A Feather in the Cap

                                       The trade in eggs and bird-skins was not limited to ornithologists and museums. In the late Victorian times, there was a fashion amongst ladies for elaborate hats decorated with exotic feathers. Now, you might imagine this wouldn’t be such a problem, just a few feathers for society madams and that’s it, but this was big business. Hundreds of thousands of birds were slaughtered to satisfy the demands of what was called the ‘Plume Trade’. 

Plumed millinery

Native species were the first to suffer, with grebe feathers in particular being desirable, but as the thirst for ever-more unusual feathers grew, colourful foreign species were imported in vast numbers. There was early opposition to this trade, most notably by the British Ornithologists’ Union, which was founded in 1858 by, amongst others, Alfred Newton. Newton was a leading British ornithologist; he had accompanied Wolley to Iceland to research the Great Auk, and his superb A Dictionary of British Birds (1893-6), along with William Yarrell’s masterpiece A History of British Birds (1843), had done much to popularise the study of birds in this country. 

Alfred Newton - A Dictionary of Birds - 1893-6

He was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University for over forty years, an early supporter of Charles Darwin, and was instrumental in getting legislation passed through Parliament for the protection of wildlife. One of his greatest achievements in this field were the laws on the closed season, making it illegal to hunt certain species during their breeding periods. 

The Ibis - Vol 1 - 1859

The British Ornithologists’ Union published a quarterly magazine called The Ibis from 1859 onwards (available online, subscription required), which highlighted the Plume Trade, as did Newton’s entry on ‘Extermination’ in his Dictionary. However, this was Victorian Britain, so entry to the BOU was strictly men only. In 1889, Emily Williamson founded a charity, initially for women only, from her home in Didsbury, Manchester called The Plumage League, which campaigned against the use of feathers and fur for decoration. The Plumage League merged with the Fur and Feather League of Croydon in 1891 to become the Society for the Protection of Birds, and became very popular, gaining support from the very society ladies who influenced fashion and might be expected to wear feathers, including Queen Alexandria and the Duchess of Portland (the first President of the Society). In just fifteen years (1904) they received the Royal Warrant from King Edward VII, to become the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The original RSPB had two simple rules: - 

1) That Members shall discourage the wanton destruction of Birds, and interest themselves generally in their protection, and 

2) That Lady-Members shall refrain from wearing the feathers of any bird not killed for purposes of food, the ostrich only excepted. 

(That exception to ostriches was because ostriches can be farmed, and their moulted feathers collected and wings clipped). 

A Bird of Prey - Punch 1892

Punch also took up the fight against the Plume Trade in the 1890s – Punch was a prominent advocate of social change at the time, and was nothing like the humorous magazine it would later become. 

Punch's Plea for the White-Plumed Heron -  Punch 1896

The RSPB published numerous pamphlets opposing the Plume Trade, many written by Professor Newton himself, which present the shocking facts and figures of the whole sordid business. 

Feathers and Facts - RSPB - 1911

They expose the lies and injustices of the Plume Traders and hold up to scrutiny their ‘justifications’ for their trafficking – one such, for example, was their contention that egret feathers were farmed from sustainable sources, in the manner of ostriches, to which the ornithologists’ reply was,  

“Those who argue thus overlook the fact that Herons and Egrets are not flightless birds which can be herded in paddocks to be clipped, but shy, winged species, which build in trees by lake and swamp, and for the rest of the year scatter themselves over wide expanses of country.” 

Bird Notes and News - Vol 2 - 1906-07

In 1903, the society began to publish Bird Notes and News, in which the cause was spread further, a typical report reads, 

“Birds-of-Paradise continue to be a leading feature of the Plume Sales in London, and will apparently continue to be so until the last of these exquisite birds has found its sepulchre in a Houndsditch warehouse; unless measures are taken for its absolute protection throughout New Guinea. At the sale on October 15th, over 7000 were offered, and nearly all "sold with good competition"; for that of December 17^th 4667 were catalogued. The packages of "osprey" feathers numbered 548 and 200 respectively, a large proportion being advertised as "East Indian." Other features of the two sales were 100 Lyre-bird tails from Australia, 96 Impeyan Pheasants (presumably from India, whence their exportation is illegal), and a large number of Coronata Pigeons and of Albatross quill feathers.” 

