Thomas Barton's 'Brief Relation' (revised version)

Mary Barton's poem about Charity

In 1661, William Barton was a man of 28 years, a butcher by trade, married and living in Shrewsbury. Brought up in a godly household, he could as a child recite whole Bible chapters and psalms. His brother affirms that he was charitable to the poor. This brother, Thomas Barton, is patently the author of A brief relation of several passages of the life and death of William Barton of Shrewsbury, in October, 1661 (1664), though the work is down on EEBO as anonymous. Thomas, writing the account, is named and directly addressed by his brother at one point (p12).  

But William was also prone to being a ‘companion of vain persons, spending time with them in the Alehouse’. Even amongst them, he would ‘speak for God and his People’. But this residual public godliness was tied up with a propensity for vainglory and lying. He would pray ‘in his family, and sometimes in secret, though, as he after complained, very seldom’. William was clearly struggling to maintain a respectable front.  

William fell deeper into ‘evil courses’ – gaming and ‘company-keeping’. He kept trying to repent of his ways, but found he could never resist if a regular drinking companion asked him out. We get the intimate family details: his mother would quiz him on how much he had spent during one of these bouts – he would affirm that he had spent no more than two pence, but this was always a lie. In danger of arrest for debt, Barton held off any attempt to detain him by brandishing a knife, saying ‘Keep off me, you know not what I may do; do not come near me, lest I set you to sleep with your fathers’.   Despite this, an over-keen apprentice to an officer of the town said that he would take Barton ‘dead or alive’. One evening, Barton went out of his house, despite his wife’s plea that he stay in to avoid any more trouble. As he later put it, having heard her request, ‘I having a readiness to do contrary, out I went’. He said to her in leaving, ‘Dost thou think that I will be afraid to go about my business for fear of an Apprentice boy?’But the persistent officer’s apprentice tried to tackle Barton (who was ‘full of drink’) from behind as he stood in his mother’s shop. Barton struck behind him with his knife, wildly, and killed the youth who was trying to arrest him with a single blow.   He was dragged off to prison, so drunk that he was barely aware of his crime. There he fell asleep in the straw, and when he came to, thought that what they told him of the murder was invented to scare him, and frighten him into better ways.   Barton came with a jolt to conviction of sin: ‘mightily awakened with the apprehension of his guilt, and of God’s severity against Sin’. His early bible learning came back to assail him: he spent his time ‘multiplying scripture against himself’.    

The greater part of this narrative of Barton’s last days (both before his inevitable conviction and equally inevitable execution) deals with the murderer’s thoughts about his sin, and the state of his soul. ‘Many choice things … were spoke by him at several times, which I am not able to set down’, his brother apologises to the reader. But there’s plenty.  William Barton, murderer, was on semi-public display, in leg-irons, laid in straw in the gaol. If ‘children or others stood to gaze on him’, Barton would prevent the gaol keeper from sending them away: ‘Let them look on me, and see the fruits of sin’, he would say, and show them his gyres.   Barton is encouraged by the godly who come to see him to make ‘an ingenious confession’ (that will be OED sense II † 4, ‘Used by confusion for INGENUOUS or L. ingenuus … honest, candid, open, frank’) – ‘without any hiding or sparing of himself’.

Barton readily set about the task which his intellectual training had prepared him for so well. At times, he sounds like a provincial John Donne: ‘I dare not look behind me, for my works sink me into Hell, and I can see nothing before me but an angry God’. His drinking provides him with a symbol or analogy for having filled himself with sin: ‘I was as full of sin as I could hold’, or worse, ‘As full of sin as I could hold, till I was become all Sin.’ As he talks, he is unconsciously rehearsing elements of the final confessional speech he would make at the gallows: ‘I loved a little Ale better than God, and better than myself’.    Bible texts inform his limitless self-reproach: ‘I have been a Son of many reproofs, but I hardened my neck And how is God’s word made good upon me in this? He that being often reproved, and hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed’. (It is Proverbs 29, 1, as given in the King James Authorized Version.) A woman who was one of his former drinking companions visits him: he earnestly tells her to ‘Spend no more time as you spent it with me’.   

For some of his listeners, his ‘ingenious confession’ is all rather too much, and they try to argue him back to a sense of proportion: ‘Some of the company then by, said, ‘William, you were not so bad as you make your self now’. But William came up with a devastating reply: that the former goodness they kindly impute to him, as far as it went, only means that (in the way of goodness) ‘I did but enough to leave me inexcusable’.

