The Wards of Old London: Bread Street - Goldsmiths, Bakers and Fishmongers

In an earlier blog-post, I followed in the footsteps of an imagined visitor to London from the west, entering the city through Newgate (having travelled, perhaps, from Reading or Oxford), and passing along Newgate Street to Saint Paul's. We left our visitor at the foot of Cheapside Cross, beyond which lies Cheapside itself, now, as in the past, part of the main thoroughfare running through the city from west to east. Newgate Street and Cheapside, together, closely follow the course of their Roman equivalent, the Via Decumana.

Charles Dickens Junior, in his 1879 Dictionary of London, says of the street:

"Cheapside remains now what it was five centuries ago, the greatest thoroughfare in the City of London. Other localities have had their day, have risen, become fashionable, and have sunk into obscurity and neglect, but Cheapside has maintained its place, and may boast of being the busiest thoroughfare in the world."

Cheapside in the early 20th Century. Photo: Snapshots of the past (licensed under CCA).

On either side of Cheapside were the shops of goldsmiths and jewellers. On its south side stood "Goldsmiths' Row," described by John Stow as "the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London, or elsewhere in England ... It containeth, in number, ten fair dwelling houses and fourteen shops." This was built in 1491 by Thomas Wood, a goldsmith. The records of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, which owned the freehold to these properties, show that the company tried very hard, throughout the 16th and 17th Centuries, to ensure that the shops and houses were let only to goldsmiths, but that, in practice, this was often difficult to enforce.

Cheapside in 1639 (The Reception of Marie de Medici in London - Image is in the Public Domain).

The lives of those who lived and worked here are celebrated (and satirised) in Thomas Middleton's (1613) play, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. It was on the site of one of these shops that workmen in 1912 discovered the Cheapside Hoard, probably the stock-in-trade of one of the jewellers, buried for safekeeping in the early stages of the English Civil War and never recovered. We will almost certainly never know whether this artisan fell as a Royalist in the Battle of Edgehill (alongside his likely commander, Robert Bertie, the 1st Earl of Lindsay, who, as Treasurer of the British East India Company, may have had an interest in some of the jewels), or as a Parliamentarian (probably with Philip Skippon's London Trained Bands) in the Siege of Basing House.

Cheapside separates Bread Street Ward, to its south, and Cripplegate Ward Within, to its north. Our visitor from the west might well have been tempted by the aromas of freshly-baked bread, to turn right from Cheapside onto Bread Street. As early as 1302, "the bakers of London were ordered to sell no bread at their houses, but in the open market at Bread Street" (Statute of Edward I).

Bread Street and Cordwainer Wards in 1720 (image is in the Public Domain).

The City Livery Companies were responsible for regulating their respective trades (the Worshipful Company of Bakers, for example, was concerned to ensure that the flour in the London loaf was not adulterated with sawdust, chalk or other contaminants), and this was, at least in theory, made easier by having all the practitioners of a particular trade operating in the same areas. In practice, however, this did not prevent all abuses - the Cheapside Hoard includes a number of fake rubies, produced from rock-crystal.

A woman buying bread from a baker, by Jorg Urlaub, 1568, Stadbibliothek Nurnberg (image is in the Public Domain).

Friday Street was part of the domain of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, responsible for ensuring that all the fish on sale here was either fresh, or properly salted or smoked. Whilst Cheapside itself was clearly a thoroughfare, streets such as Bread Street and Friday Street are unlikely to have been navigable by horses or wheeled transport during market hours, being filled with market stalls, their owners and customers.

The fish market at Antwerp, by Marten Pepijn & Adriaen van Utrecht, c1630, Rubenshuis (image is in the Public Domain).

Walking the streets of Bread Street Ward today, one has little immediate sense of its rich history. The Medieval Churches of All Hallows, Bread Street (where John Milton was christened in 1608) and Saint Mildred, Bread Street were both destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Both were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, but All Hallows was demolished in 1876; and St Mildred's (where Percy Bysshe Shelley married Mary Godwin in 1816) was destroyed during the London Blitz. A large part of the Ward, including "Goldsmiths' Row," is now beneath One New Change, the only large-scale modern shopping mall within the City. The up-side of such developments is that the developers are legally obliged to fund archaeological excavations before they start building. I was fortunate to have a tour of the excavations whilst they were in progress (they revealed Roman, Medieval and Early Modern features), and the Museum of London's archaeologists are now working on the publication.

