Scribal Terror

Elizabethan hosiery restrictions

No tailor, hosier, or other person, whosoever he shall be, after the day of the publication hereof, shall put any more cloth in any one pair of hose for the outside than one yard and a half, or at the most one yard and three-quarters of a yard of kersey or of any kind of cloth, leather, or any other kind of stuff above the quantity; and in the same hose to be put only one kind of lining besides linen cloth next to the leg if any shall be so disposed; the said lining not to lie loose or bolstered, but to lie just unto their legs, as in some ancient time was accustomed; sarcanet, muckender, or any other like thing used to be worn, and to be plucked out for the furniture of the hose, not to be taken in the name of the said lining.  Neither any man under the degree of a baron to wear within his hose any velvet, satin, or other stuff above the estimation or sarcanet or taffeta.
-- From Articles for the execution of the Statutes of Apparel, and for the reformation of the outrageous excess thereof grown of late time within the realm, devised upon the Queen's Majesty's commandment, by advice of her Council, 6 May 1562

Drawings from John Speed's Map Book (1611)

Bad luck and cow breath

In the Elizabethan era, according to Richard Foss of the St. Ives Historical Society:

To stir a pot counter-clockwise, or "widdershins"*, was supposed to spoil the contents, as well as bring bad luck to all who ate from it. Bad luck could also follow from spilling salt, leaving a door open behind you, or from almost any encounter with a cat, black or otherwise. Good luck flowed from other sources: iron, silver, fire, salt, and running water were thought to be pure and purifying, and many good luck charms involve these elements. Other charms are more mysterious in origin: for instance, it was good luck to touch a man about to be hanged, just as it was lucky to spit into a fire or to be breathed on by a cow.

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*Widdershins (sometimes withershins, widershins or widderschynnes) means to take a course opposite that of the sun, going counterclock-wise, lefthandwise, or to circle an object, by always keeping it on the left. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry cites the earliest uses of the word from 1513, where it was found in the phrase widdersyns start my hair, i.e my hair stood on end.

The use of the word also means "in a direction opposite to the usual", and in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun sixteenth century. It is cognate with the German language widersinnig, i.e., "against" + "sense".

Moft wickedlye murdered

 

Alice [Arden or Arderne, 1510-1551] tried for two years to have her husband murdered. She tried to poison him on several occasions. She enjoined her lover in the plot as well as a sworn adversary of her husband, who found two nefarious characters, Black Will and George Shakebag to carry out the deed. They followed Arden around for two days but failed to find an opportunity. Ultimately, Black Will hid in closet while Arden was lured with a game of backgammon with Moseby. Arden had his back turned to the closet and Moseby distracted him by exhorting the predetermined cue to signal Black Will: "Now I may take you, Sir!". Black Will jumped from the closet and strangled Arden with a towel. Mosby struck Arden with a fourteen pound pressing iron. Alice, to make certain that her husband was indeed dead, stabbed him seven or eight times.

Alice Arden was found guilty of the crime of murder and burnt at the stake. Her co-conspirators were all rounded up and executed with various means and at different locations. -- Wikipedia

You can read the whole sorry tale in the Newgate Calendar. It is also the subject of a Renaissance play, Arden of Faversham (The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham, Kent, who was moft wickedlye murdered...etc. etc.), and of Diane Davidson's excellent historical novel Feversham. The photo shows the actual "murder house" (as the tabloids would say), via Faversham.com. (PS: I know the f is really an s, but I don't have a Renaissance s in my font.)

Écorchéby Ligier Richier (1500 – 1567)

An écorché is a human figure with the skin removed. It literally means "flayed."

On crabs and French adventurers

 

According to Companion Guide to Istanbul: And Around the Marmara by John Freely and Susan Glyn, there is a place on the European side of the Bosphorus in Istanbul which is so treacherous even the crabs avoid it.