William keenly, obsessively, analyses where his godliness failed. He recalls how he would formerly look forward to Sabbaths, and listen intently to the sermons he heard. But Mondays always saw him ‘turned into the world again’. Religion seemed to let him down. Even worse, six months before ‘this brake out’ (he means, his final spewing forth in murder of the sin with which he had been fully charged), he had turned to the Bible, and turned the pages, ‘I would turn it and turn it, and methoughts I would fain find some new thing; nothing would serve but something that was new; I could begin to read no where, but it was that which I knew before; I thought I knew it all already, and so I would lay it down and never read’. For a 17th century Englishman, this sounds a dire situation indeed: to be failed by God’s word. (One thing that is striking about this sad narrative is that Thomas does not mention any clergyman or elder coming to talk to his brother: the godly of the town seem to take on that role collectively.)  

Understandably, under this intense pressure from within, and from without, Barton’s mood swings wildly. He can assert that ‘my tongue shall sing aloud of his (God’s) Righteousness, though it should be upon a gallows’. When his links are knocked off, hurting him in the process, he affirms that ‘I will bear the indignation of the Lord’.     But shortly afterwards, his brother and sister find him yellow in the face, ‘his countenance as if he had not been the same man’, and he says: ‘All is gone now, I am in the dark’. But even then he soon he returns to his ‘former rapture of joy’.    

As he is taken to execution, he proclaims that ‘Sin is going to be executed’. Again, we have a moment when one of the godly community stands in for a minister (though the intervention proves not to have been well judged):‘A Friend going with him, cheared him up with the words of Dr Tayler of Hadley going to his martyrdom: ‘It is but one step to my Father’s House.’ But the martyr’s confidence is too much for the fragile Barton, who collapses again into ‘Ah! But I am not such a one’.   On the scaffold, Barton prays for the Holy Spirit to assist him in his final address to the onlookers (‘Now Lord help me to honour Thee’). He is represented as repeating many of his previous formulations: how he could never listen to counsel, how he hardened his neck, ‘I being often reproved hardened my neck’, and that shocking assertion about how he effectively ‘loved a little Ale better than God’.   He had pleaded innocent to the charge of wilful murder, and, on the gallows, he repeated his argument that he never meant to kill the officer’s apprentice. In a rather murky passage, he says that he forgives anyone present who ‘did plot or contrive that which is now come to pass, the casting away of my life’. (Barton can still see himself as in part a victim, despite all the self-accusations.)     In all this eloquence, both on the scaffold and previously in prison, with its mixture of bible locutions, there is almost a sense that Barton was reading his lines from the script his culture had ingrained in him.

Yet there is one moment that is totally unexpected in a 17th century man, as Barton in this vein of ‘ingenious confession’ suddenly voices this (p25): ‘I have been cruel to Horses, in making them do more then they were able; and cruel I have been to men’. That’s a Keith Thomas moment for you (I think of Man and the Natural World 1500-1700). It is the one mention of animals in the narrative, nothing else is said about this cruelty, but William Barton, for a moment, transcends his engrossing soul-drama, departs from talking about himself in the manner which the godly community expected of him (for in all the very penitent Barton says, there’s a faint continuity with his earlier performance of public piety). Here, he seems to purge himself of an unexpected crime, suggest a wider reflectiveness. It’s an impressive moment. 

Thomas Barton, writing this account, has throughout interspersed references to their sister Mary, who had died of illness in 1658, three years before William’s final disaster. Mary had been one of those who had regularly admonished her peccant brother. He was always on her mind: ‘she carried him upon her heart’, the narrative says. Mary was godly through and through, given to visiting church yards by night ‘the better to put myself into a dying condition’.   Then, as a final surprise to us, and ending the volume, ‘Here follow also some Verses, made by the same Mary Barton, in the praise of Charity’. It is a versification after 1 Corinthians 13. I have put the quatrains onto a single image, which heads this post.  It does not seem to me that Thomas Barton is adding this to even up the moral balance on his family, insinuating a saint to match the sinner: for William Barton struggles though from sin to an exemplary death. He is like Frank Thorney in ""The Witch of Edmonton. On the gallows, his one demur is when the officers presiding try to chivvy away the townsfolk who are giving William one last farewell, perhaps a final embrace. As William gets to the scaffold, ‘Chearfully looking upon the multitude, he said, ""All these are to see sin shamed. When the Officers bade them stand off from him, he said, ""O do not keep God’s people from me this little moment that I am to be in the World, they are my delight, and my comfort.’

Thomas Barton’s Brief Relation is a revealing work, of great integrity. He manages to keep his own feelings out of the account; there’s a great dignity in which he swerves from any account of the hanging itself to this appended tribute to his dead sister. I do not think it’s a silent reproach: William did not lack charity in his last days, and in general accepted his punishment. The godly of Shrewsbury seem to have accommodated him as a drunk, and forgiven him as a penitent about to face God. William could not accept himself as no-good son, his faith was too ingrained. In that part of his life, faith assailed him. But, as murderer, faith came to his rescue, sustained him till his death, as he accepted himself as thoroughly penitent.