One New Change, under construction  in 2009. The photograph is taken from Saint Paul's Cathedral, looking east along Cheapside (to the left) and Cannon Street (to the right). Photo: Graham Horn (licensed under CCA).

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is now working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.

The Witches of Ancient Rome and London

Since the time of the Renaissance, ancient Rome has frequently been presented as a supremely rational society, informed by philosophy and logic, and governed by the rule of law. One does not have to dig too deeply, however, to discover that many Romans were deeply superstitious, living in fear of ghosts, werewolves and witches. Halloween was not a Roman festival - ghosts, in particular, were more in evidence at Lemuralia (in May) - but witches might be encountered at any time of the year, and they were generally to be found in and around cemeteries.

Roman mosaic from Pompeii. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen (licensed under CCA).

Throughout the Roman world, it was forbidden to bury human remains within a town or a city, and cemeteries were consequently clustered around the roads leading into and out of them. People generally avoided travelling at night because of the perfectly rational fear of robbers, but also because of the fear of unquiet spirits haunting the tombs along the roads. To a witch, however, these spirits, and the human remains to which they were connected, were a resource which could be put to use for good or ill.

Tombs on the Appian Way, leading south from Rome. Photo: Geoff Wong (licensed under CCA).

The writer, Horace, in his Satires, refers to witches on the Esquiline Hill (originally located beyond the limits of Rome, and therefore used as a burial ground):

"Now one may live on the Esquiline, since it is made a healthy place [human remains had been systematically and carefully removed], and walk upon an open terrace, where lately the melancholy wanderers beheld the ground frightful with white bones, though neither the thieves or the wild beasts accustomed to infest this place occasioned me such care and trouble as did those hags that turn people's minds  by their incantations and drugs. These I could not by any means destroy nor hinder, but that they would gather bones and noxious herbs as soon as the fleeting moon had shown her beauteous face."

"I myself saw Canidia, with her sable garment tucked up, walk with bare feet and dishevelled hair, yelling together with the elder Sagana. Paleness had rendered both of them horrible to behold. They began to claw up the earth with their nails, and to tear a black ewe-lamb to pieces with their teeth. The blood was poured into a ditch, that thence they might charm out the shades of the dead, the ghosts that were to give them answers."

Canidia and Sagana, in Horace's account, go much further, torturing a boy to death by burying him upto his neck in a pit, and starving him, with food placed just beyond his reach, so that "his parched marrow and dried liver might be a charm for love, when once the pupils of his eyes had wasted away, fixed on the forbidden food."

Women consulting a witch, Villa del Cicerone, Pompeii. Photo: Wolfgang Rieger (image is in the Public Domain.

Accounts such as Horace's were widely translated and printed during the 16th Century, and would have been available for sale at the many book-stalls in the church-yard of Saint Paul's in London, so, when we read that Canidia, "having interwoven her hair and uncombed head with little vipers ... orders funeral cypresses and eggs besmeared with the gore of a loathsome toad, and feathers of the nocturnal screech-owl ... to be burned in Colchian flames," we can have little doubt that she and Sagana are the direct ancestors of the "weird sisters" in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The witch, Pamphile, transforming herself into an owl, spied upon by Lucius, from a 1537 edition of The Golden Ass, by Apuleius (Nicolo di Aristotile - image is in the Public Domain).

There is archaeological, as well as literary, evidence for Roman witchcraft and magic. Throughout the Roman Empire, lead "curse tablets," or defixiones, are found cast into streams, rivers and wells, invoking spirits either to harm a person identified by the person writing the curse, or to cause someone to fall in love with that person.

Lead defixio (curse tablet), from Telegraph Street, London (British Museum, image is in the Public Domain). The text reads: "I curse Tretia Maria, and her life and mind and memory; and liver and lungs mixed up together; and her words, thoughts and memory; thus may she be unable to speak what things are concealed, nor be able ..."

Around the Walbrook Stream, which divided Roman London into its western and eastern halves, several discoveries have been made over the last hundred and fifty years, of human skulls buried in pits. Under Roman law, they should not be there, since the pits are located within the city boundaries. It was once thought that these were victims of Boudicca's rebellion in 60/61 AD, but the most recent research shows them to be a century later in date. Evidence of violent deaths has led scholars to the conclusion that these were the remains either of executed criminals, or of gladiators killed in the arena. This may well be the case, but the skulls still ought not to have been buried within the city. The area in which they were found seems to have been an industrial quarter with foul-smelling tanneries, a place likely to have been shunned by toga-clad magistrates, but just the sort of environment in which a British Canidia or Sagana might have been able to operate.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Who were the Celts? Art, Identity and Myth in Ancient Europe

For those of us living in the United Kingdom, a current exhibition at the British Museum, and a recent three-part television documentary, have raised some interesting questions about "Celtic" identity. The exhibition ("Celts - Art and Identity"), to my mind, explores these questions with a degree of subtlety, whereas the BBC documentary ("The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice") seems to me to perpetuate, rather than to challenge, some of the myths that have emerged about "the Celts" over the last few centuries.