The current off Akinti Burnu is the strongest of any point on the European side (of the Bosphorous), reaching a speed of over five knots when the prevailing north wind is blowing. This made it very difficult for sailing vessels to round Akinti Burnu on their way up the Bosphorus, and they had to be pulled around the point by porters on the shore. Apparently crabs also found it difficult, as Gyllius writes in his book on the Bosphorus: “I myself saw there stones worn down by the long procession of crabs. And even if I had not seen it I would not have thought it far from the truth that stones should be worn down by the hard claws of crabs, since we see that ants can dig down furrows and make a bath by the continuous attrition of their feet.”

The author Freely and Glyn quote is Petrus Gyllius or Pierre Gilles, born in France in 1490:

IN 1544 Gilles left France with a French embassy that included the king’s royal cosmographer, André Thevet d’Angoulême. Gilles seems to have spent the years 1544 to 1547 in Constantinople, gathering literary sources and investigating the physical remains of the ancient city. Out of money, in 1548 he enlisted in Suleyman’s army and joined the expedition against Persia. In 1548 he met the French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Gabriel d’Aramon, who took Gilles with him to the Holy Land and Egypt.

IN JANUARY 1550, still in d’Aramon’s company, Gilles returned to Constantinople. That same year he travelled with the ambassador back to France. Almost immediately upon his return, however, Gilles headed south to Rome. While in Rome Gilles began the work of sifting through the large number of source materials and notes that he had accumulated on the history of Constantinople. Gilles had made great progress in completing his book on Constantinople by 1555; but then, as the epitaph on his tomb tells us, he was stricken by a fever that he fought for eleven days before dying at the fourth hour on January 5, 1555. His patron Georges d’Armagnac provided for his funeral and his tomb, in the church of San Marcello in Rome.

FROM HIS EPITAPH we learn that Gilles was hard at work organizing his notes for his two works on Constantinople when he died. He apparently left these incomplete; and his nephew, Antoine Gilles, then took up the task of finishing his work. This he did faithfully; and in the 1560s a string of books emerged from his stewardship. The most important for our purposes appeared in Lyon in 1561 and were Gilles’ Three Books on the Thracian Bosporus and the Topography of Constantinople and Its Antiquities in Four Books.

Italica Press offers an E-book translation of Gyllius here. The illustration is a 1422 map of Constantinople by a Florentine cartographer, Cristoforo Buondelmonte.

Meet the Tudors

From left to right, these rather miserable-looking people are Henry VIII, Will Somers (his jester), Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. According to the BBC:

The portrait, dating from 1650 to 1680, was found in the Duke of Buccleuch's collection at Boughton House.

It shows Elizabeth with siblings Edward VI and Mary I, father Henry VIII and his jester, Will Somers. 

It is a copy of an original panel painting, which is thought to date back to the early 1550s.

Will looks like a serial killer, but actually he's the only one in the picture whose adult career did not involve the shedding of innocent blood in various horrible ways. (Edward doesn't count, since he died at 15.) Via Medieval Material Culture

Don't leave home without it

Discovery News features a "tiny gold combined toothpick and earwax spoon, believed to be more than 385 years old, [found] during the search for a shipwrecked Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys."

Don't laugh. If you were going halfway across the known world to a place with no gold earwax spoons that would also function as toothpicks, you’d find a place for this in your baggage too.

Update, thanks to Michelle commenting at Neatorama. A silver "ear picker" is featured at the Historic Jamestown site, according to which:

 Ear pickers, though not all of silver, were used by all levels of society in medieval and post-medieval England. As was the fashion for many of these tools, this one is double-ended. The pointed end was used to clean teeth and nails, and the spoon-shaped end was used to remove earwax. The 17th-century English knew about plaque, which they called "scale" or "surf," and they were encouraged by their doctors to scrape their teeth frequently. They also knew that a buildup of earwax could cause deafness. As gross as that may seem to us today, the earwax was often saved and used for coating sewing thread to make it stronger and easier to use.

