An appetite for wonders: Robert Gell considers Marcle Hill

Robert Gell made much of the subject of my last post, the Marcle Hill landslip, in his sermon to the Society of Astrologers, published as Stella nova, a new starre, leading wisemen unto Christ. Or, A sermon preached before the learned Society of Astrologers, August 1. 1649.

As Gell explains it, the earth shook at the giving of the law (he cites Psalm 114), then the earth was shaken again when the gospel came to be revealed (his far-fetched connection here is when King Herod was troubled by Christ’s birth: Herod’s name, he tells us, connotes ‘mountain’). Finally, as he sums up this three-part view of history: ‘what the Lord did at the giving of the Law, prefigured what should be done at the publishing of the everlasting universall Gospell’ (p. 28)

That’s right, Gell seems to have been a reader of the works of Joachim de Fiore, and to have been expecting the angel of Revelations 14, who would deliver the third Testament, that of the ‘everlasting gospel’. He cites Joachim directly, quoting the over-stimulating verses in Revelations, and saying ‘But who this Angel was, every one judgeth as he is affected. Abbat Joachim tells us, it was Gregory the Great’ (in his Aggelokratia theon, 1650).

Though he is a relatively temperate reader of Joachim (Gell insists that nobody has produced writings ‘holy and pure’ enough for them to be seen as the Third, Everlasting Gospel, and that the prophet expected to preach the third Gospel is a ‘Non est inventus’), Gell’s argument about Marcle Hill exhibits that total lack of a sense of proportion that marks so much mid-seventeenth century religious writing. He goes on to spell out the strange symbolisms of the divinely-altered landform in detail, as it now prefigures the geography of his ideal city of Christian brotherhood, Philadelphia:

‘This hill (i.e., Philadelphia) like that I told you of out of Master Camden and Master Speed, keeps the sheep safe in their cotes, and all the trees of righteousness growing upon it; only it turns those West which were East, and the East West. They that were first become last, and the last first. It over turnes all meer ceremoniall outside worship; and changes the great beaten roads, even that broad way of open known sinners, and that kind of narrow way, which is indeed cut out of the same broad way, consisting of an affected kinde of strictnesse, in regard of some bodily exercises; which neglect of the true narrow way of mortification which leads unto the everlasting life. And as that Hill mounted it selfe on the top of another, and there rested; so this Hill of the Lord must raise it selfe above all the little Hils, even all particular Churches divided in judgements and opinions.’

So Marcle Hill, after the landslide, symbolises all the inversions of earthly rank of the heavenly city itself …

Reading Stella nova, one can hardly help not imagining the astrologers, who perhaps expected their own proclivity for nutty deductions from perfectly natural events to be flatteringly treated by their preacher, sitting there wondering what on earth he was on about, as he digressed so unpredictably from the phenomena they were interested in to these wild geological-eschatological conclusions. Instead of anything astral or planetary, here he was, seeing the apocalypse in a landslide a trifling matter of 75 years before.

Gell, in his Stella nova sermon, introduces a long quotation from Speed’s account of Marcle Hill like this: “Master Camden in his Britannia tells us, in the Description of Herefordshire, that Prope confluentes [Lugi & Vagae] Collis quem Marcley-hill vocant, annus saluties 1575. quasi somen solutus consurrexit & triduum se in immanissimam molem propellans horrendo reboans mugitu, & obvia quaeque prosternans in superiorum locum, magna cum admiaritone se promovit, eo terrae motus genere, ut judico, quod Physici Brasmatiam vocant. Master Speed, in his Description of the same County, gives us the History more fully; onely there is in him a mistake of the yeere, unlesse it were onely the Printers fault, as I believe.

Gell then quotes Speed’s version at length, as given in my previous blog entry, and comments: “This (landslide), although we may refer unto its second causes, as master Camden doth; yet if we consider the great manifestation of that Divine light, by the publishing of the everlasting Gospell that very yeere unto this nation, we cannot but apply that of the Psalmist; What ailed yee, yee Mountaines that yee skipped like Rams, and yee little Hils like yong Sheepe? Tremble thou Earth at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Israel (Psalm 114.)”

“The Lord then made manifest His presence by the moving of the Earth”, Gell proclaims. What connects the landslide (with its strangely misunderstood reports of the slip piling up on itself into a new eminence) to a Stella nova (the nova in Cassiopeia) is, to re-iterate a point, the miraculous nature of any change to the divinely ordered creation.

At the site of 'The Miracle'

Down for a weekend in Herefordshire, stopping at this very pleasant place,

http://hallendhouse.co.uk/

Some part of what George Sandys said centuries ago is still true of Herefordshire: “the great Age of the Inhabitants is a sign of the goodness of the Air …This County exceeds in 4 W’s. Wood, Wheat, Wooll and Water. Much Syder is made here, so that the County deserves the Name of Pomerania.”

But my photographs are of the site of what was once a great prodigy, one that Sandys also mentions, though with some inaccuracy and some improvement on the strangeness of the event: “Anno 1575 (sic) Marcley-Hill shaked and roared for 3 days together, and raised it self into an higher Place” (Anglorum speculum, or, The worthies of England in church and state alphabetically digested into the several shires and counties therein contained, 1684).

What can be seen today? The solitary yew tree was supposedly once in the ground of the chapel at Kynaston which was demolished by the slide. The sunken lane with rock faces at either side in the photograph was (I thought) a remnant of the slide. There was no reason for anyone to make a deep cutting into a field which could be walked into further down-slope; it looks like the ground opened and was pulled apart.