To talk of "the Celts" at all (rather than, say, "Celtic art" or "Celtic languages") makes certain pre-suppositions that ought not to remain unchallenged. It is unlikely that anyone living in Europe prior to the late 17th Century AD ever thought of themselves as "Celts." The exhibition does make clear that the term "Keltoi" was first used by Greek writers to refer to people whose culture was very different from their own. As he marched his legions through Gaul, Julius Caesar never thought that he was fighting "the Celts." He referred, instead, to "Gauls," "Belgae" and "Britons," but he recognised that none of these groups were homogeneous, and one of his favourite military strategies was to play one tribe off against another: the Aedui against the Arverni and Sequani in central France; the Trinovantes against the Catuvellauni in southern England; much as later European colonialists would play Tutsi against Hutu in Rwanda, Nuer against Dinka in Sudan.

There are at least two potentially coherent uses of the term "Celtic" in relation to the ancient cultures of Europe. The first is linguistic - people who spoke "Celtic" languages. The idea of a "Celtic" language group is a modern construct, but the surviving Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton) clearly have more in common with one another than they do with other languages, and it is reasonably clear that most of the people referred to by Caesar as Gauls, Belgae and Britons spoke languages closely related to these. The second is art-historical: there is a style of art, extending from the 4th or 5th Century BC to the 7th or 8th Century AD, which, for want of a better term, has been described as "Celtic." Unsurprisingly, given its focus on the art, the British Museum takes the art-historical definition as its starting point.

The "Battersea Shield," almost certainly made by craftsmen and used by a warrior who spoke a "Celtic" language. Photo: QuartierLatin1968 (licensed under CCA).

It is not safe, however, to assume that all "Celtic" art was produced by people speaking "Celtic" languages. There is a major problem with the vision presented in the documentary series, of a "unified" Celtic culture extending from Portugal in the west to Turkey in the east: it ignores the existence of the Germans. Roman writers, including Caesar and Tacitus, make a clear distinction between "Gauls" and "Germans" (Germani or Alemanni, terms sometimes, but not always, used interchangeably), and linguists certainly distinguish "Celtic" from "Germanic" languages. It is almost certain that some of the masterpieces of "Celtic" art were produced by people who spoke Germanic (and other) languages, but it is not always easy to determine which ones. Let's look at some specific examples from the British Museum exhibition.

The "Lord of Glauberg." Photo: Heinrich Sturzl (licensed under CCA).

The so-called "Lord of Glauberg," a sandstone statue of an elite warrior found in Baden-Wurtenburg, is probably a representation, however stylised, of a real man: a burial found nearby had a torc almost identical to the one depicted on the statue. Glauberg straddles the border between the Celtic (Gaulish) and Germanic-speaking worlds, so was he a Gaul (perhaps married to a German), or a German (perhaps married to a Gaul)? Either way, he might well have been bilingual, and is unlikely to have used either term to describe himself, citing, instead, a tribal name that may well have become lost in the mists of time. Torcs, in themselves, are often seen as indications of "Celtic" identity, but they may well have been worn by people who did not speak "Celtic" languages, and the Glauberg torc (even in art-historical terms) is far from typical of those found in areas where those languages clearly were spoken.

The Glauberg Torc. Photo: Rosemania (licensed under CCA).

Gold torc from Snettisham, Norfolk, a far more typical example of "Celtic" gold-work. Photo: Johnbod (licensed under CCA).

Even more problematic is the Gundestrup Cauldron, a spectacular masterpiece of the silver-smith's art currently on loan to the British Museum from the National Museum of Denmark. The smiths who made it were probably Thracians, and the cauldron was ultimately buried in Denmark: it is very unlikely that "Celtic" languages were spoken either in Thrace or in Denmark, and yet there are several themes in the iconography that suggest a link to the Celtic-speaking world.

The Gundestrup Cauldron. No photograph can truly do justice to this extraordinary artefact. I had seen it before, in the National Museum of Denmark, but would happily have paid the £16 admission for the exhibition just to see this. Photo: Knud Winckelmann (licensed under CCA).

