More Pepys!
Picard was fond of Pepys, and fond of London, and happy to spend possibly quite a lot of time reading original documents from Pepys' era in London; she also has a felicity of expression something like 's. Do all British tax lawyers write like that? Should we read Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce straight?
Tidbits:
London Bridge, built up with houses, deserves a book of its own; see Ex Libris, a good novel set there.
Petticoat breeches:
"'all open, like a short petticoat, having no sewing up between the legs'...heavily trimmed with yards and yards of ribbon, and also they were worn at half-mast, hanging precariously from the wearer's hips, no longer attached to the doublet...The gap was filled by an expanse of billowing linen shirt filled with point." [lace] (p. 117)
But no skateboards.
A 1792 drawing of a 16th-century mansion composed largely of windows; small panes, but large windows running around three stories at least, including the ground floor. Expensive! Seems to be set around a courtyard, perhaps a private one, maybe the windows were safe because of that. All the house that isn't window is heavily carved. It's grand and pretty.
Samuel records eating an enormous amount of meat, and no vegetables; personal taste, descriptive bias, or was that actually what people ate? Recipes are ambiguous (one 'grand sallet', p. 152, would do James Lileks proud: violets, capers, preserved oranges, and a architectural or geometrical arrangement stuck with rosemary and hard-boiled eggs and lemons. However, there is legal and economic evidence of a steady flourishing market in vegetables and fruits. She assumes that people ate them but didn't bother to talk about them.
Other good recipes: what looked like a pie but actually contained a live snake:But 'this is only for a wedding to pass away time', which can drag at such gatherings. (p. 153)
Also, Take a male Pike, rub his skin off whilst he lives...
(p. 155)
Complicated common beliefs about sex; female orgasm was believed necessary to conception (except by at least one midwife), and women were spoken of as dangerous sexual devourers, but Pepys' and other descriptions of actual dalliance are sometimes very explicit that the woman couldn't have enjoyed herself and the man didn't care. Picard can cite a period of six months in which Samuel did not lie with his wife (who he loved and admired) but did have encounters of various casual sorts with other women. Maybe it was the religious madonna/whore split, although that seems too etiolated for the age and man in question; maybe it sublimated guilt about the dangers of childbirth. After all, with no contraception and a serious risk of death with each pregnancy, a man would be helplessly moved not to have sex with a woman he loved; and the rationalizations around a double batch of helplessness would be severe. Not that I have any evidence for this; it just allows one to think a little more kindly of half of Pepys' behavior.
By 1671 there were fifteen Quaker boarding schools, of which two were for girls and two were coeducational. (p. 187)
Have you ever heard a well-trained actor reading Chaucer aloud? He sounds like a drunken Cornish bumblebee trapped in a jar of honey - with impeccable erudition, I am sure. Now turn your mind the the early years of our present Queen's reign; her broadcasts to the nation on Christmas Day could have cut glass at 50 paces. Between the two eras the Great Vowel Shift has occurred. (p. 199)
Maybe there are examples of each online.
Marriage - although theoretically marriage was indissoluble and well-defined, Henry VIII had fuzzed up the first, and actually the second was complicated by the sort-of-indissoluble condition of betrothal. I think The Knight, the Lady and the Priest has the background on why the Church philosophically needed to recognize private mutual promises as marriage. In practice, between human hotheadedness and parental opinion and what all, it wasn't always clear who was betrothed. Even a marriage recorded in a church register has to have been hard to prove if the participants wouldn't say where it had been. Finally, people abandoned by their spouses seem to have technically been married until they could prove they were widowed, but in practice were considered widowed after seven years. Collusion would have sometimes been irresistible, I should think.
ISBN: 0-380-73236-X
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (17th c.). | TrackBack