Table of Plumes sold in London - from Feathers and Facts 1911

The campaign was ultimately successful; an Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Bill was introduced to Parliament in 1908, and was eventually passed in 1921, coming into force on April 1^st 1922. A parallel campaign was carried out in America by the Audobon Society, founded by George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream magazine. The American Ornithologists’ Union estimated that in excess of five million birds per year were being killed to satisfy the demands of ladies’ fashion. By the 1920s, over a dozen states had legislation in place prohibiting the sale of plumes. 

Sandwich-board men July 1911 - From Our Vanishing Wild Life W T Hornaday 1913

It is worth mentioning here the ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ Guy Bradley. Bradley had worked with the plume hunters in Florida in the 1890s, guiding them to the ‘rookeries’ of egrets. After the passing of the Lacey Act of 1900, which forbade the commercial transportation of game over state lines, Bradley changed sides and became one of the first professional game wardens in the US. By all accounts, he was an excellent fellow, “… clean-cut, reliable, courageous, energetic and conscientious", but in 1905 he confronted Walter Smith and his two sons who were in the swamps hunting egrets. Smith shot Bradley and left him to bleed to death. Bradley’s body was recovered later by his brother, having drifted ten miles downstream. Smith turned himself on the following day, and initially pleaded self-defence, claiming Bradley had shot first, but evidence was produced that Bradley’s weapon had not been fired, and it was added that Bradley was such a good shot that if he had fired first, he would not have missed. The jury decided there was insufficient evidence and declared Smith not guilty, sparking national outrage. Whilst Smith was in custody, his two brothers-in-law burned down Bradley’s house, and his homeless widow and two infant children were rehoused in Key West with money raised by public subscription. Bradley’s obituary in Bird Lore, August 1905, reads,

Guy Bradley's obituary from Bird Lore 1905

“A faithful and devoted warden, who was a young and sturdy man, cut off in a moment, for what? That a few more plume birds might be secured to adorn heartless women's bonnets. Heretofore the price has been the life of the birds, now is added human blood. Every great movement must have its martyrs, and Guy M. Bradley is the first martyr in bird protection.”

For Auks' Sake

                                Dodos and Solitaires are not the only birds to be totally wiped out by the hand of man. The nineteenth century saw the demise of, amongst others, the Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), another flightless species. The Great Auk lived in North Atlantic waters, ranging from the shores of North America, through Greenland and Iceland, to Britain, Norway and the north of Europe. It stood about 33 inches tall, weighed about ten pounds, with a large, grooved bill and distinctive black and white plumage. They live in dense colonies, mated for life, and nested on the bare rock of isolated islands, laying a single egg. 

The Great Auk - Archibald Thorburn

The Great Auk was also known as the Garefowl (probably from Icelandic Gyer, meaning ‘spear’, which may refer to the shape of its beak, or its swiftness in the water), but also the Penguin. And here is where the etymological wranglings start – some say this comes from Pin-wing, on account of the small size of its wings (unlikely), other have it coming from the Welsh Pen Gwyn – ‘white head’ (maybe, but just how many loan words are there from Welsh), or from Latin Pinguis – ‘fat’ (possible – the birds were very oily). However, regardless of the name, when explorers began to go to the Southern hemisphere and saw the black and white, flightless seabirds, they named them for the nearest thing they could relate them to – the Penguin. 

Great Auk - from British Zoology Vol 2 William Pennant 1776

Humans and Great Auks had co-existed for centuries, and the birds had been an important part of the lives and culture of indigenous maritime peoples. Early European explorers of the Americas exploited the Great Auk as a food and fuel source, and as fishing bait, and with the declining numbers of Eider ducks, the plumage became valuable as stuffing for quilts and cushions. The trade in feathers seriously affected numbers of the birds, and early conservation laws were passed to protect the declining population, although these laws were largely ineffective. The hunting practices and methods of harvesting the birds can be seen here: -  

“When the water is smooth, they make their shallops fast to the shore, lay their gang-boards from the gunwale of the boat to the rocks, and then drive as many penguins on board, as she will hold; for the wings of those birds being remarkably short, they cannot fly. But it has been customary of late years, for several crews of men to live all the summer on that island, for the sole purpose of killing birds for the sake of their feathers, the destruction which they have made is incredible. If a stop is not soon put to that practice, the whole breed will be diminished to almost nothing, particularly the penguins [i.e. Great Auks].” 