The horned figure depicted here on the cauldron, holding a torc in his right hand, and a serpent in his left, is thought by many specialists to represent the Celtic god, Cernunnos (Germanic speaking people may well have called him by a different name). Photo: Malene Thyssen (licensed under GNU).

These figures on the cauldron are playing carnyxes, musical instruments that are known to have been used by "Celtic" (Gaulish) armies as they entered battle. Photo: Malene Thyssen (licensed under GNU).

For me, the cauldron speaks of the fluidity of cultural identities in the part of Europe that lay beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. Tribal groups, some of them speaking languages ancestral to modern Welsh & Breton, others speaking languages ancestral to modern German & Swedish, knew of, and interacted with one another, sometimes fighting, but sometimes also feasting together, trading and intermarrying.

 Bronze carnyx from Tintignac, France. The people who made and used this artefact are likely to have been Celtic-speaking Gauls. Photo: Claude Volette (licensed under CCA).

Celtic and Germanic speaking peoples may have had more in common than has sometimes been supposed, not only in terms of artistic expression, but also of religious practice. Their gods had different names, but many similar attributes, and they demanded human sacrifice, with ritually killed bodies found in bogs from Ireland to Denmark and northern Germany. The documentary presents this as a specific marker of  "Celtic" identity, but it seems to have been a practice shared by "Celts" and "Germans."

The British characters in my novel, An Accidental King, speak the "Celtic" language of pre-Roman Britain, wear "Celtic" jewellery and worship "Celtic" gods, but they see themselves not as "Celts," but rather as Regnenses (in Sussex), Catuvellauni (in the Thames Valley) and Trinovantes (in Essex). Some of them come to see themselves as "Britons," but this is a Roman concept, which, in the novel, seduces some of the native people of our islands, whilst alienating others. This, I imagine, is how things must have been, and it is why I find the vision offered by the British Museum more compelling and convincing than that of the BBC documentary.

The British Museum exhibition "Celts - Art and Identity" runs until 31st January 2016. Advance booking is recommended.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Berlin - The Diary of a Nightmare - A Remarkable Testament of the Second World War

It is one thing to take an interest in history, quite another to immerse oneself in primary sources: the letters; diaries; administrative documents; even shopping lists and newspaper advertisements; that have survived from a particular moment in the past. Many prefer indirect narratives of history, whether in the form of museum exhibitions, documentary programmes on television, or historical novels. For those of us who create those narratives, however, primary sources, where we can find them, are an essential starting point.

Historians are often sceptical about the first-hand testimonies that emerged from Germany in the aftermath of the defeat of the Third Reich. Many of these, especially the "diaries," were actually written up, in their present form, after the event, and and they are frequently at pains to emphasise the anti-Nazi credentials of their authors. Novelists and historians alike must exercise careful judgement in the ways in which we use such documents.

A USAF bombing raid over Berlin in 1944. Between 1940 and 1945, the USAF dropped 23,000 tons of bombs over the city, and the RAF dropped more than 45,000 tons. By May 1945, 1.7 million people (40% of the population), had fled. Photo: US National Archives & Records Administration, 197269 (reproduced with permission).

Ursula von Kardorff's "diary" of life in Berlin from 1942 to 1945 was written up for publication in 1947, presumably based on memory and brief, coded notes. A professional journalist, she makes no claim to have been a heroine of the resistance, but her diary does include comments that she is unlikely to have committed to paper during the war, since, if they had come to the attention of the Nazi authorities, they would certainly have brought disaster not only upon herself, but on many others (her social circle included most of those directly implicated in the 1944 plot against Hitler's life, and she was subsequently, questioned about this by the Gestapo).

Von Kardorff's diary is more about survival than about resistance, and most of the key facts can easily be checked. It is the account of daily life that attracted me to it as a key source informing the letters written by my fictional character, Greta, in "The Spirit of the Times," the 20th Century story in my novel, Omphalos. The details of individual hardships, and inevitable gallows humour, certainly have the ring of truth about them.

The following are excerpts from Von Kardorff's diary (the English translation is no longer in print, but used copies are available, and copies are likely to be available in many libraries).

"13th July 1943. A cynical joke is doing the rounds. A man is dug out after being buried in rubble for two days. His wife and child are dead, and he himself has lost his left arm, a leg and an eye, but he raises his remaining arm in salute and says 'Heil Hitler - Danzig is German, and that's the main thing!'"