The shining Button

To the church at Alton Priors, in Wiltshire. I tend to find that a deconsecrated church like this, cleared of the necessary human clutter for a congregation of service books, chairs, kneelers, notices, elderly harmoniums and the rest, a church pared back to the almost bare building, feels more contemplative and (if one were so minded) prayerful.

A trapdoor in the nave can be opened to reveal a large sarsen stone, apparently deliberately broken off at one end. This is a very old place of worship; the yew tree in the churchyard outside, divided by age into two splayed arboreal brackets, is supposed to be 1,700 years old itself.

This brass memorial plate by the altar is set above the tomb chest of William Button. He is depicted rising from the tomb, which, in the plate, bears on its lid these six lines of verse:

This was but one though taking roome for three

Religion, wisdome, hospitalitie.

But since heaven gate to enter by is straight

His fleashes burden here he left to wait

Till the last trump blowe open the wide gate

To give it entrance to the soule it’s mate.

The edge of the tomb reads ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ I Cor. 15, and along the left edge, ‘It is sown a natural body’. Beneath this, his family coat of arms.

The angel top central is blowing the last trump through a trumpet which is also a key. This is labelled ‘The key of David’ [Revelations 3, 7]. A precatory roll emerges from the trumpet’s mouth, which reads ‘It is raised a spirituall Body 1. Cor. 15’ [verse 44], the second part of the verse with which the left tomb edge is labelled.

On the palm leaf he bears: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (again, 1 Corinthians, verse 54)

Top left, a grid-like design (probably meant to suggest a heavenly gate swinging wide open) with three suns and three phases of the moon is labelled ‘This is the gate [ ] the Lord’, and the corresponding section on the top right, ‘The righteous shall enter in at it’ (Psalm 118, verse 20).

Button is resurrecting with a full head of hair and a vigorous body, not as a 64 year old. He is probably meant to be 33. I especially like his glorified and radiant foot. Around his tomb, others are also rising from the grave, two very Blakean figures of men to the right, and another man, and a woman veiled by her loose hair, to the lower left.

The genealogical bit is on the front side of the tomb, which with its contracted forms expanded, reads:

“William Button Esq dying Anno domini MDLXXX (1590), Aet[atis suae] LXIIII (64) left by his wife Mary daughter to Sir William Kellwey Knight VI sons Ambrose Knight. William, who married Jane daughter to John Lambe of Coulston: John, Francis, Edward & Henry. II daughters. Dorothie married to John Drake of Mount Drake in the Countie of Devon Esq & Cecilie married to Sir John Mewys of Kingston in the Isle of Wight Knight.

Erected by Sir William Button knight Grand child to the first William and Sonne and heire to the latter, in pious memorie.”

There’s an ODNB life of the middle William, who purchased a Jacobean baronetage in 1621, and died in 1655. The writer of this life has the first Sir William Button dying in 1599, which I can’t explain. The third William Button, the grandchild who erected this tomb, was the subject of a funeral sermon in 1660, An antidote against immoderate sorrow for the death of our friends: taken from an assured hope of our resurrection to life and glory. Delivered in a sermon preached in the parish-church of North-Wraxall in Wiltshire, the 12th. of Aprill 1660. at the funeral of Sr William Button Baronet. By Francis Bayly his houshold chaplain. Either his chaplain could lie without shame, or he was a genuinely pious man as described. The monument to his grandfather must date to some time before he succeeded his father as baronet, though I am puzzled by the protocol here. But his father was a man who became an MP solely to stave off arrest for debt, so hardly likely to have been erecting elaborate monuments.

This funerary artefact is just like the title page of an early 17^th century book: artistically unsophisticated, a visual object just about swamped by text, the power of the divine word; crowded with its simple meaning. The averted face of the resurrected subject seems an oddity of the handling (perhaps no one had any notion of how the first Sir William Button had looked decades before). Yet there’s something grand too: Sir William has his back on the world: his tomb opens, and the gate of heaven swings simultaneously wide. His transition will be as swift as, say, that of the soul in Donne, which ‘Dispatches in a minute all the way / Twixt heaven, and earth’.

At Kilcolman Castle

Kilcolman Castle, which I was pleased to be able to revisit a few days ago, having misplaced the photographs I took on a visit two or three decades ago. It’s not an easy place to get to see: a colleague tells me that the landowner detests all mention of Spenser, and is reputed to remove any signs directing the curious. I hiked across a couple of fields covered in long wet grass, was shocked three times on electric fences, climbed over lots of barbed wire, and discovered on my way back that the herd of cows I had seen grazing were large and rather too curious young bulls, who had me backing out of their field, and smartly back over the electric fence that I’d first thought of as surely too rusty to be electrified…

 Window at first floor level

But it’s an evocative place for the Spenserian. He is not supposed to have lived in the keep of the old FitzGeraldine castle, but it must have been very familiar to him, and some of the masonry looks post-medieval. The tower stands slightly off the crest of a low, grassed-over limestone outcrop. The only other piece of substantial early masonry is a ruined turret quite a surprising distance away, which indicates that Kilcolman, once described as “a large castle, old, and dilapidated, which at the present time has no use except to shelter cattle at night’, once would really have been so. Perhaps it had a palisade rather than a curtain wall.