 

http://www.multimap.com/s/imF0XoR6

A full and more accurate account that that given by Sandys can be found in the chroniclers William Camden and John Speed:

“But more admirable was the work of the Omnipotent, even in our own remembrances, and year of Christ Jesus 1571, when the Marcley Hill in the East of this Shire, rouzed it self out of a dead sleep, with a roaring noise removed from the place where it stood, and for three days together travelled from her first site, to the great amazement and fear of the beholders. It began to journey upon the seventh day of February, being Sunday, at six of the Clock at night, and by seven in the next morning had gone forty paces, carrying with it Sheep in their cotes, hedge-rows, and trees; whereof some were overturned, and some that stood upon the plain, are firmly growing upon the hill; those that were East were turned West; and those in the West were set in the East: in which remove, it overthrew Kynaston-Chappel, and turned two high-ways near an hundred yards from their usual paths formerly trod. The ground thus travelling, was about twenty six Acres, which opening it self with Rocks and all, bare the earth before it for four hundred yards space without any stay, leaving that which was Pasturage in place of the Tillage and the Tillage overspread with Pasturage. Lastly, overwhelming her lower parts, mounted to an hill of twelve fathoms high, and there rested her self after three days travel, remaining his mark, that so laid hand upon this Rock, whose power hath poysed the Hills in his Ballance.”

(An epitome of Mr. John Speed's theatre of the empire of Great Britain And of his prospect of the most famous parts of the world, 1676 edition.)

John Speed’s account gives us a clue to that unlikely notion of the landslide defying gravity (as in Sandys’ sensationally miraculous “Marcley-Hill shaked and roared for 3 days together, and raised it self into an higher Place”) - the material coming down the hill (I take him to be saying) piled up where it came to a halt to a height of twelve fathoms. This might be just about believable as a guess at the height of the slumped material piling up on itself. I take it that this entire tongue of land (covered in blackcurrant bushes) is of material that once was higher up the ridge, and also represents the lateral spreading of that temporary new hill of slumped earth.

Speed’s account was repeated verbatim in early modern writings that deal in their own way with what we would call geology: “And if this late Earth-quake seeme strange or incredible unto them, I wish them have recourse unto that more admirable worke of the Omnipotent, even in ours and our Fathers remembrance, in Hereford-shire: and recorded by our best Historiographers: when as, In the yeere of Christ Iesus, 1571. Marcley Hill in the East of the shire, rowzed it selfe out of a dead sleepe, and with a roaring noise remoued from the place where it stood...”  Henry Holland continues to quote the whole account he found in Speed. (Motus Medi-terraneus. Or, A true relation of a fearefull and prodigious earthquake which lately happened in the ancient citie of Coventrie, and some other places of the Kingdome, to the great amazement of the inhabitants. With a touch of some other occurrences, as well forraine as domestique, 1626).

The Marcle Hill landslip remains on the Ordnance Survey map as ‘The Miracle’. These writers seem unduly excited by events of this nature, and it is worth pausing over why they cite and re-cite the few examples they had. Obviously, Great Britain is not very active geologically, so the rare instances of a major movement assume importance, and get confused with earthquakes (as we see in Henry Holland, though of course a minor tremor might have started the slump). Mainly, of course, God has to be involved: His world is in the order in which He established it. Latter day changes to that initial divine ordering are important signs: warnings of His displeasure, portents of things to come. This 1571 landslide was more locally known, but creates (in a smaller way) the same kind of stir as the nova in Cassiopeia would do in the following year.

Thomas Lawrence intelligently cited the landslip as a hint towards a way to account for anomalous discovery of fossil sea shells far inland and up mountains: “Marcley hill with us in Hereford-shire, Anno 1571. with a great noise removed it self from its place, and went continually for three dayes together, overthrowing Kinnaston Chapel, bearing the earth 400 yards before it. And therefore Exhalations may be granted to remove stones and sands, and with them such heterogeneous bodies as lie on them, from one place to another, from the sea to the hills, from a coast far into a countrey. (Thomas Lawrence, Mercurius centralis, or, A discourse of subterraneal cockle, muscle and oyster-shels found in the digging of a well at Sir William Doylie’s in Norfolk many foot under ground and at considerable distance from the sea / sent in a letter to Thomas Brown by Tho. Lawrence, 1664).

The date of the landslip does vary from author to author. 1575 is a mistake; both Camden and Speed give 1571. February 17^th 1571 is the date given in the most consciously ‘scientific’ or Baconian of these writers, J. Childrey, but his account is a very close paraphrase of what he had found in Speed, and he maybe introduced this later date through an error in his note-taking. Childrey’s surmise was that large earth-slips had something to do with the local soil: “Machley-hill in Herefordshire, Westram in Kent, and Armitage in Dorsetshire were all of a fat and clammy soile, and not very stiffe; (for then I think I have much to say to the cause of those too) but till I am sure, I shall be silent, though some of Herefordshire have told me, that Marcley-hil is such as I would have it to be.” (J. Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or, The natural rarities of England, Scotland, & Wales. According as they are to be found in every shire. Historically related, according to the precepts of the Lord Bacon; Usefull for all ingenious men of what profession of quality soever, 1662).

Gideon Harvey’s account of “a very stupendious Earthquake, that befel the east part of Herefordshire in the year 1575 in March, where the earth and a rocky hill (called Marcley hill) was removed to a far distance thence with the Trees and all the Sheep that were upon it” in his Archelogia philosophica nova (1663) seems to have conflated this landslide with the one at Westerham in Kent, for he says that “Some other Trees were cast out of the ground, whereof many fell flat upon the ground, others hapned to fall into the seams of the Hill, and closed as fast, as if they had taken their first root there. The hole which this eruption made was at least 40 foot wide, and 80 yards long, lasting from Saturday in the Evening untill Munday at noon.” The detail of trees being swallowed up comes from accounts of divine signs and wonders which gather together all sorts of events, as when Increase Mather cites both Marcle Hill and Westerham in his An essay for the recording of illustrious providences wherein an account is given of many remarkable and very memorable events which have hapned this last age (1684).