"25th November 1943. The zoo was badly hit ... Many of the animals were killed, and others escaped. It is odd to think that a tiger might bob up at any moment ... towards morning we lay down and tried to get some sleep. Papa was on his rubble-covered bed ... Today Klaus and I tried to get things in order. We swept and scrubbed and carried piles of broken glass onto the balcony. We carted buckets of water up four flights of stairs, and managed to get at least one room into habitable condition."

"25th January 1944. I went into the zoo shelter when the seven o'clock warning sounded. It was eerie. The ack-ack had already opened fire, and a herd of human animals began to file towards the entrances of the shelter, which are too small, and far too narrow ... The walls of the shelter, made of massive blocks of stone, look like a stage-set for the prison scene in Fidelio. Snarling policemen drive the unwilling crowd slowly up the stairs, in order to divide them out onto the different floors of the shelter."

The entrance to the air-raid shelter at Berlin zoo. Anti-aircraft guns were mounted on top of it. The sign reads: "Men between 16 & 70 years old belong at the front, not in the bunker." Image is in the Public Domain.

"12th April 1944. I  walked home from the zoo because the weather was so fine ... The oriental buildings, in comically poor taste, stand there half-gutted. I peeped in through the cracks in the walls, but could see only crows. Sheep were grazing in one spot, and there was a smell of horse manure. I felt homesick for the country, but even here there is something beautiful about springtime. The Tiergarten is in full-bloom, in spite of the bomb craters."

The bombed ostrich house of the Berlin zoo. Many animals were killed, and many more were shot by troops after escaping. Presumably they were eaten (meat being in very short supply), but not, apparently, by von Kardorff. Image is in the Public Domain.

"20th September 1945. So this is Berlin. Fascinating and depressing. Everyone is hungry. All the people look half out of their minds, utterly worn out by the struggle for existence. In spite of everything, they are kind. They have been through Hell, whilst we have been living on the fat of the land in Swabia. It is shaming, but none of our friends reproach us. In the evening I went to the Kunfurstendam. Pretty girls with combs in their hair, and handbags slung on their shoulders, were strolling about with British, French and American soldiers ... Hot jazz resounds from bars which only serve hot drinks, and where there is nothing to eat."

German women washing clothes at a water hydrant, in July 1945, beside the wreck of an armoured car. Photo: Imperial War Museum, non-commercial license BU 8609.

It is precisely documents such as these, whether published (as here) or in archives, that provide historical novelists with the details of sights, sounds and smells, the sense of lives disrupted but also of life going on despite everything, that allow us to animate a time and a place that we never experienced, could not have experienced and, in truth, would not want to have experienced for ourselves.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

A History of the World in 50 Novels - 32 - "Tierra del Fuego," by Sylvia Iparraguirre

Sometimes history is driven forward by an accidental coincidence of circumstances. In 1830, when HMS Beagle was exploring the maze of channels and fjords at the southern tip of South America, one of the ship's boats was stolen by a group of natives. Her notoriously short-tempered captain, Robert FitzRoy, seized four young natives as captives. Since the boat was not returned, he considered himself justified in keeping his hostages, and embarked upon a curious social experiment. He dressed the three young men and one young woman in western clothes, taught them English, and eventually brought them back to England, his purpose, as stated in his journal, being that they should "become useful as interpretors, and be the means of establishing a friendly disposition towards Englishmen on the part of their countrymen."  

"HMS Beagle at Tierra del Fuego," by Conrad Martens (image is in the Public Domain).

 "A Savage woman of Tierra del Fuego," by Jacques Gasset de Saint-Sauveur, 1797, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (image is in the Public Domain).

One of these Yamana people died of smallpox shortly after arriving in England, and is known only by his English given name of "Boat Memory." The others, O'run-del'lico ("Jemmy Button"), El'leparu ("York Minster") and the girl, Yok'cushly ("Fuegia Basket"), received a brief education in England, and an introduction to the principles of Christianity, and were ultimately presented to William IV and Queen Adelaide.

"Two studies of Jemmy Button," from FitRoy's journal (image is in the Public Domain).

It had always been FitzRoy's intention to return these young people to their homeland, where they would play a part in the "civilising" of their fellows, but the Lords of the Admiralty were less enthusiastic about funding a return voyage. FitzRoy had taken (by any modern standards, "abducted") these young people on his own initiative, and they were therefore his problem, not that of the Royal Navy. He seems to have been resigned to the funding of the journey from his private fortune, but he was a well-connected aristocrat (descended from one of the bastards of Charles II), and someone pulled strings, securing the required funding from a reluctant Admiralty.