Captain George Cartwright  Labrador Journal entry for Tuesday, July 5, 1785. 

Frontispiece - The Great Auk - Thomas Parkin 1911

When ornithologists and collectors realised the supply of birds was dwindling, they made concerted efforts to acquire what they could before they disappeared entirely which, of course, reduced the population even further. The distinguished ornithologist William Yarrell noted the Great Auk as very rare in the first edition of his magnificent A History of British Birds (1843), and refers to individual specimens seen or taken in the Orkneys and St Kilda in the 1820s, and quotes one Graba as saying, “ … none have been seen in Greenland, Iceland, or Faroe of late years.” 

The Great Auk - from A History of British Birds William Yarrell 1843

However, a colony had been found in 1835, of about fifty birds, on Geirfuglasker (Great Auk Rock), a tiny volcanic island off the shore of Iceland. Collectors took what they could, and after volcanic activity disturbed them, the remaining birds moved to Eldey, a tiny islet nearby. It was here that the last two remaining Great Auks were taken, on June 3^rd 1844. John Wolley, the naturalist and egg-collector (and friend of H E Strickland of The Dodo and its Kindred fame), went with Alfred Newton, another great ornithologist, to Iceland in 1858, and met the men who had taken them. Unfortunately, Wolley died the following year but his researches were presented by Newton in the ornithological journal The Ibis in May 1861. 

Alfred Newton's report in The Ibis May 1861

Wolley’s record from the Icelanders says, 

“The Gare-fowls [i.e. Great Auks] showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along under the high cliff, their heads erect, their little wings somewhat extended. They uttered no cry of alarm, and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jón [Brandsson] with outstretched arms drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast. Sigurður [Ísleifsson] and Ketill [Ketilsson] pursued the second, and the former seized it close to the edge of the rock, here risen to a precipice some fathoms high, the water being directly below it … the birds were strangled and cast into the boat.” 

Great Auk eggs - from Ootheca Wolleyana Vol 2 - Wolley and Newton 1864

Wolley and Newton collected blown eggs from Iceland, and excavated a great number of bones, which they returned to England. In a revised edition of his History (1871), Yarrell updates his entry and declares the species to be extinct, including in the piece that Newton had reported to him that of the remaining specimens, “… he estimates their number at seventy-seven skins or mounted birds, and there are sixty-nine egg-shells.” 

Title page - The Great Auk - Thomas Parkin 1911

In 1911, Thomas Parkin counted 80 skins or mounts and 73 eggs, with another coming to light later in 1918. (Modern estimates are of 78 skins or mounts and 74 eggs). Parkin wrote two texts on the Great Auk, the first The Great Auk, Or Garefowl (1894) is a paper he delivered to the Hastings and St. Leonards Natural History Society on June 28th, 1894; the second is a record of the sales of Great Auk specimens and eggs sold in public auctions from 1806 to 1910. In the early 1850s, eggs sold for about £20, but by the 1900s, prices had risen to over £300. In 1806, a mounted bird sold for £10, in 1895 another sold for £350. (In 1971, one sold for £9000). 

So, well done mankind, for continuing to know the price of something and the value of nothing.

Great Auk and Egg offered for sale - The Athenaeum March 22 1902

Dodo or Solo ?

                        Until modern manufacturing introduced mass production, nails were hand made and so valuable. If a nail could be re-used, it would be. But when nails were used to make a door, they were bent over at the ends, called ‘clinching’, to increase their hold on the planking. Such a nail could not be pulled out and re-used –it was dead, dead as a doornail. The phrase is a very old one – the poem Piers Plowman, from about 1360, has the line,

“That fey withouten fait is febelore then nougt, And ded as a dore-nayl” 

[That they without faith are feebler than nought, And dead as a doornail].  