The slow landslide at Marcle Hill got into poetry (of sorts) too, when the courtier poet Sir Aston Cokain, writing a ‘Remedy for Love’ after Ovid, sensibly told his recovering sufferer from love to go and view the beauties and wonders of the world “Hereford behold, / And Marcley hill whose motion is so told.” (A chain of golden poems).

This was my previous landslide:
http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2010/01/john-chapmans-new-years-gift.html

 

John Chapman’s New Year’s Gift: documenting the Westerham landslip, 1596.

Google Earth image contributed by Malcolm Page,
see comment from him below the post

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John Chapman presented his pamphlet A most true report of the myraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine acres, at Westram in Kent, which began the 18. of December, and so continued till the 29. of the same moneth to Margaret, Baroness Dacre as a New Year’s gift early in 1596 (she was the sister of the Gregory Fiennes, Baron Dacre, who had been executed for murder in 1594).

It’s an interesting pamphlet, carefully written and unsensationalised, about a creeping landslip near Crockham Hill, in Kent. 27 male witnesses verify the account – the local JP, the vicar, a physician, 12 gentlemen and 12 yeomen. As far as I can pick up from local village websites, there does not seem to be any current local knowledge of this historical happening in their pretty landscape.

Chapman supplies everything we need to understand what happened, geomorphologically. We are in 1596, and Shakespeareans all remember how at that time

the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

Chapman confirms this at local level, writing finally of how by “the great aboundance of water, and continuall rayne which have fallen so many months together of late, sundry great bowrnes (bournes), and violent streames have broken out in many places of this land, and at the least seaven such within xii miles of this place every way, the least whereof is able to drive a corne Mill”.

That’s a lot of ground water. England was saturated, and if you look at this map, my best guess as to where the landslip occurred, you can see (switch to the OS map) the spring line beneath the higher ground to the north.

http://www.multimap.com/s/PE4ZqMSR

Chapman makes, for his own reasons, which I will come to, a big point about how the rain water did not increase the flow of two ‘gozelles’ in the area that slipped (for ‘gozelle’, the OED cites 1695 KENNETT …a gutter is in Lincolnshire a Gool, in Kent a Guzzle, in Wiltshire a Gushill, and Gooshill”). I imagine some feature of the local geology saturated the top soils, which maybe traveled on a slippery clay layer below. As far as I can judge by my geological map, Crockham Hill seems to be precisely at the northern boundary of the Weald Clay, which is succeeded by the overlying Lower Greensand. I think that would be the impermeable layer which prompts the spring line upslope.

This Wikipedia page has a nice animated gif of a similar slump landslide over several days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landslide . Though that’s on a far steeper slope, with no saturation. As Chapman writes, vividly, the two ‘closes’ or fields that slipped and merged into one further downslope “were Adant (sic? Not in OED), and upon the shoot (= rising?) of an hill, but not so much that a bowle being cast up against the hill might easily have layen and settled without tumbling backe againe perforce”. The ground was not steep enough for a sudden slide, but just gave way in a gradual slumping.

On the 18^th of December, the whole area (nine acres!) started to move, leaving a scar at the point of detachment of six and a half feet. On the 19^th December, there was thirteen feet more of slippage, then eighty feet on the 20^th. People stood on it, experiencing how it managed “to move, slide, and shoote southward, not with any suddaine shot, but creeping by little, and little, so as the motion and stirring thereof was not discerned nor perceived, by them that were presently standing upon it, but onlie by the sundrie effects that followed, as the cracking of the roots of trees, the brushing of boughs, the noise of the hedge-wood breaking, the gaping of the ground, and the riving of the earth asunder”.

The slide was measured at one stage as fourteen “handfulls by measure in one houre and a halfe” – 56 inches, nearly 6 feet. After eleven days of movement, Chapman outdoes the Beatles’ count of ‘10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire’ with a conscientious tally of “eleven thousand furrows, riffes, cracks, and clefts in diverse places here and there”. The nine acres of ground had moved by eight perches or more (a perch is that useful old English measure, of sixteen and a half feet, or coincidentally close to five metres). He describes the way the upslope material ended up on top of the lower lying ground: “the hinder ground coming faster forward … then the former ground did give way unto it, caused it to swell uppe in rounde hillocks like unto graves, the green turf remaining still whole and unbroken above”. In other places, the higher material had gone like a broken wave over the lower.

Everything went with the topsoil layers: a hedge that ran across the slip was displaced southward by seven perches, its trees either still upright and apparently growing, or overthrown. There had been “two standing water pools” in the upper of the two fields. These also moved “four perches south, with their tuftes of Alders still standing upon them, but withal, they are mounted up aloft, and become hilles, standing yet to be seen with their sedge, flags, and black mudde upon the toppe of them still”. In their place, dramatically, a “great hole made by sinking of the earth, to the depth of 30 feet” opened further down the slide.

This gentle slumping after a very rainy year hardly seems unaccountable. But what is interesting (from the early modern mindset side of things) is the way that Chapman sets out to interpret all this: as he saw no increase in the runoff through the ‘gozelles’ (the flow in each could be accommodated by an auger hole of one and a half inches, he says, and it didn’t rise at all during all the deluge), the landslip, he firmly decides, “cannot be imputed to the aboundance of water enforcing it as the cause thereof”.

The great Crockham Hill landslip is in fact for him a tremendous act of God, through which the deity gives ‘unto our eies a sencible testimony of his most certaine being”. We do not have to travel far, Chapman says, to have stirred up in ourselves “a strong and fruitfull impression of the great deitie”. Fifteen miles south of London will do.