View from the surviving tower back to the keep

I do not know if any archaeology has been done here. Maybe some 19^th century gentlemen poked around. The outcrop has suggestions of former buildings all over. To the south, Spenser had his own bog, now a nature reserve, which among the lines wishing away all the bad things from the wedding night in ‘Epithalamion’, especially brings alive: “Ne let th’unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking / Make us to wish theyr choking.”

Home for the unpleasant choir of frogs?

 

At the north west of the outcrop, there’s another feature of Spenser’s imagination, a cave running back into the hill. It could only be through here that, on the 15^th October 1598, when Kilcolman was attacked “Spenser and his family escaped through an underground tunnel, known as the fox hole, leading to caves north of the estate (the tunnel is still recorded as extant in 1840)”, as the ODNB rather vaguely puts it. There must have been a sousterrain from the old keep. I fondly imagine that somewhere in this lost tunnel Spenser left a small iron chest containing, say ‘The Legend of Sir Peridure, Of Constancy’ – the rest of Book VII. He certainly had time to work on extra portions of his great poem, though not very much after James fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, ‘the súgán earl of Desmond’ began his 1598 rebellion.

'Therein is eaten out a hollow cave...'

Earlier in our week in Ireland, I had found my way to Smerwick, and the desolate remains of the Fort d’Oro, where Spenser was probably present when Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton ordered the massacre of the surrendered garrison (9^th November 1580). The local musuem says that the fort was named because scattered along the foreshore were lumps of Canadian stone, glittering with pyrites, brought back as gold by Martin Frobisher's expedition for the North-West passage.

Fort d'Oro

If Spenser himself wasn’t a man of blood, most of his superiors and associates were, and he defended and advocated brutality. Kilcolman seems to have been very much targeted by the rebels in 1598: Spenser had quite clearly been an aggressive land-grabber, and the native Irish had reason to remember who it was that Spenser had served (and tried to remake into ‘Arthegal’).

‘The iron hand and the velvet glove: 

Come live with me and be my love.’

 

Photographs of early modern church tablets and memorials

 I spend a lot of time looking at these things, so I posted a picasa web album. And as a break from the dusty dead, another of orchids. The slide show facility works pretty well.


http://picasaweb.google.com/108102900983084646130/ChurchesAndMonuments#

http://picasaweb.google.com/108102900983084646130/BritishOrchids#

'Kissing the Rod'

The OED cites this phrase from Sir Philip Sidney writing circa 1586:

a1586 SIDNEY Arcadia II. (1867) 190 Yet he durst not but kiss his rod and gladly make much of his entertainment. 1628 SHIRLEY Witty Fair One I. iii, Come, I’ll be a good child, and kiss the rod.

But it’s of an earlier invention, and a search on EEBO traces it back to a likely originator, William Tyndale, and that unusual but characteristic work, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 1528. There’s a chance Tyndale came up with this first, as he was such a great maker of memorable phrases and idioms (notably in his New Testament translation, of course). But this other work, once so highly regarded, also strikes me as a likely source because The Obedience of a Christian Man is so appallingly masochistic. Tyndale seems to have wrenched his mind (and the minds of his readers) free from the grip of obedience to the Catholic church at the cost of an unlimited pay-off in cringing obedience to any other authority God might mysteriously have set over you. Politically, it’s a counsel of despair: you are a child in respect of your ruler, good or bad, and you have to learn to kiss the rod with which you are chastised. Here’s the context, slightly edited:

“Let us receive all things of God whether it be good or bad … let us not take the staff by the end or seek to avenge our selves on his rod which is the evil rulers. The childe as long as he seeketh to avenge himself upon the rod hath an evil heart. For he thinketh not that the correction is right or that he hath deserved it neither repenteth but rejoyseth in his wickedness. And so long shall he never be without a rod: yea so long shall the rod be made sharper and sharper. If he 'knowledge his fault and take the correction meekly and even kiss the rod and amend himself with the learning and nurture of his father and mother then is the rod take away and burned. So if we resist evil rulers seeking to set ourselves at libertie we shall no doubt bring ourselves in to more cruel bondage and wrap ourselves in much more misery and wretchedness … If we submit ourselves unto ye chastising of god & meekly 'knowledge our sins for which we are scourged and kiss the rod and amend our living: then will God take the rod away, that is he will give the rulers a better heart.”