Shakespeare uses it in Henry VI Part II (Act 4 Scene 10), when Jack Cade says,  

“…if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more,” 

 and right at the beginning of Chapter One of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is

 “…Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” 

George Clark - Report on the excavation of Dodo bones, from The Ibis !866

In 1865, inspired by Strickland and Melville’s The Dodo and its Kindred, a Mauritian schoolmaster, George Clark, excavated some subfossil Dodo bones from the swamp of Mare aux Songes in Southern Mauritius. His reports inspired contemporary interest in the Dodo, and Lewis Carroll introduced one as a major character of his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, also from 1865 (it is said the Dodo represents Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson. Due to a stutter, he introduced himself as Do-Do-Dodgson). The expression ‘dead as a doornail’ began to be changed in popular parlance to the similarly alliterative ‘dead as a Dodo’. 

Tenniel's Dodo - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

It is probably from Tenniel’s illustration from Alice that the Dodo is instantly recognizable to most people today. We all know what happened to the Dodo. 

But have you heard of the Solitaire? 

Yesterday I mentioned the Mascarene Islands, which, in addition to Mauritius, included the islands of Rodriguez and Bourbon (now called Réunion).  Rodriguez lies about three hundred miles to the east of Mauritius, and is about fifteen miles long by about six miles wide. The island was uninhabited until 1691, when a group of French Protestant refugees led by François Legaut landed there and remained for two years. Legaut and nine other volunteer colonists were Huguenots, who boarded the small frigate La Hirondelle in Amsterdam, bound, as they thought, for the island of Bourbon. Nobody thought to tell them of a change of plan – Bourbon was under French control, and the organiser of the party, the Marquis Henri du Quesne (under sanction of the Dutch East India Company), wanted to avoid a confrontation with the French, so he had Leguat and eight of his followers abandoned on the uninhabited Rodriguez instead. 

Leguat's Map of Rodriguez - Voyages - 1708 - Look closely and you will see the Solitaires all around the island.

They stayed there for a year, and then tried to escape in a small boat, which was damaged on a reef, killing a man. In 1693, they tried again and navigated the three hundred nautical miles in an open boat to Mauritius, where initially they were welcomed by the Dutch authorities. An argument with an avaricious Governor altered all this, and Leguat and his companions were imprisoned in terrible conditions on a tiny islet far offshore (another man died attempting to escape), before they were shipped to Batavia for trial. The Dutch Council there eventually found the three remaining survivors innocent, and they returned to the Netherlands in 1698 (remember the crew of the Pandora, and their treatment by the Dutch at Batavia). 

Title Page - F Leguat - Voyages 1708

Leguat moved to England and wrote a fascinating account of his adventures, published in English and French simultaneously, in two volumes, in 1708. Legaut was a meticulous recorder of detail and it is largely from his work that we have knowledge of the Rodriguez Solitaire. He devotes over three pages of description to the bird, which he calls the Solitaire, possibly because he had heard of the Solitaire that lived on the island of Bourbon, although he had never been there, so had not seen it. 

Le Solitaire - from Leguat Voyages 1708

The Rodriguez Solitaire was, as the name implies, a solitary bird, and strongly territorial. The Solitaire was, it seems, more slender than the Dodo, with longer neck and legs, a shorter beak and more developed wings, but similar enough to belong to the same family. As with its Mauritian cousin, the Rodriguez Solitaire was wiped out by man, and by pigs, cats and rats introduced by man onto its isolated home. Joseph-François de Cossigny looked to bring back a live specimen in 1755, but none were to be found. Gone in less than 60 years. 

Frontispiece - F Leguat - Voyages - 1708

Detail  of the above frontispiece

On Bourbon (now Réunion) was another flightless bird called the Solitaire. Bourbon lies about 120 miles southwest of Mauritius, and the first account we have of it is in An Account of a Voyage to the East Indies of the Pearl (1613), in which John Tatton writes of, 

“… a great fowl of the bigness of a Turkie, very fat, and so short winged that they cannot flie, beeing white, and in a manner tame; and so are all other fowles, as having not been troubled nor feared with shot. Our men did beate them down with sticks and stones”. 

Five years later a Dutch navigator, Bontekoe, records “…Dod-eersen, which have small wings, and so far from being able to fly, they were so fat that they could scarcely walk,” Fifty years later (1668), the Frenchman Carré writes of

“I here saw a kind of bird which I have not found elsewhere: it is that which the inhabitants call the Oiseau Solitaire, for, in fact, it loves solitude, and only frequents the most secluded places … the flesh is exquisite; it forms one of the best dishes in this country, and might form a dainty at our tables.” 