Robert FitzRoy, National Library of New Zealand (image is in the Public Domain).

Aware of his own depressive tendencies, and of the suicide of his predecessor as captain of the Beagle, FitzRoy insisted on having a companion to share his cabin and table: a naturalist would be ideally suited to the role, a university-educated gentleman who shared his own scientific interests (FitzRoy himself was a noted pioneer of meteorology). That naturalist was, of course, Charles Darwin, and his five-year voyage around the world on HMS Beagle would inspire the theory that went on to transform our understanding of the natural world, and of our place within it.

Sylvia Iparraguirre's novel, Tierra del Fuego, is not about Charles Darwin (he appears only as a minor character). It is primarily about the very different journey of O'run-del'lico ("Jemmy Button"), but Iparraguirre has cleverly chosen to narrate it from the point of view of a fictional Argentinian seaman, John William Guevara, who joins the Beagle's crew on the first voyage, befriends O'run-del'lico, and shares his experiences of England as an unfamiliar land, returning with him on the second voyage. It opens with Guevara in Argentina, many years after the Beagle voyages, receiving a letter from an Admiralty clerk, asking him to recount his experiences of contacts with the Yamana, and his account is, in part, addressed to this clerk. It is one of those historical novels in which fact and fiction are so skilfully blended that one is drawn to check what is real and what is invention.

"I notice a certain symmetry between you and me, Mr MacDowell or MacDowness, between your letter and what I write. I can't figure out your name; mine must have puzzled you. Who, then, is the one writing? ... The one who recalls these events and writes is John William Guevara, fifty-three years old, born in a part of the flatlands of what today is called the Argentine Confederation."

"The port [London] was a pandemonium ... Ships with unfamiliar flags, enormous warehouses where the shipping clerks shouted at the top of their lungs, shipments, people from every country, and of all races: Negroes, Hindus, Chinese ... Button had long ago used up his capacity for astonishment ... The chaos of persons, ships and buildings was irrelevant, or made no sense to him ... As amusement, some drunken sailors had passed the word around that our companions were cannibals, and there were more and more shouts. A rabble was gathering in the street, and it had turned into more than a bad practical joke."

"What we saw left us speechless: a canoe was approaching to starboard; a girl, almost a child, was skilfully stroking the water, first one side then  the other, a small fire at her feet. Standing at the bow was a man. He was naked, skinny, with a mass of tangled hair. A sealskin not much bigger than a handkerchief around his shoulders was all that protected him from the wind ... It was Jemmy Button ... There was, as never before, a great distance between him and the whites. This figure barely gave us a glimpse of the Button with English boots and jacket, the London Jemmy of a year ago. In the Captain's eyes, this man who had returned to the most primitive human state ... had kept nothing of what he had been given. He had done nothing. He hadn't played his part. He had civilised no one ... He was the image of his own failure."

It is not a long novel, but it has an epic quality, which put me in mind of Melville, of Conrad, even of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Perhaps, above all, like Shelley's masterpiece, it is a tragedy of unintended consequences.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Ghosts of China Past and Present: The Compelling Vision of Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei's current exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is his first major retrospective in the United Kingdom. His name has long been familiar to most of us, and many of us would recognise him if he passed us on the street. We know of his courageous advocacy of human rights in his native China, and of his suppression and imprisonment by the Chinese authorities, but of his work, that which actually defines his project as an artist, we have so far seen little.

The current exhibition changes all of that. The first thing that struck me, on entering the exhibition, is the enormous scale on which Ai works. This is not a lone dissident labouring away in a dingy basement, but rather the director of a vast atelier, the output of which includes the heaviest work of art ever to have sat on the floorboards of the Royal Academy. In fact, the word "dissident" tells only one part of the story. Ai has acquired shares in a quarry producing stone for his workshop; he has craftsmen from many specialisations working for him (in his promotion of traditional Chinese carpentry, stone-working and ceramic manufacture, he resembles a John Ruskin or a William Morris); perhaps most significantly of all, he has the facility to store and transport colossal pieces of sculpture. Surely none of this could have been achieved without friends, as well as foes, in the upper echelons of the Chinese establishment.

Those friends notwithstanding, it was a brave decision on Ai's part, after spending twelve years in exile in the United States, to return to China in 1993. A brave decision, but a fruitful one, for this body of work could certainly not have been produced anywhere else. The transformation of China, and especially its urban landscapes, over the past thirty years is on a scale not paralleled in Europe since the mid-nineteenth Century (Charles Dickens, on the pages of Dombey and Son, gives us a close approximation).

