, showing jewellery’s growing evolution.
There’s also a set of Byzantine intaglios and ancient gems, some dating back more than a thousand years and re-set in 16th- and 17th-century mountings. In the same way that we are interested in the past, they show the Renaissance era’s own obsession with previous times – the revival of classical antiquity, with gems engraved with Roman emperors and mythological figures designed to signal learning and sophistication.
The role of Stony Jack
You may be surprised that the Hoard survives – and wasn’t sold by those who found it. That’s all down to one man: George Fabian Lawrence (1862-1939), known as “Stony Jack”. He was a surveyor with a passion for collecting stone artefacts and well known for dealing in antiquities.
Caption: The story of Stony Jack is told in this book by Victoria Shepherd.
Lawrence had cultivated a network of workmen with a simple arrangement. If they found anything unusual, they would bring it to him. He would pay them cash on the spot, at a higher rate than a scrap dealer. He often donated or sold these items cheaply to museums, particularly the Guildhall Museum (the forerunner of the Museum of London where the Hoard is mostly kept). When the Hoard was found, he hurried to the site and persuaded the labourers to sell him the bulk of the treasure (a few pieces were kept and sold separately by the builders). He then ensured the Hoard was placed in the Guildhall Museum, securing its preservation.
The Hoard will never be sold – but it is worth tens of millions of pounds. It was an extraordinary find by the workmen in 1912 – not just for its value but for what it can tell us about London and British life three hundred years earlier.
Bodleian Library MS. Arch. Send. B. 10, for. 184r Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Hardyng was born in Northumberland and, at the age of 12, was at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 in service to Hotspur. Having survived the battle, he entered service to Sir Robert Umfraville who was closely associated with the Percy family. Hardyng found himself taking part in Anglo-Scottish hostilities as well as the Hundred Years War under the command of Henry V. In between making war on the Scots, Umfraville was also sent north of the border on diplomatic missions. Later, when he wrote his chronicles, Hardny would describe Umfraville as the perfect knight.
In 1418, Henry V sent Hardyng to Scotland to complete a topological survey and to find evidence of English overlordship of Scotland. Hardyng remained there for three and a half years making his map – designed to assist with an English invasion as well as unearthing (writing them himself) documents evidencing English claims to political overlordship of the Scots. Unfortunately he had to wait until the 1440s for his reward due to Henry V’s death. Little wonder that his chronicle makes much of the fact that he personally retrieved, at great personal risk, the all important documents from Scotland. He even claimed that James I of Scotland would have given 1000 marks of gold for the documents. Among the documents to survive is a forged letter granting him safe conduct to enter James I’s presence whenever he was in Scotland and to stay in the country for 40 days with six servants and horses – so no imagining a solitary spy surveying the landscape.
Having been granted the manor of Geddington in Northamptonshire and a pension of £10, Hardyng retired to the Augustinian priory at Kyme in Liincolnshire where he began to write his history of England. This was presented to Henry VI on 1457 together with his map of Scotland and those largely forged documents pertaining to overlordship. Hardying sought to promote political unity within his own country by allying English political factions against the Scots – working on the premise that war across the border would bring about peace at home. His forged documents provided a watertight rationale and he handily provided a map that detailed distances between military objectives, castles and rivers. While not to scale, and the drawings of the fortifications more akin to fantasy than reality, the map was both an itinerary for invasion and a visual encouragement for the English. On this occasion he received an additional annual pension from the Crown of £20.
Undeterred by the decade’s hostilities, not to mention the change from the House of Lancaster to the House of York on the throne in 1461, Hardying continued to polish his histories, happily explaining Edward IV’s pedigree as a way of winning the new monarch’s approval. The end result was two historical chronicles in rhyming couplets – I am truly thankful I don’t have to blog in rhyme- and a colourful history of a man who as well as being all the things in the title was also something of an antiquarian he was also the first chronicler to detail a quest for the Holy Grail and would provide Sir Thomas Malory with a source for his story about King Arthur.
Armstrong, Jackson, W. England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Society in the Fifteenth Century Scottish Marches. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Palgrave, Francis, Sir. Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland and the Transactions Between the Crowns of Scotland and England. Volume I (Great Britain Record Commission: London, 1837)
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.
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.
Known as Peutinger’s Tabula or thePeutinger 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!