A British Naval officer reports ‘curious birds’ on Bourbon in 1763, although we cannot be sure of what species, but a comprehensive scientific survey of Bourbon in 1801 by Bory St. Vincent makes no mention of the bird, so we may safely assume that they were extinct by then. 

Dodo

If mankind had so little regard for the living birds, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that the dead ones were treated with an even more cavalier attitude. By the time Strickland and Melville were writing (1848), there were only three physical remnants of the Dodo in museums. 

Dodo's foot

The British Museum had a foot, a cranium was in a museum in Copenhagen, and the relics of a stuffed Dodo that, in 1656, was listed in a catalogue of Tradscant’s Museum. This was bequeathed to Elias Ashmole, and was part of his collection that formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In 1755, the Trustees of the museum undertook an inventory, and ordered the neglected, decaying specimen to be destroyed. Only the head and a foot were saved from the flames, which remain in the Ashmolean. 

Dodo's head at Oxford (top) and a reconstruction

Dodo's skull

Strickland and Melville dissected this head and compared it to specimens of the Rodriguez Solitaire, establishing their kinship. The second part of their book is an osteological report on their findings, but it’s not easy going. Take this example, taken at random: -  

“The sub-crescentic supra-orbital tract is rough, and perforated by periosteal vascular foramina; a series of larger size extend from the notch on the antorbital process to the supra-orbital foramen or notch, and indicate its inner boundary; hence the supra-orbital plate appears formed, as it were, by a separate ossification of the periosteum extending outwards to protect the eyeball.”  

And there are over fifty pages in a similar vein. 

Contemporary advert for The Dodo and its Kindred

Hugh Edwin Strickland carried on an engrossing conversation on the theme of the Dodo in the pages of Notes and Queries magazine from February 1850, until his untimely encounter with the express train at Retford in 1853. Further studies have placed the Dodo in the Columbidae family – it was a gigantic type of pigeon.

 

OhNo Dodo

                  Mr William Huskisson had argued with the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. Huskisson was a Member of Parliament who had resigned from the Duke’s Cabinet over an issue of parliamentary reform in 1828. In 1830, both of the men were passengers on the first train at the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway. This was the first ever inter-city railway in the world, and September 15^th 1830 was the first day that trains ran on the twin-tracks between the cities. The train carrying Wellington and Huskisson stopped to take on water at Parkside, near Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, and several passengers, including Huskisson got off to stretch their legs. Huskisson spotted Wellington and went over to attempt a reconciliation. The Duke bent his head, welcomed Huskisson and shook his hand but then shouted a warning. Huskisson looked round and saw Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive approaching on the other track. He panicked, tried to climb up into the Duke’s carriage, but grabbed the door instead, which swung open, dangling him in the path of the oncoming train. Huskisson scrambled, slipped and fell down onto the line. Rocket ran over his leg, horrifically mangling it; in his agony he cried out, “I have met my death – God forgive me”. Huskisson was carried up onto Stephenson’s train, which was driven by Stephenson himself, and taken to nearby Eccles. Later in the same day, after making his will, he died at the Vicarage there. He was the first man in history to be killed by a train.  

Huskisson falls under Stephenson's Rocket

 On September 14^th 1853, Hugh Edwin Strickland, a geologist and naturalist, was examining the newly opened Manchester, Sheffield and Nottinghamshire Railway line at Retford, when he stepped out of the way of a oncoming good’s train and directly into the path of an express train on the opposite track, killing him instantly. He was 42. 

Strickland and Melville - The Dodo and its Kindred 1848

Five years previously, Strickland had co-authored with A G Melville the idiosyncratic book The Dodo and its Kindred, or, to give it its full title, “The Dodo and its Kindred; or the History, Affinities, and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire, and other extinct birds of the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon (1848)”. 

Mascarene Islands

The islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez and Bourbon, and other smaller, nearby volcanic islands are known as the Mascarene Islands, after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascarenhas, who discovered them in 1512 (although other Portuguese navigators may have visited them as early as 1502). The Portuguese called Mauritius Cerne (meaning ‘swan’) until 1598, when Jacob van Neek renamed it in honour of Prince Maurits van Nassau. The sailors found large, swan-sized birds on the island and called them walghvogel, dronte, dodaars, and dodo. 