This local and rather quietly impressive event is a manifestation of the God who “hurleth downe hilles … and exalteth the lowe vallies”. “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” said Isaiah, and here it is locally, as Chapman triumphantly, and piously, concludes his description: “By means of all which confusion, it is come to passe, that where the highest hilles were heretofore, there the deepest dales be now. And where the lowest dales were then, now the ground lyeth mounted heist”.

As the creeping earth was moving so slowly, people had plenty of time to get aboard for the ride. Chapman says that 4,000 people have visited the site, from London and elsewhere: “to whom it hath seemed to be a very strange and fearefull sight, giving occasion unto some of them, to thinke upon that great opening of the earth that shalbe in the latter day when she shall yeelde up her dead, that be in her to come to the resurrection”. He makes their experience one of supernatural, not natural, wonder.

So it was, in Chapman’s eyes, as though the visitors were on a slow ride in a divine theme park. He remarked at the start of his pamphlet that God by his “wonderfull and unsearchable providence … doth from time to time … alter and change” the world He created. Here was the local instance, though it is rather evident that Chapman would have liked it rather better if God could have contrived to swallow up a few atheists, those who ‘in their own hearts … saye plainely … that there is no God at all’. He has an excellent Bible example in mind. Chapman says “this damnable impiety deserves to be punished”: either with the fires that fell on Sodom, “or the sudden gaping of the ground that swallowed up Corah.”

He refers to Korah, in Numbers 16, who complained to Moses about having left behind one land flowing with milk and honey, and not having arrived in the promised land: Moses refutes these objections to his handling of the wilderness years, remarking to the Israelites: “But if the LORD make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the LORD. And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.”

Chapman emerges well from the pamphlet. I think he has to be the ‘yeoman’ of the same name listed among the witnesses. He is a credit to local education: meticulous, observant, and capable of writing very vividly. But this bit of local slope instability cannot for him be accounted for by secondary causes: the primary cause is the important one. God is reshaping his world. Or rather, bible texts fill out Chapman’s response to what he witnessed: it’s Isaiah, The Book of Numbers, and what the earth will look like when the dead awaken. His religious beliefs give meaning to what he saw.

Mount Etna moralised, 1670

My illustrations are from Heneage Finch, Earl of Winchilsea’s A true and exact relation of the late prodigious earthquake & eruption of Mount AEtna, or, Monte-Gibello (1669) and from a ballad, Mount AEtna's flames, or, The Sicilian wonder (also 1669) written to tell the same marvels to a less polite audience, where I believe that we can see the woodcut engraver doing a down-market version of the Earl’s woodcut (just as the ballad itself is entirely indebted to the illustrated pamphlet). Finch had gone to some trouble to get the original drawing done, as his pamphlet explains: “As Your Majesty will see by the draught that I take the boldness to send herewith; it was the best I could get, but hath nothing of the Progress into the Sea [he means, the sight of the lava flowing into the sea itself]; the confusion was so great in the City, which is almost surrounded with Mountains of Fire, that I could not get any to draw one…”

Heneage Finch was Ambassador to Constantinople (where he got on terrifically well), his poor wife bore him 27 children, and, as the ODNB life says, “his correspondence breathes trenchant common sense”. About the eruption Finch, who was actually in Catania, gathered all the information he could, and his account sticks to the facts. Altogether he writes to Charles II in the spirit of the Royal Society.

I was therefore interested to find Thomas Vincent’s Fire and brimstone from heaven, from earth, in hell, or, Three discourses I. Concerning the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah formerly, II. Concerning the burning of AEetna, or Mount Gibel more lately, III. Concerning the burning of the wicked eternally, with fire and brimstone (1670). Vincent was a compulsive publisher of his own sermons and moral discourses (here’s a pot calling the kettle black, eh?). He takes Finch’s pamphlet, with its forward-looking discourse, and exploits it for hell-fire and brimstone. He says he was actually prompted by what Finch didn’t say: “The occasion of my Writting these few Sheets concerning these three great Burnings, was the breaking forth of such Flames and Streams of Fire the last Year at the Mouth and sides of Aetna, or Mount Gibel; being willing to take hold of any occasion, especially so sutable as this, to awaken Sinners, that they might endeavour their escape from the future and everlasting burnings of Hell; and this I thought the rather to do, because in the Relation given us of those stupendous burnings of Aetna, the hand of the Lord was not in the least minded, his Name not once mentioned, and no improvement thereof at all attempted by him, or them that drew up the Narrative; which to me seemed a shame, and quickned me (when others who might have done it better were silent) in my endeavours to make some advantage of this Providence for the good of Souls.”

A section like this one following is mainly directly lifted from Finch, with a few biblical references (which might remind us of Milton’s conspicuously volcanic hell): “But that which was most notable in these eruptions, was the stream and flood of fire, which in liqued melted matter, gushed forth at the breaches. We read Isa. 30. 33. Of a stream of Brimstone kindled by the breath of God, which runneth in burning Tophet: Such was the stream of Fire and Brimstone which came forth of this burning Mountain, the flames of it were blew like burning brimstone, the coulour of it fiery red, like melted brasse, the motion of it like Quick-silver; this stream (wherein great stones were seem to swim of the bigness of an ordinary Table) coming forth at the sides of the Mountain, ran down like a mighty torrent, and meeting with a Hill devided it self into two currents, which spread themselves, one of them in some places at least six miles in breadth, and was judged to be fifteen yards in depth. In its progresse this stream ran in, upon a Lake of four fathem Water, and four miles in compass, which it both filled up, and raised a Hill of ragged Stones and Rocks upon it. The composition of this fiery stream was judged to be Sulphur, Nitre, Sal Armoniac, Lead, Iron, Brass, and other Metals, melted with the vehement heat of the fire.”