I surmise (perhaps unsafely, but I think the thought is worth entertaining) that from this particular work, ‘kissing the rod’ spread explosively across early modern English culture. It is even possible that what Tyndale meant metaphorically was adopted as a literal prescription, by those made sadistic by the idea of the quasi-divine righteousness of punishment:

“You have heard sometimes of schoolmasters which make their boys kiss the rod, wherewith they were beaten…” observes Robert Parsons, in his A discoverie of I. Nicols minister (1581). The basic, cruel idea was then susceptible to refinement: apparently, a father might make his child go out and select a rod to be beaten with, and restrain the child with ties so frail and easily broken that that preservation was a sign that the child had been patient throughout his chastisement:

“I have sometimes seen an indulgent father
Make his dear child, rods for himself to gather,
And then his wanton liberty restrain,
Nay make him fetters of a slender twine,
Sharply correct him, make him kiss the rod,
Tries his obedience: And just thus does God
With his dear children, (if well understood)
Wise parents know 'tis for their children’s good.”

From ‘Upon a true contented Prisoner’ in Characters and elegies. By Francis Wortley, Knight and Baronet (1646).

Tyndale directed his prescription of acceptance of punishment to all Christians. Inevitably, it was a sentiment women heard from men. Here, a puritan spiritual director addresses a ‘Gentlewoman troubled in minde’:

“12. Beware of a discontented mind in any case: yea, be contented to have your desires denied you of God: and if your prayer be not heard of God, vex not your self too much, neither vehemently covet, nor be grieved for any thing, saving the having or loss of the favour of God.

13 Labour for meekness and patience, and be ready to kiss the rod, and to offer up all to him of whom you have received your self: for if you struggle, it will fare with you as with a Bird in a Gin, the more she striveth, the faster she is.” (Short Rules sent by Maister Richard Greenham to a Gentlewoman troubled in minde, for her direction and consolation, 1612).

Here, in Stephen Denison’s The monument or tombe-stone: or, A sermon preached at Laurence Pountnies Church in London, Nouemb. 21. 1619 at the funerall of Mrs. Elizabeth Juxon, the late wife of Mr. John Juxon. By Stephen Denison minister of Gods word, at Kree-Church in the honourable citie of London (1620), the minister deploys this serviceable thought when accounting for poor Mistress Juxon having cried out in the agony of her final illness (there had apparently been some adverse comment on this evident failure of Christian patience):

“was grief and smart irksome and troublesome unto Job himself? Then it was the great mercy of God, to give patience unto this our sister in any measure. And let us not think it strange if she roared and cried with pain at some times; but let us rather fear, that if we had been in her case, and had tasted her sorrows, we had been like to fall into greater extremity then ever she fell. It is the property of a good child to cry whilst he is a-beating, as well as of a bad. But here is the difference; a good child, when the smart is gone, will kiss the rod, and love his parents, and be sorry for his fault; whereas a wicked child will murmur against and hate his parents. Now this our worthy sister showed her self to be a good child; for she cried when she felt the smart: but when she had any mitigation, she condemned her impatiency, and justified God, kissing his rod, by showing a very tender affection of love to God, whensoever she thought or spoke seriously of him.”

Shakespeare, however (and thank goodness), uses the phrase only in a far more rousing context, as Queen Anne rebukes Richard II for his supinity:

Queen.
What is my Richard both in shape and mind
Transform’d and weaken’d? hath Bullingbrook,
Deposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?
The Lyon dying thrusteth forth his paw,
And wounds the earth if nothing else with rage,
To be ore-power’d, and wilt thou pupil-like
Take the correction, mildly kiss the rod,
And fawn on Rage with base humility,
Which art a Lion and the king of beasts?

These are just some of the occurrences an EEBO search turns up. It’s an idiom which is so expressive of how they thought, of their sense of powerlessness. I will cite two final, related examples: perhaps both were written by the author named in the first as George Elliott, though the latter example was published anonymously. In each, the personified city of London is speaking, first about the great plague visitation of 1665, and then about the Great Fire. In each instance, ‘London’ is made to draw the almost inescapable conclusion: God is punishing you, and your business is rod-kissing:

“…Although I suffer Punishment awhile;
I willingly submit my self to God,
And with Humility will kiss the Rod…”

London’s lamentation: or, Godly sorrow and submission. By George Elliott, author of God's warning-piece to London. 1665

“My Sins have forc’d this Vengeance from my God,
Shall I then kick? No, I will kiss the Rod…”

LONDON Undone; OR, A Reflection upon the Late DISASTEROUS FIRE 1666.