Dodo

The etymology of the word Dodo is vexed; some say it is an onomatopoeic rendering of the bird’s call, others that is comes from the Dutch doudo – ‘simpleton’, dod-aarsen – ‘fat-arse’ or dodoor – ‘sluggard’. Sailors’ journals tell that they preferred to eat doves and parrots rather than the walghvogel – ‘disgusting bird’ - but it seems that this is because they had to boil the legs for such a long time to render them edible that they ended up tough and stringy. 

Harvesting food on Rodriguez - from Leguat's Voyages 1708

Later reports say that the breast and belly were very tasty indeed, and record fifty birds at a time being taken onboard ships for food. In 1627, Sir Thomas Brown visited Mauritius and mentions seeing the Dodo, as does Benjamin Harry in 1681 but a Frenchman, François Leguat (more of whom tomorrow), was at Mauritius in 1693 and this meticulous observer makes no mention of the bird, so it seems it was extinct by that date. The Dutch left Mauritius in 1712 and the French took charge of it. There is no further mention of the Dodo in any of their records. 

Dodo - frontispiece to Strickland and Melville The Dodo and its Kindred 1848

Strickland and Melville look closely at the written records of the Dodo and list in detail pictorial representations of the bird, with a very interesting investigation of the physical remains of the bird in various institutions but one extremely interesting section of their book concerns the extinction and the appearance of the Dodo. 

“We must figure it to ourselves as a massive clumsy bird, ungraceful in its form, and with a slow waddling motion,” and then go on to compare it to a newly-hatched duckling, “…the Dodo is (or rather was) a permanent nestling, clothed with down instead of feathers, and with the wings and tail so short and feeble, as to be utterly unsubservient to flight.” Then, in a telling passage, they write, 

“There appear, however, reasonable grounds for believing that the Creator has assigned to each class of animals a definite type or structure from which He has never departed, even in the most exceptional or eccentric modifications of form.” 

This was the standard scientific position in the 1840s – that God had created each of the species in an immutable form. That an entire species could become extinct was unbelievably difficult for the Victorians to comprehend – it contravened their doctrine of immutability; God had made all the animals for a purpose, so how could a species entirely cease to exist. And if God had ‘… assigned to each class of animals a definite type or structure’, then why would He then alter that ‘type or structure’? It is vital to remember one thing here – the date. 

This was 1848, ten years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. There were hints and suspicions of evolution doing the rounds, but as yet no fully worked out theory (and I’ll come back to what a scientific ‘theory’ is on another day). Strickland, Melville and the rest of the Victorian scientific establishment were at pains to discover where to place the Dodo in scheme of Creation. 

Dodo

There were even suspicions that the Dodo had never actually existed in the first place and that it was all just a hoax, that the bird was mythical. The available evidence was sifted and considered, and the reality of the Dodo was confirmed. It had been a flightless bird of about three feet in height, weighed up to about fifty pounds and was clumsy, lumbering, stupid and far too trusting. It had lived on a highly forested, isolated island, without any natural predators, and when it had been discovered, it had been harvested for food by sailors, its habitat was systematically destroyed and the balance of its nature disrupted by the introduction of rats, dogs, cats and other predators. 

Dodo

In less than a hundred years of coming into contact with mankind, the entire population of the Dodo had been wiped out. Carl Linnaeus was being, I think, a little too insensitive when he assigned to it the Latin name Didus Ineptus. The poor Dodo was not inept – it was just tragically unfortunate.

Heroes or Villains?

               You should never, so they say, meet your heroes. Maybe you should not look to deeply into their backgrounds either. Take the example of Edmund Spenser. I started to read Spenser years ago; at first I found him hard going, then I got attuned to him and I was converted. I especially liked the minor works, but of course The Fairie Queen stands out as an astonishing piece of work. I expected him to have been a hit at the court of Queen Elizabeth (The Fairie Queen is allegorical Elizabethan propaganda, after all), and when I started to read a little deeper, it was as I thought – born in London, went to Cambridge, life at court, buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. Then I looked deeper still. 