A traditional hutong in Guangzhou. Photo: Symane (licensed under CCA).

I first visited China on University business in 2001, and, for the next eight years, I made at least one, sometimes two, visits each year. Without fail, each time I arrived in Beijing, Guangzhou or Shanghai, I would get lost. Everything was changing, nothing remained still, and I never stepped twice onto the same streets. There were very good reasons for these changes: quaint and atmospheric as they may have been, the houses of the narrow, traditional hutong streets lacked all modern facilities, and posed an all-too-obvious fire risk. If much was gained, however, something was also being lost.

Guangzhou's Shang Kia Jiu Square. Photo: Sha Mian Ren (licensed under CCA).

At the heart of every community in Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) China was a clan temple, part of an ancestor-cult that dates back to the age of Confucius (551-479 BC). Here weddings were solemnised, prayers were said for the recently departed and, in at least some cases, young men were prepared for the gruelling examinations for the Imperial civil service. Many of these were still standing (though fewer were in active use) in 1993; I peered into a few derelict examples in 2001 and 2002; only a handful are still standing today, protected as ancient monuments and open to tourists.

The Liang Clan Shrine, Jiangxi. Photo: Symane (licensed under CCA).

Ai Weiwei and his collaborators collected a great volume of wood from the demolished temples, and used it to make sculptural installations. They also collected abandoned furniture from the houses of the hutongs, and combined these into new and imaginative arrangements. Ai is not, I think, suggesting a return to the past, but he is, perhaps, making some space for its ghosts; insisting, rather as John Betjeman did for Victorian architecture, that there is value in engaging with the past, even as society moves on from it.

"Bed,"by Ai Weiwei, made from salvaged "ironwood" (hornbeam) from Qing Dynasty temples. Photo: Pittigrilli (licensed under CCA).

"Fragments," by Ai Weiwei, made from salvaged "ironwood" from Qing Dynasty temples. Photo: www.wikiart.com (licensed under CCA).

"Chairs," by Ai Weiwei, made from salvaged Qing Dynasty furniture. Photo: Pittigrilli (image is in the Public Domain).

Nor does he stop with the Qing Dynasty. More controversially, he has "destroyed" (he prefers to say "transformed") and over-painted vases from China's Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), and even pulverised "Neolithic" pottery. The boundaries between protest, satire and creativity, here, are blurred. I have walked through the antique markets where he acquired these vessels with Chinese archaeologists, who assured me that most of the pieces offered for sale were fakes. "All the same," said one of these colleagues, "you wouldn't want to be caught at the airport with one of these in your luggage!"

Ai Weiwei "dropping a Han Dynasty vase" (image is in the Public Domain).

Over-painted "Han Dynasty vase," by Ai Weiwei. Photo: Victoriagrigas (licensed under CCA).

"Dust to Dust," by Ai Weiwei ("pulverised Neolithic pottery in glass urn"). Photo: Pittigrilli (licensed under CCA).

If Ai Weiwei's engagement with the Ghosts of China Past have been, for the most part, playful, his interaction with the Ghosts of China Present have been far more problematic in terms of his relationship with the regime. No artist or writer could respond playfully to the tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, especially when it became clear that the death-toll was made much higher by the corrupt actions of local officials, cutting corners with even the lax building standards that apply in China. Ai Weiwei courageously published the names of the victims, thereby subverting an official attempt to cover up the scale of the tragedy. It was this, more than anything else, that prompted his arrest, detention and torture, highlighted in the exhibition by a series of menacing fibreglass dioramas.

"S.A.C.R.E.D," by Ai Weiwei. Photo: Abxbay (licensed under CCA).

There have been few exhibitions in London in recent years that have generated quite the sense of anticipation that I sensed around this one. Whilst he has been known to us as a "personality," Ai Weiwei's work has, for most of us, been a "known unknown." Now revealed to us, I can only encourage people to see it for themselves.

The Ai Weiwei Exhibition at London's Royal Academy runs until 13th December. Advance booking is strongly recommended.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Negotiating with the Unexplained - Megaliths in the Popular Imagination

All around Europe, from Spain to Sweden and from Greece to Portugal, are conspicuous stone monuments for which, until the mid-19th Century, there could be no informed explanation. These monuments date to a period before literacy emerged in Europe, hence there can be no record as to who built them, or why.