Where Heneage made no comment, Thomas makes propaganda: “Yea, the Image of the blessed Lady of the Annunciata, (so highly reverenced by the Superstitious Papists, unto which many resorted in Pilgrimage from remote parts) was not spared, whatever power the Intercession of that Virgin Lady hath with her Son in Heaven, for persons here upon the Earth, (as the Papists ridiculously fancy) yet nothing could now avail to secure her Image from being swallowed up by this devouring fiery stream; whereby all may see that there was no difference between the stones of that Image, and those of the other buildings in that place which equally felt the force of the fire.”

Despite making some allusions to the dismay and panic in London at the 1666 great fire, Thomas feels a Protestant population would have coped better: “Had the Christian religion taken place there in the purity and power thereof, it might have born up the spirits of the sincere, and established Christians against overwhelming fear and amazement in all those storms and danger; no wonder if the blind Superstitious Papists, whose worship is mingled with such vanity and Indolatry, be filled with such dread and horrour, especially the more notorious Sinners amongst them.”

Soon he is ranting away (I suspect a certain disappointment with God for making all this smoke without carbonizing a suitable number of sinners): “Sicily hath drunk deep of the Cup of Fornication, which is in the hand of the Romish Whore, and God made some of them drink something of the Cup of his Wrath and Indignation: yea, Sodomy it self is of frequent practice in those parts, and God brings ruine like unto that of Sodom upon their houses by Streams of Fire and Brimstone, though through infinite patience their persons were preserved.”

Thomas Vincent does half know that Athanasius Kirchner and Nicholas Steno are establishing what would become geology, but he is having none of it: “Some are of the opinion that there are Fountains of Fire under ground as well as of Water; and that in the bosom and bowels of the Earth, God hath layd up Treasures of this Element, enclosing it in vast Caverns, as in so many Store-houses; which Subterranean Fire they assign to be the cause of hot Bathes, and that Mount Aetna, as also Vesuvius with other flaming Mountains, which Geographers and Travellers tell us are to be seen in all the parts of the World, are the breathing holes of this Fire: but the Scripture is wholly silent of any such work of God there; we read of the Earth, and the gathering together of the waters, and the Fountains of the great deep, but nothing of any Fountains of Fire mingled with either of these Elements; and the laying up of this Element in store, in a place so low, when naturally it tendeth upwards, is not easie to conceive; besides who ever hath descended into the depths of the Earth, to search and find out these depths of Fire?”

Vincent’s main purpose was to expound the Christian message of the eruption. His whole book develops a religious pyromania. The Great Fire of London is strongly on his mind; and for him, the Western world seems to be going up in flames: “These late dreadful Eruptions of Fire and Brimstone from Mount Aetna, should carry our eyes upward unto God the Author hereof. The Lord hath been lately upon the Earth, he hath shown himself in great Majesty; a Fire hath devoured before him, and it hath been very tempestuous round about; a smoke hath gone out of his mouth and Coals have been under his feet; he hath clothed himself with flames, and of late appeared very terribly in these Europaean parts; he hath not only kindled fires in houses and Cities, turning them into ashes and ruinous heaps, but he hath also kindled a fire in a great Mountain, which hath broken forth with a great flame.”

His eagerness to seize on the eruption, and other parts of his book about whether the flames of hell are metaphorical or not, suggest that he is concerned by questioning or outright denial of the existence of hell. Samuel Richardson’s A discourse of the torments of hell: The foundation and pillars thereof discovered, searched, shaken and removed. With many infallible proofs, that there is not to be a punishment after this life for any to endure that shall never end (anonymous in 1658, over Richardson’s own name in 1660) may have come his way. Etna, thoroughly supernatural in Vincent’s account, helps him reinforce belief in the other supernatural flames: his 3rd chapter explains ‘That Hell is a place of Fire and Brimstone’, then follow the categorical pronouncements of chapter 4:

“Concerning the properties of Hell-fire.

There are seven properties of Hell-fire.

• First, It will be a great Fire.
• Secondly, It will be a dark fire.
• Thirdly, It will be a feirce fire.
• Fourthly, It will be an irresistible fire.
• Fifthly, It will be a continual fire.
• Sixthly, It will be an unquenchable fire.
• Seventhly, It will be an everlasting fire.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Etna

This website has other contemporary engravings, at least as vivid as that in Finch, of the 1669 eruption:

http://boris.vulcanoetna.com/ETNA_1669.html

Giant Noah and fossil teeth

Term ends this coming week, and my students are finishing work on Milton with brief presentations on aspects of Books XI and 12 of Paradise Lost. One trio is looking at the account of Noah’s flood in Book XI, where God ‘late repenting him of man depraved’ decides to drown humankind like kittens in a bucket. That’s line 886, by the way, based on Genesis 6; 6 “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart”, but worked into the narrative as tactfully as Milton could manage. Michael says it to Adam after the vision of the deluge, as Milton’s version of God doesn’t do repentances for things which He must always have foreseen. Milton doesn’t suppress such a salient biblical line, but smuggles it into a conversation.

EEBO did not fail me on Noah. I hadn’t anticipated a point which is obvious when you think about it: Noah was a genealogical pinch-point. As such, the proudly Welsh author George Owen Harry got quickly into print in 1604 with The genealogy of the high and mighty monarch, James, by the grace of God, king of great Brittayne, &c. with his lineall descent from Noah, by diuers direct lynes to Brutus, first inhabiter of this ile of Brittayne ... wherein is playnly shewed his rightfull title. Well, they had such a truncated view of time that such a genealogy isn't entirely a mad enterprise. My image for this post is one page from this bizarre genealogy, where the various lines of descent from Noah are testing early 17^th century printing layouts to the limit. As Harry traces the bifurcating lineages, you can maybe see Uther Pendragon squeezed into a column, and reported to be buried at Stonehenge. At the start of this book, Noah is “the first monarch of the World”, and his sons divide up Asia and Europe between them (George Owen Harry tactfully forgets that America exists, so as not to have to account for its population).