Edmund Spenser

He was born in about 1552; his father, John, was a journeyman cloth maker who had moved to London from Lancashire. The name Spenser (with the ‘s’ – rather than Spencer) is common around Burnley and Pendle – as are the first names Edmund or Laurence – the registers of Baptism for Burnley from 1564 to 1703 have twenty-nine entries for either Edmund or Laurence Spenser. A Laurence Spenser was buried at Newchurch in Pendle in 1584, and may well have been the poet’s grandfather. In and around Hurstwood, (and adjoining Extwistle and Briercliffe), the Spenser family had long held property, and John was a member of this branch of this family.

Spenser's cottage, Hurstwood, nr Burnley

The young Edmund attended Merchant Taylors’ school, before he became a sizar at Pembroke Hall (now College), Cambridge. That he was a sizar indicates the family was not well off, as he would have worked in the college kitchens and served at table in return for reduced fees, but he also received money on several occasions from a charitable bequest from Robert Nowell of Read, near Burnley. Robert Nowell was the brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, London, and was the great-uncle of Roger Nowell, the magistrate at Read who had prosecuted the Pendle witches in 1612. At Cambridge he made several important acquaintances, but after graduation Lancelot Andrews, later Bishop of Winchester, beat him for a Fellowship and so he ‘…went to reside with some friends in the North of England’. These Friends in the North were undoubtedly members of his extended family, and local tradition places him at Spenser’s Cottage in Hurstwood in 1576-77.

Edmund Spenser - The Shepheards Calender 1597 edition - Title Page

Internal evidence in The Shepheards Calender (1579) points to a strong Lancashire connection, and he may well have written the early parts of it at this time. The heroine, Rosalind, has been identified as Rose Dyneley from Downham, although other Dyneleys lived in Pendle; Menaleas is an anagram of Asmenal[l], a local family name now spelled Aspinall. Rose, it seems, spurned Spenser’s love, preferring a local yeoman instead, which broke Spenser’s heart.

T T Wilkinson - Edmund Spenser and the East Lancashire Dialect 1867

In a speech to the Historic Society of Lancashire on January 10^th 1867, T T Wilkinson listed forty-five words taken from East Lancashire dialect, (which he delightfully calls Folkspeak – “ ... more appropriate and comprehensive than ‘dialect’”), that appear in The Shepheards Calender, many of which Wilkinson says were still used in Pendle in the 1860s, and many of which are still used in 2012 (I know, as I use some of them myself). He notes, for instance, that Extwistle (‘the boundary of the oaks’) and Briercliffe (‘steep with briars’), both close by Hurstwood, appear in the February eclogue, in the old man’s story of the Oak and the Briar.

Walter Crane illustration to February - The Shepheards Calender

Wilkinson also notes that the East Lancashire folkspeak is closely allied to Lowland Scots, with many identical words and phrases being shared and derived from common sources in Danish and Norse, and he mentions the noticeable differences between the East Lancs and South Lancs dialects. A transcript was published in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, New Series Volume VII, 1867.
So, we’ve got a lovely local connection to one of the great Elizabethan poets. Brilliant.

Edmund Spenser - Title Page A View of the State of Ireland

Except Spenser went on to write, in 1596, A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is one of the most hateful pieces of bile I have ever had the misfortune to read, (and that includes Hitler’s Mein Kampf). It takes the form of a dialogue between Irenius and Eudoxus, with the ‘expert’ Irenius explaining the reasons for the degeneracy of the Irish to Eudoxus - the inferiority of their culture, society, language and customs, and how the English in Ireland should employ a scorched earth policy, to starve the Irish people into submission. It is a devastatingly ironic anticipation of Swift’s satirical Modest Proposal of 1729, and an insult compounded by the actual Great Famine in 1845-52. Spenser’s View was not published during his lifetime, it was not printed until 1633 – it is a pity it was ever printed at all. In 1599, Edmund Spenser died in London – ‘for lack of bread’ – in his late forties. I admire his work, his skill, his learning and his wit. I am glad not to have had the opportunity of meeting him.

Another view of Spenser's Cottage, Hurstwood.