"Everything that has come down to us from heathendom," wrote the Danish antiquarian, Rasmus Nyerup, in 1802, "is wrapped in a thick fog; it belongs to a space of time we cannot measure. We know that it is older than Christendom, but whether by a couple of years, or a couple of centuries, or even by more than a millennium, we can do no more than guess." His British contemporary, Sir Richard Colt-Hoare, writing a few years later, concurred: "Speculation may wander over its wide and spacious domain, but it will never bring home with it either truth or understanding."

The monuments themselves, however, were too obvious and too beguiling to ignore. Taking his lead from Roman writers, such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus, the 18th Century historian, Philip Falle, was certain that the megalithic site of Le Couperon, on the island of Jersey, had been a Druidic altar that had once been "besmeared and seen smoking with human blood," and offered thanks to God for "extinguishing so Hellish a superstition through the Gospel of his Son."

The dolmen of Le Couperon, Jersey. Photo: Pawel "pbm" Szubert (licensed under CCA). It is the "grave of a Danish pirate" that sits beneath an apple tree in "The Path of Stars," the Medieval story in my novel, Omphalos.

With the insights of modern archaeology, we now understand that most of these monuments were built several millennia before the birth of Christ (most date to the Neolithic era, between 4500 and 2500 BC), but such distant periods were not even imaginable to most of our Medieval or Early Modern ancestors. Long before Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland in the 5th Century AD, the Iron Age people of Ireland had re-imagined the monuments built by their distant ancestors as the abodes of their own Pagan gods. The passage grave of Newgrange, for example, was the home of the god of love, Aengus Og.

The passage grave of Newgrange, Ireland. Photo: Jimmy Harris *licensed under CCA).

Oengus Og, the pre-Christian Love God of Ireland, his head encircled by white singing birds. From Heroes of the Dawn, by Violet Russell & Beatrice Elvery, 1914 (image is in the Public Domain).

In the 6th Century, Pope Gregory the Great, determined to claim all of Europe for the Catholic Church, ordered that Pagan sites be "purified from the worship of the demons," a process that continued over centuries. In some cases, this was interpreted to mean physical destruction, but in other cases the monuments themselves were Christianised - a Medieval church built within the stone circle of Avebury, a menhir (standing stone) at Saint Uzec in Brittany carved with symbols of the Crucifixion.

The Menhhir de Saint-Uzec, Pleumeur-Bodou, Brittany. Photo: Ash_Crow (licensed under CCA).

Long-held traditions and customs, however, did not surrender easily to the decrees of pontiffs or priests. It was widely believed, in the 17th Century, that witches gathered at certain of these monuments (Le Trepied, on the island of Guernsey, for example) to have intercourse with the Devil.

In the late 1980s, as I travelled around Normandy, Brittany and the Channel Islands researching for my PhD, I heard tales, told by elderly farming people, of the "little people" who emerged from the megaliths at night (they are called "faitiaux" in the Channel Islands, "korrigans" in Brittany). These fairy-folk might be helpful to humans - one old man told me that the faitiaux would mend a pair of shoes left in a certain dolmen (megalithic tomb), provided that one also left a cup of milk for them - but they could also be malicious if disturbed. What they gave, they might also take away - a barren cow, tethered overnight to a menhir, would be found within a few weeks to be in calf, but her milk would soon dry up if the farmer did anything to offend the korrigans.

The Dolmen of Grantez, Jersey, known locally as Le Trou des Faitiaux. When the site was discovered in the early years of the 20th Century, a local farmer tried to drive the archaeologists from the land, concerned that they would offend the faitiaux.

It is difficult to know whether these customs are still practised today, but most villages in Brittany have an annual Pardon, a church service in honour of its patron saint. The service is followed by a Fest-Noz, a party with traditional music and dancing, helped along by the consumption of large amounts of local cider, and the spirit distilled from it - Calvados. Sometimes in French, and sometimes in Breton (a language close to Welsh), stories are still told of Grandpere's and Grandmere's encounters with the korrigans.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

New Release!

Castles, Customs and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors, Volume 2, edited by Debra Brown and Sue Millard.

An anthology of essays from the second year of the English Historical Fiction Authors blog, this book transports the reader across the centuries from the prehistoric era to the Twentieth Century, with more than forty different authors sharing the stories, incidents and insights arising from their research for their own novels. It can be purchased from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

To mark the publication, we are holding a blog-hop, with each author posting something on the broad topic of customs from history. To see the postings from other authors, click on the link below, or look out for the hash-tags #EHFA and #Customs on Twitter.