Harry’s book resembles and perhaps (apart from its own Celtic bias) owes something to Giovanni Nanni’s An historical treatise of the travels of Noah into Europe: containing the first inhabitation and peopling thereof. As also a breefe recapitulation of the kings, gouernors, and rulers commanding in the same, euen vntill the first building of Troy by Dardanus. / done into English by Richard Lynche, Gent. (1602). A curious production by a fabulist in the Spenserian style of lofty mythic genealogies, The travels of Noah into Europe surprised me by asserting that Noah was a giant: ‘good giant Noe’ dies in Tuscany (quite nice for your retirement after a stressful career) 346 years after the deluge in 1967 BC, and aged 950, as the Bible specifies in Genesis 9; 29. The progress from Noah and his sons down to what was the present includes in both these odd books a large emphasis on Hercules.

Nanni has a deal to say about giants. I have always been interested in early modern interpretations of fossil remains, and Nanni repeats a story from ‘Boccaccio’ (Johannes Boccatius, author of a work De Montibus et Fluuiis) of how “there was found under the foot and hollow caverne of a mountaine, not far from the citie of Deprana, in the Isle of Sicilia, the bodie of a marvelous, huge, and strangely proportioned Gyant, which seemed to hold in one of his hands a mightie long peece of wood like unto the bodie of a young tree, or the mast of a ship, which so soone as it was touched, fell all into ashes and dust, but it was all garnisht & wrought about with lead, which remained sound and firm, & it was found to weigh five hundred pound weight: his bodie also being touched, consumed, and became pouder and ashes, except certain of his bones, and three of his teeth, which were also peized, and every tooth weighed fortie ounces. For the height and full stature of his bodie, it was conjectures by the people of that countrey, to be two hundred cubits long. And the same author sayth, That his teeth were afterwards hanged up in our ladies church of Deprana, for a straunge monument, and a thing of wonderfull admiration. In many other places are the bones of gyants that lived in those daies, kept and preserved for wonders…”

I wonder what they did find in that cave. One of these?

http://www.paleodirect.com/cavebear1.htm

But I’ve met the fossil tooth before in other sources, and chasing it up led me agreeably to Sir Hans Sloane’s article in Philosophical Transactions, 35 (1727) – it's now on JSTOR! – ‘Of fossile teeth and bones of elephants' where it is noted along with a whole array of elephant bones and teeth (as Sloane considers them to be) misidentified as the remains of giants (some of them quasi-biblical).

Noah as a giant, though – how did they ever arrive at that? Their general view of mankind as diminished in lifespan and size is familar from Donne's 'Anniversaries'. But surely problems getting everything plausibly aboard the ark might have made them hold back on Noah? I was thinking about Gulliver's Travels recently, and how a belief in the degeneration of humankind would have gone along with odd notions about human stature.

Earthquakes: I blame the fulkers

There has been a small earthquake in Kent,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6605095.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6603129.stm

and this reminded me of Gabriel Harvey’s rather witty account of his experience of the 1580 earthquake, which he wrote about to his friend Edmund Spenser. Harvey was playing at cards with two gentlewomen, who were arguing so vehemently about the game that he quipped that their voices have caused an earthquake:

“Where being in the company of certain courteous Gentlemen, and those two Gentlewomen, it was my chance to be well occupied, I warrant you, at Cards, (which I dare say I scarcely handled a whole twelvemonth before) at that very instant, that the Earth under us quaked, and the house shaked above: besides the moving, and rattling of the Table, and forms, where we sat. Whereupon, the two Gentlewomen having continually been wrangling with all the rest, and especially with my self, and even at that same very moment, making a great loud noise, and much ado: Good Lord, quoth I, is it not wonderful strange that the delicate voices of two so proper fine Gentlewomen, should make such a sudden terrible Earthquake?
… But behold, all on the sudden there cometh stumbling into the Parlour, the Gentleman of the house, somewhat strangely affrighted, and in a manner all aghast, and telleth us, as well as his Head and Tongue would give him leave, what a wondrous violent motion, and shaking there was of all things in his Hall.”

At this point, the company decide that it was an earthquake, and not heavy furniture being moved around upstairs. The quarrelsome ladies turn from playing to praying:

“The Gentlewomens’ hearts nothing acquainted with any such Accidents, were marvelously daunted: and they, that immediately before were so eagerly, and greedily praying on us, began now forsooth, very demurely, and devoutly to pray unto God, and the one especially, that was even now in the House top, I beseech you heartily quoth she, let us leave off playing, and fall a praying. By my truly, I was never so scared in myself, Me thinks it marvelous strange. What good Partner? Cannot you pray to your selfe, quoth one of the Gentlemen, but all the House must hear you, and ring Allin to our Ladies Matins? I see women are every way vehement, and affectionate. Your self was liker even now, to make a fray, than to pray: and will you now needs in all hast bee on both your knees?”