Local delicacies

                 I happened to be talking with a Northern Irishman the other day when the conversation turned to regional delicacies. I mentioned butter pies, which he hadn’t heard of, so I told him how they are something found largely in Lancashire, eaten by the people here on fast days, when the consumption of meat is forbidden. Lancashire, it must be remembered, is an Old Catholic county so, of course, it’s fish on Fridays – hence the popularity of fish and chip shops. 

Butter Pie

Butter pies are an alternative to meat pies, with the meat left out and the pie is filled instead with buttery mashed potato and onions. Potatoes may now be a staple food, but it wasn’t always so. When the first potatoes reached the Old World from the Americas, the Protestants wouldn’t eat them because potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible, (neither is America for that matter, but that didn’t stop them moving there), and the Catholics, on the other hand, wouldn’t eat them unless, before they were planted, they were sprinkled first with Holy Water. Unbelievably they caught on, undoubtedly because of their versatility. 

John Gerarde - Herball 1597 - The first mention of potato in English

You can do a lot with the humble spud. Spud, by the way, comes from the root of words like ‘spade’, that is something short and blunt and, frankly, spud-like. A spatha was a short, broad sword, as was a spadroon and a spado; a spud was a short dagger, a small blade, a digging tool – Pepys’s diary entry for October 10^th 1667 has “… then begun with a spudd to lift up the ground.” Spuds, or puds, are also fists, particularly in children. 

Recipe for Porpoise Pudding - c. 1430

Pud, or pudding, is an old term for sausage, as in black pudding, another Lancashire favourite. Black pudding is made with oatmeal, onion, spices, diced fat and pigs blood, mixed and then boiled until cooked. Old-fashioned black pudding was flavoured with the herb pennyroyal, which was also known in days past as pudding-grass. 

Pennyroyal

The thought of pigs blood pudding will make some people turn up their nose at it, but blood sausage is enjoyed across the world, from the German blutwurst, French boudin noir, Spanish morcilla, to Vietnamese doi or Tibetan gyurma. The Latin word for sausage is botulus, from which we get the word botulism, the infection caused by the bacterium clostridium botulinum. 

Clostridium Botulinum

Justinus Kerner, a German doctor (and poet) identified the botulism toxin in improperly cooked blood sausages, hence the name, which means ‘sausage disease’ (and nothing to do with the appearance of the bacteria, which just happen to look like sausages), but the bacterium itself was not identified by him. That honour belongs to a Belgian professor of microbiology, Emile van Ermengem, some eighty years later than Kerner. 

Emile van Ermengem

Van Ermengem was sent a brine-cured ham, which had been served at a funeral dinner in the Belgian village of Ellezelles, and which had been responsible for an outbreak of botulism, poisoning twenty-three musicians (three fatally). From the ham, van Ermengem isolated the cause of the disease, the bacterium he initially called bacillus botulinus, and further study linked the pathogen to other outbreaks of food poisoning worldwide. Botulism causes muscular paralysis, starting with the muscles of the face and spreading to the rest of the body. If the respiratory system becomes infected, respiratory failure may occur, leading to death. 

However, it was also found that if exceptionally small doses of the toxin were applied to the muscles of the face, then the resulting paralysis also made that person look a little younger, so it began to be used for cosmetic purposes although the name botulinus neurotoxin was a little off-putting, so it was shortened to Botox. The dose needs to very tiny though, as the botulin toxin is extremely potent – it has been calculated that four kilograms of pure toxin is enough to poison the entire human population of the Earth. 

Recipe for Sausages - from Cookery Reformed, or the Lady's assistant - 1755

Sausages and potatoes. Bangers and mash. They are called bangers because cheap sausages would pop – or bang – when they were fried. They still will. Don’t waste your money on cheap sausages – and don’t ask what goes into them. You really, really, don’t want to know. Do, however, buy good sausages – preferably from a proper butcher. Cowman’s sausage shop on Castle Street in Clitheroe sell proper sausages, and has done so for years – their reputation for excellent quality is well deserved. 

Another fantastic sausage dish is Toad in the Hole. That’s sausages cooked in Yorkshire pudding batter, served with thick onion gravy. The name has nothing to do with toads, though. It’s a euphemism for another four-letter word that starts with a ‘t’ and ends with a ‘d’. Just think what a cooked sausage looks like. Are you thinking t**d? Yep, that’s the one.