I recollected how in 1988 Germaine Greer and her collaborators gave the title Kissing the Rod to their Virago Press collection of 17^th century women’s verse. The end of the introduction says this:

“Before publication we were already hearing shock reaction to the title we have chosen … whether the rod is wielded by the paternal authority, the male establishment, a husband, the king, Cromwell or God himself, women have always been obliged for their own survival to humble themselves before it, and to flatter it”. And they cited Torriano’s Proverbial Phrases (1666), who explained: “taken from children, who when they do amiss, and are punished, they are made to vent their vexation no otherwise than by kissing the rod with which they were punished”.

The Virago press printed this anthology on a paper that has yellowed dramatically: it looks like 1888, not 1988, was the publication date. Even 1988 seems a long time ago…

An answer song to Sir John Suckling's 'Why so pale and wan?'

The 1638 Folio of Suckling’s Aglaura on EEBO, with its alternate Act V, also preserves an answer song to Suckling’s famous lyric, ‘Why so pale and wan fond Lover?’, written alongside the original on [Sig G2].

Thomas Clayton does not note the existence of this answer poem in my edition of the Cavalier Poets. I suppose it will have been mentioned in other editions. I have tried to find it via searches on EEBO and LION full texts, but it does not seem to have gone into print in the 17^th century. Not a distinguished poem, of course, though the down to basics aspect of the original has a conceptual simplicity which hardly spurs inventiveness in any answer poem.

Clayton notes that at least five contemporary settings of the original song survive. An answer poem was inevitable, and this could have been sung by the witty Orithie in response to Orsames. The dialogue lets us know that the poem had been around for a few years before Suckling put it in his notorious play.

The person who wrote the answer poem also appended an alternate, softened ending to the original ‘Or else – Then quite forsake her’, which does suggest that the oath, and maybe the suggestion of the devil ‘taking’ the young woman who refuses love in a sexual way was seen as potentially in need of toning-down.

There are no other annotations in this copy that I can see. I have modernised the spelling in my transcript.

ORSAMES.
Nay Ladies, you shall find me,

as free, as the Musicians of the woods
themselves; what I have, you shall not need to call for,
nor shall it cost you any thing.

SONG.

Why so pale and wan fond Lover?
Prithee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee why so pale?

Why so dull and mute young Sinner?
Prithee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prithee why so mute?

Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move
This cannot take her;
If of her self she will not Love,
Nothing can make her,
The Devil take her.

 or else

Then quite forsake her.

ORITHIE.
I should have guessed, it had been the issue of
your brain, if I had not been told so;
ORSAMES.
A little foolish counsel (Madam) I gave a friend
of mine four or five years ago, when he was
falling into a Consumption …

Answer.

Why so fierce & grim proud railer?

Prithee, why so grim?

Thou didst look as pale or paler,

When thou wast fool’d like him.

Prithee, why so grim?

Why so stout thou bold adviser?

Prithee why so stout?

If men would be somewhat wiser,

Women would not flout

Prithee, why so stout?

A Fool he came so let him go,

As he came hither,

The winds to Gotham freely blow,

To carry thither,

Two Fools together.

My other picture is one of the cannily ‘mad men’ of Gotham, as in the last stanza here, expecting a hedge to prevent a cuckoo from flying away, from the 1690 printing (!) of Andrew Boord’s Merie tales of the made men of Gotam gathered to gether by A.B. of phisike doctour of 1565.

A dumb fortune-teller

I am always interested in the stray lives that occasionally get mentioned in 17^th century texts, people otherwise unrecorded, making their way through life as best they could.

My image is of a fortune teller by Simon Vouet. The number of early modern paintings of fortune tellers reminds us just how common a vocation this harmless activity must have been.

In the anecdote below, George Carleton, in his Astrologomania: the madnesse of astrologers (1624) drops that perpetual 17^th century mode of ‘my opponent says this, but the Bible says…’ to produce a reminiscence from his childhood in Carlisle:


“Secondly I answer…

(yes, it is part of one of those arguments – a colleague points out that Milton once reaches a resounding ‘and ninthly’)


… that those Predictions do not always fall out jump and true, as they would bear us in hand; but that either the Divell doth miss sometimes, or that his instrument doeth mistake his informations. This I am able to justify and make good by a plain story of my self when I was a child, & went to School at Carleill where I was borne. There came an odd Fellow about the Country: He was reputed a Cunning man, and so called, for that he took upon him to tell Fortunes. The Fellow was dumb, or at least feigned himself speechless, but certain it was, he had an instinct or Familiarity with some Spirit. This Fellow being on a time in my Fathers House, there were some there more simply honest then Religiously wise, made signs unto him, to show what should be my Fortune, and another School-fellows of mine that was then present. Whereupon, this Wizard having looked earnestly upon us both, and paused a little; for my School-fellow, he takes me a low stool, and gets up upon it, with a Book in his hand, and began to act after his fashion, signifying thereby that he should be a Preacher: and for me, he took a Penne and a scroll of Paper, and made as though he would write, signifying thereby, that I should bee a Scrivener. Now it so fell out, that my School-fellow proved the Scrivener, and I prove the Preacher. By which it is plain to bee seen, that either the Divell himself did miss, or his instrument was mistaken in his informations.”