Harvey, showing off incorrigibly, now argues that “an Earthquake might as well be supposed a Natural Motion of the Earth, as a preternatural, or supernatural ominous work of God”, taking the not entirely impossible line that the heavy rains in England since Michaelmas have caused the earth to be full like the stomach of a drunk, and it is now (essentially) vomiting. He asks Spenser to send him a copy of the inevitable “threehalfepennie Pamphlet for news” or “Tragicall Ballet in Ryme” about the earthquake, but in his superior vein, wishes “some learned, and well advised University man, would undertake the matter, and bestow some pains in deed upon so famous and material an argument. The general Nature of Earthquakes by definition, and the special diversity of them by division, being perfectly known…”

I took myself off to read one of the “threehalfepennie Pamphlets” about the 1580 earthquake, that by Thomas Churchyard, which amid its pious exhortations, gives the facts, and some vivid detail:
“On Wednesday in the Easter week, being the sixth day of April. 1580. between the hours of five and six in the evening, happened generally through all the City of London, & the Suburbs of the same (as it were in a moment and upon the sudden) a wonderful motion and trembling of the earth, in so much, as Churches, Palaces, Houses, and other buildings did so quiver and shake, that such as were then present in the same were tossed too and fro as they stood, and others, as they sate on seats, driven off from their places: some leaning backwards, were ready to fall: and many besides so shaken standing, that it brought such terror to those that were in the same houses, that the most part feared, their houses would come down upon them, and thereupon ran out of their doors in great perplexity, to see whether their houses were still standing in their wonted place or no. And some houses did so crackle, that the tables and stools, with other furniture, as Brass and Pewter, so tottered, that it was thought they would have fallen to the ground, and the houses rest insunder.”

The quake brought down the top of a pinnacle of Westminster Abbey, bells tolled of their own accord in steeples, it was felt in the great chamber at Whitehall with the queen in residence there, while the gentlemen of the Middle Temple, dining in their new hall, ran forth with their knives still in their hands, thinking the new building was falling. Tragically, it so shook Christ Church in Newgate during service there that a boy in the congregation was killed by falling masonry, and others hurt.

For Churchyard, this is all a matter of God's wrath, and he runs through a list of those whose sins draw such correction upon God's people, among which 'fulkers' feature:

"You greedy graceless Fulkers lewd, that lets out gold for gain,
Take heed, lest from the heavens high, hot fire and Brimstone rain."

I had never seen this word before, as you see it means moneylender. A pity it didn't last, but one can see reasons why it wouldn't. (Try "I am a fulker at Lloyds Bank".)

The impious fared rather better than the pious. Plays were being performed at the theatres to the north of the City:

“A number being at the Theatre and the Curtain at Hollywell, beholding the plays, were so shaken, especially those that stood in the highest rooms and standings, that they were not a little dismayed, considering, that they could no way shift for themselves, unless they would, by leaping, hazard their lives or limbs, as some did indeed, leaping from the lowest standings.”

These events were frightening enough to prompt publication of a special order of prayer:

The order of prayer, and other exercises, vpon Wednesdays and Frydayes, to auert and turne Gods wrath from vs, threatned by the late terrible earthquake: to be vsed in all parish churches and housholdes throughout the realme, / by order giuen from the Queenes Maiesties most honourable priuie counsel (1580)

As you see from the title, it recommended fasting two days a week, gave suitable extracts from Isaiah, and the Book of Joel, even a psalm complete with musical notation (xlvi, ‘The Lord is our defence and aid’). The book has ‘A prayer to be used of all householders, with their whole family, every evening before they go to bed, that would please God to turn away his wrath from us, threatened in the last terrible earthquake”. The prayer includes

“We most heartily and humbly beseech thy Fatherly goodness, to look down from thy throne of thy mercy seat upon us most miserable, and sinful slaves of Sathan, which with feareful and trembling hearts doe quake, and shake at the strange & terrible token of thy wrath and indignation appearing most evidently unto us, by thy shaking, and moving of the earth.”

but no special apology for those odious fulkers.

Habitacles of daemons and intelligences

I mentioned in a recent post my buying mineral specimens at a ‘Rock, Gem and Mineral Fair’. One thing I have noticed about these fairs is that dealers tend to set off with a stall that reflects their own interests, but after a season or so, they end up making compromise with ‘crystal healing’, ‘mood rings’, and various Tolkienesque notions of particular powers in stones. Better chance of a sale and a better price if the stone has magic in it.

I’ve been reading Thomas Nicols’ A lapidary, or, The history of pretious stones with cautions for the undeceiving of all those that deal with pretious stones (1652). It is amusing to imagine some of his more traditional magical powers of gems being pitched to the modern customer: ‘You should buy this, madam, for if your husband places this gemstone on your head while you are asleep, he will be able to see by your reaction whether you are faithful to him or not’ (reference, p. 51).

Nicols is not a very original thinker: he generally compiles from his authorities (‘Langius’ and others), but this causes a series of little crises, for he is reluctant to admit some of the more grandiose claims made for gemstones and their secret powers. Rather, he takes the line that it is not the gems, but demons inhabiting them, that might exert these powers. Again, a genuinely time-honoured belief that could serve as an interesting pitch for the new age rock dealer to try on the 21^st century customer:

“Some do impute such vires [powers] to produce such effects to them, as these creatures cannot possibly be capable of … But such have been the errours of the great searchers out of the secrets of nature, as that they have attributed to inanimate creatures which are of the lowest orders of all natures productions, powers supernaturall, and vires which their natures are not capable of producing” (p. 19 – he cites Albertus Magnus claiming that the Opthalmius allows you to be invisible, and many others).

Though gems as being materiall mixt bodies, cannot by their own proper power and faculties produce such admirable and supernaturall things … yet they may be said to be continent causes of such effects, if we grant them what some affirm, namely, that oft-times they are the habitacles of daemons and intelligences” (p.31).

An interesting thing about the book is the way Nicols gropes towards (or rather, away from) a systematic understanding: all he has is a prose style founded on an extensive vocabulary (which imparts a certain shaky authority to what he says), and an unshakeable basic neo-Platonism, in which everything is somehow alive. Gems grow underground, and so they are a bit like plants:

“They (as the opinion of some is) have vegetative souls, or lapidisick spirits infused into them from above, by which they live and draw the likenesse of their substance, their lapidisick juice, their proper nourishment, for their sustentation, for the preservation of their being, and for their further growth and increase of their own proper substantiall moles, masse, or lump. Herbs draw their fructifying juyce from the circumjacent earth by thready roots, thereby to sap their bodies and their branches…” (p.2)

Many of Nicols’ stories about gemstones deal with them in connection to heat. These precious stones come from the tropics, for they need the tropical sun to come into being (p.9), and they can induce all kinds of temperature-related effects, either to heat or to cool. By the story he tells, a jewel-loving and credulous outdoors type (if such a combination is possible) might nowadays make a perfect customer for a ‘heliotrope’, on the basis that, being a gem of the sun, it will make a pan or water into which it is placed boil rapidly (p.142). Or, conversely, a chrysolite will so rapidly cool down scalding hot water that you can drop one into boiling water, and then plunge your hand “without any hurt or danger into that water which even now with the fervency of heat boiled up” (pp. 105-6). This discourse extends into more metaphorical forms of heat: gemstones can rouse or soothe the passions, and have major roles in matters sexual. The sapphire “if it be worn by an adulterer, by loosing its splendour it will discover his adultery: and that the wearing of it, doth hinder the erections that are caused by Venus.” (Nicols reports these beliefs, but thinks that the demon Asmodeus must have more to do with untoward erections – pp. 84-5).

Here he is at his best, enthused by the ‘emerald or smaragde’:

The Emerauld is a precious stone or gemme of so excellent a viridity, or spring-colour, as that if a man shall look upon an Emerauld by a pleasant green meadow, it will be more amiable then the meadow, and overcome the meadows glorie, by the glorie of that spring of viriditie which it hath in its self: the largeness of the meadow it will overcome with the amplitude of its glory, wherewith farre above its greatnesse it doth feed the eie: and the virescencie of the meadow it will overcome with the brightnesse of its glory, which in it self seemeth to embrace the glorious viridity of many springs. This stone is known by its apparent coldnesse in the mouth, by its gravity being weighed: and in this, that being cast into a fire, it will not burn, nor send forth any flame; and that in the brightnesse of the Sunne, it will keep its excellent viridity and greennesse (p. 91).

My image is his fold-out chart classifying all rocks: which starts, wonderfully, from ‘Stones are either small, [or] great’. I must show this to my geological society and see what they think.

Strange and foreign forms, 1807

A busy week for me, but teaching prompted me to look at texts I’d never read before – Nahum Tate’s absurd version of Richard II briefly entertained me (what a silly project for a proponent of James II that was!). I also spent some time reading the poems of Charlotte Smith. The Elegiac Sonnets are, in Hugh Kenner’s term, counterfeit. But I liked ‘Beachy Head’, and as it is some time since I did a posting about geology in literature, I shall mount that hobbyhorse.

Smith begins her poem imagining the formation of the Channel, and later speculates about the fossil bivalves and ammonites she sees in the chalk. Her first line is to entertain the old notion that they are just freaks of nature. But that explanation doesn’t satisfy her, and she speculates (as in the opening of her poem) about real geological processes, of the chalk being formed under water, and uplifted to form her local landscape, the South Downs:

And still, observing objects more minute, 372
Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms
Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil
Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance.
Tho' surely the blue Ocean (from the heights
Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen)
Here never roll'd its surge. Does Nature then
Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes
Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling 380
To the dark sea-rock of the wat'ry world?
Or did this range of chalky mountains, once
Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves
Swell'd fathomless? What time these fossil shells,
Buoy'd on their native element, were thrown
Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill
Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment
Grew up a guardian barrier, 'twixt the sea
And the green level of the sylvan weald.

More interestingly, in a subsequent passage Smith is apparently reacting to large fossil bones being found, and she wonders if these might be the remains of elephants brought into England by the Romans: 'Some lone antiquary' she says

perhaps may trace,

Or fancy he can trace, the oblong square
Where the mail'd legions, under Claudius, rear'd
The rampire, or excavated fossé delved;
What time the huge unwieldy Elephant
Auxiliary reluctant, hither led,
From Afric's forest glooms and tawny sands,
First felt the Northern blast, and his vast frame
Sunk useless; whence in after ages found,
The wondering hinds, on those enormous bones
Gaz'd; and in giants dwelling on the hills
Believed and marvell'd---

There had been, and would be, worse guesses. The intriguing aspect of this is that her poem is published in 1807, while Gideon Mantell did not start finding local dinosaur bones until 1820, in the quarry at Cuckfield, North of Lewes. Perhaps Charlotte Smith was no longer thinking of local fossil finds, but has heard about Baron Georges Cuvier, who was already publishing on extinct mammalian fauna – though his study was not in English till quite a bit later. Cuvier himself would assert that Mantell’s iguanodon teeth belonged to an extinct rhinoceros. But bones from dinosaurs are not unheard of in the chalk, and Smith does seem to be writing with local reference. Mantell’s early collection was of marine fossils from that formation, so maybe his efforts to collect fossil bones owed something to what was being talked about locally.

This anticipation in poetry of the historically recorded moment of discovery reminds me of Shelley scooping Dean Buckland in Prometheus Unbound IV, 309 ff – writing in 1819, while Buckland would not name the first dinosaur till 1824 (Megalosaurus):

the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms

On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe

Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God
Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried,
'Be not!' And like my words they were no more.

Shelley’s prescience outdoes Charlotte Smith’s, for he brilliantly surmises the extinction of the monarch beasts as a consequence of a passing comet, an idea that would wait for Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980.

http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/chalkformationfossils.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Mantell

My photograph is of Tim not enjoying being at Beachy Head a year or so ago.