So, here’s a chap who may or may not be dumb: Carleton can see that dumbness might be part of the act, certainly the charades by which the fortune teller acted out his diagnoses would have added a lot to the entertainment value of his little act, and dumbness gives him a mystique that relates him to the more normal line of blind prophets. A fortune teller who cannot speak, that's quite clever, it intrigues your client.


However, although Carleton has some perception of the flummery involved in the divination, he retains a belief in it as supernatural: indeed, it is diabolical in its inspiration. “Certain it was, he had an instinct or Familiarity with some Spirit”, he says solemnly. The predictions for the two boys were both diabolically prescient, and diabolically wrong, for the devil will always tell lies – the right vocations, but each assigned to the wrong child.
Carleton cannot see a bit of harmless fun, cannot see a man surmounting a possible disability and making a living. This is a moment when the devil reached out and nearly touched his life, it has stayed with him ever since. He could not have told the story, of course, had the prediction been exact.

From Astrologomania: the madnesse of astrologers. Or An examination of Sir Christopher Heydons booke, intituled A defence of iudiciarie astrologie. Written neere vpon twenty yeares ago, by G.C. And by permission of the author set forth for the vse of such as might happily be misled by the Knights booke. Published by T.V. B. of D.

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

 

'A worm the author of this book': William Ramesey's 'Helminthologia'

This chap is William Ramesey, and the amazing bonnet he is wearing was probably designed as an extra container or sump for the overflow of dotty notions stemming from his brain. Or there may be some ceremonial aspect to it: Patrick Curry’s ODNB life of Ramesey mentions that while he was born in Scotland into a family called Ramsey, he later changed his name because he had an idea of his Egyptian descent. He probably thinks of the hat as being like the crown of Upper Egypt Rameses the Great would have worn. This whole bogus Egyptian connection primarily suggests his inheritance from Ptolemy the Great, for Ramesey’s first obsession was astrology.

He was, however, an astrologer with a marked reluctance about making specific predictions. Ramesey was a royalist, and really didn’t want to make trouble for himself, so he keeps lapsing into this mode: ‘I could say somewhat of (Jupiter) … but I passe it over in silence, knowing it is neither safe nor fitting that the truth should be spoken always’ (Vox stellarum, 1651, p. 86). Ramesey hardly dares say anything particular about the fate ‘our Rulers or Grandees’ (pp. 97-8), but he looked to 1652 as a time when the nation might see ‘the pale Horse and his Rider as it were preparing for his march’ (p. 90). Ramesey duly called on England to ‘repent, repent … God is angry with thee’ (p. 88). Elsewhere in this astrological work, Ramesey seems unduly excited about Venus’s influence, and women in general, who are so threatened by pox (during 1652) that he says he will have nothing to do with women in the summer quarter, at least, ‘(as near as I can)’ (p. 108).

He became a physician, even court physician to Charles II, who would (as he famously said) die with the help of too many men like this. The major medical text by Ramesey is Helminthologia, or, Some physical considerations of the matter, origination, and several species of wormes (1668). It’s a work perhaps advisedly ignored by the compilers of the OED, whose references to things ‘helminthous’ are far later in date.

This is a book which sets off well, with its eye on the subject matter: “Worms the Subject, and worms the readers, and a worm the Author of this Book” (p. 8, and the formal beginning of his text after the prefatory material). “Infinite multitudes … die by them, under the notion of feavers of all sorts, Pleurisies, and most other Distempers”, he asserts. To believe that people die of little creatures living in them does seem to be thinking along the right lines. At times, the “Rational and Learned Physician” he saw himself to be flickers into view:

“ ‘view any corrupt blood with a * Microscope where they shall plainly perceive innumerable vermines’ * By which Instrument fitted with glasses at each end, the smallest mite will appear in that magnitude as you may discover every part thereof.”

But his topic wriggles away from him uncontrollably. Worms, he explains, are the product of ‘putrid, vitious and gross, viscid, corrupt matter’. As such, anything that upsets the perfect bodily regime can produce worms: God, his angels, the devil and his imps, witches and witchcraft, air, water, the planets, food, passions, retention of semen (Ramesey shifts into decorous Latin). Ramesey has his full say about witchcraft and the diabolic pact (being a Scot, he once saw “nine burnt at one time in Leith-Links”), about diet, planetary influences, anything. Worms, we realise, are to him what melancholy was for Robert Burton, and he palpably has his eye on Burton’s book, even writing about ‘Air rectified’ as part of a salubrious regime.

Ramesey was not, as his choice of headgear shows, overburdened with a sense of the ridiculous. He also can write like this, in apparent seriousness:

‘That my Reader may be Encincted with Reason able to Renix the Halucinations of that Panenerical evil of Envy and Ignorance, which is a Cacoethick Malady; But especially that he may injoy an Orthostadian Judgement, and not be Depsect with that Truculent Credulity which proves Sontick to most men, and an assured Prodromos of Ruine, I thought it not amiss here to aedepize some things, and Indigitate thee, wherefore others in this Book are handled in that manner they are…’

Credulous about all tales which seemed relevant to his maggoty notions, Ramesey cannot perceive irony in his sources: Erasmus’s story of an Italian, living in Germany and fluent in the language, whose helminthous  problems were so extreme that he behaved like a man possessed, until a wise physician treated him for worms, and simultaneously purged from him both the wriggling cause of his problems and all his grasp of the German language: this cock-and-bull story Ramesey tells twice (pages 42 and 312).

 He has much to say about the effects of milk, and again can be caught retailing as true a gosh-wow-fancy-that yarn: ‘A Slut at Packwood near Knole in Warwick-shire, did put a nurse-by-blow-child [he means, a bastard child, a ‘by-blow’, that has been put out to nurse] often to suck a Mastive Bitch, who at the same instant had Puppies, the Child throve well enough, but shewed the fruits and disposition of his Nurse, as he grew bigger, by his churlish behaviour, and never could sit or lie down, without turning two or three times round’. It seems a plausible story about squalor and neglect in early modern life, until that last couple of clauses.

Under diet, we learn about a Duke of Brunswick bursting after a surfeit of strawberries, and about King James’s opinion of ling, salt cod: ‘a dish for the devil’- Ramesey agrees: ‘they that eat ling, may as well eat a worse thing, and drink Piss’. He is insistent about the dangers of sea food: ‘We may absolutely condemn, and explode the Periwinkle, Cockle, Muscle, as dangerous food, offending the Brain’, and has stories of people who by eating too many cockles became natural fools.

All oddities of diet interest him. He writes about cases of pica, and one of his sources fills him in on what happens to you if you happen to consume cat’s blood: ‘a remarkable story of a maid, who by drinking of cats-blood, degenerated into the disposition and nature of a Cat, and by fits, would imitate a Cat, both in Actions and Voice; and in private would catch Mice, and contract herself so, (which was strange) to pass through holes, that no body else of her bigness could’. (She sounds to me like an entertainer whose spurious back-story has got garbled.)

Notice that none of this discussion has any notion of parasites being transmitted. Sea food, for instance, in itself upsets the bodily regime, and leads to worms spontaneously generating in any part of the body.

Ramesey produces this splendid illustration of the varieties of internal parasite, though the numbers do not key to specific discussions in the text, that would be too limiting. That’s a flat worm 300 feet long that he has picked up report of, and that weasel is a worm shaped just like a weasel, which was found when a pox-ridden gentleman was trepanned, and from his brain, a worm was “taken away, which was on the Dura Mater, in the form of a weasel”. He also reports how in October 1637, Dr May found a worm in the left ventricle of Mr John Pennat, aged 21 (and dead) ‘splendent as if it had been varnished’.

When Ramesey does finally get off the causes of worms to worms themselves, his account of the symptoms (p. 297ff) is horribly graphic and convincing. To that extent, he knew what he was talking about. His account of the treatment for worms retreats into Latin, as his medicine (a highly technical matter of purges and enemas) is something only the educated can practice. Writing of ‘The force of the imagination’ as a possible cause of worms, Ramesey instances the power of the imagination by referring to it ‘all Cures done by silly Women’.

I was disappointed that Ramesey did not have more to say about sex as a cause of worms, for Vox stellarum seemed to show that he was anxious about sexual matters. He does, however, come out strongly for eugenic practices, which among other things will eradicate left-handedness:

‘Sots as we are, in this most weighty matter we are too remiss, marrying any deformed unwholesome piece of mortality for a little money, when we are curious of the strain of our Horses, Doggs, Pigeons, game-Cocks; and so frequently, we leave a Crook-Back’d, Flat-nos’d, Bow-leg’d, Squnit-Ey’d, Left-handed, ugly, infirm, Weesle-fac’d, Diseased, half-Witted, Hair-brain’d, Nonsensical, Goos-cappical and Coxcombical, Worm-eaten Idiot, not only to possess our Estates, but our Names, and to build up our Families…’

To end with, here’s a tale he has of someone offering a toast to the devil during the civil war: ‘Or that of a mad fellow, in the time of our uncivill Wars at Salisbury, who being drunk, in a Bravado, drank an health to the Devil, saying, that if he did not come and pledge him, he would not believe there was either a Devil or a GOD, his Associates trembling at his expressions, retired into another Room, and left him, and never saw him more; for immediately the Devil came and carried him away, as it is thought out of the Window, the Bar thereof being bowed.’