 

Here's an interesting item from the eighteenth century:

 This horn piece was one of the most common horn implements made during the height of Horn Guild of 18th Century London. A thread puller or toothpick and an ear wax spoon. Pinned with copper this horn tool is hinged like a Swiss Army knife, one swing out tool is for pulling the precious threads out of old or discarded clothing and the little spoon tool is for collecting ear wax to wax the thread with. -- The Scarlet Scarab

Catherine and the dwarves

 
Catherine de Medici (1519-1589) was one of the great female sovereigns of the sixteenth century -- the "monstrous regiment of women" that John Knox found so troubling. She ruled France as queen and influenced it mightily as queen mother throughout much of the sixteenth century. Besides Machiavellian political maneuvering, one of her great passions was dwarf collecting. In Vasari's painting of Catherine's marriage to the future Henri II, you'll notice  a couple of dwarves in attendance.  They were more than just curiosities -- Catherine created a tiny dwarf kingdom within her court, as Leonie Frieda explains in Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (2005):

She accorded a proper household to her troupe of them; they had their own footmen, apothecaries, laundresses, housekeepers, tutors and so on. The Queen Mother kept her dwarves superbly dressed, wearing furs and precious brocades. Among her favourites were ‘Catherine La Jardiniere’, ‘The Moor’, ‘The Turk’, ‘The dwarf Marvile’ and ‘Auguste Romanesque’, who carried a sword and dagger. There was even a dwarf monk. . . . They all received pocket money from her and she married off two of her favourites in a splendid miniature ceremony. Catherine La Jardiniere was the Queen Mother’s best-loved dwarf and this tiny companion accompanied her almost everywhere.

Catherine's fondness for little people was shared by her granddaughter Eugenia, who is paired with her own favorite dwarf in a portrait by an unknown artist, c. 1599.
 
You can read more about dwarves in the art of 15th to 18th century Europe at this PBS site. Velasquez is particularly well known for his painting of dwarves in the Spanish court of the 17th century. Las Meninas (The Ladies in Waiting) is probably the most well-known of these works.

Great guns!

 
And great outfits, too, at BibliOdyssey, from the Zeugbuch Kaiser Maximilians:

a 500+ page paper and parchment manuscript produced between 1495 and 1515. It details the arsenal and artillery innovations of the Habsburg monarch, Kaiser Maximilian I, who was something of an enthusiastic scholar and patron to a wide range of intellectual as well as military pursuits. He is credited with the development of the portable cannon and the establishment of the respected mercenary pikemen regiments . . . known as Landsknechts.

The manuscript itself, even without the illustrations, is a work of art -- well worth browsing through for the beauty of the lettering, initials, and marginalia.

Scribal points to Minnesotastan for explaining what Kaiser means -- and why it's pronounced that way.

Kaiser, like the Russian term czar, is a corruption of the Latin caesar. The pronunciation changed when the term passed into the Teutonic languages (the OED claims it was the first Latin word to do so).

Although the German word Kaiser is indeed different from the original Latin Caesar, it's not much different. In classical Latin, the Cae would indeed have been pronounced Kai as in kind. It probably came into the Teutonic languages via Greek  . It was originally the family name of Julius Caesar,  meaning"hairy." There is a distinct possibility that this was intended humorously, since the Caesar men had a tendency to baldness. (Rather like calling a bald guy "Curly.")

In defense of rats

 

Futility Closet tells the story of a 16th century French attorney who was placed in an unenviable position by the "the authorities in Autun [who] asked him to advocate for the rats, which they put on trial in 1510 for eating the harvest of Burgundy":

In his defence, Chasseneux showed that the rats had not received formal notice; and, before proceeding with the case, he obtained a decision that all the priests of the afflicted parishes should announce an adjournment, and summon the defendants to appear on a fixed day.

At the adjourned trial, he complained that the delay accorded his clients had been too short to allow of their appearing, in consequence of the roads being infested with cats. Chasseneux made an able defence, and finally obtained a second adjournment. We believe that no verdict was given. -- Sabine Baring-Gould*, Curiosities of Olden Times, 1896

Speeches exhorting rats and other undesirables to leave a particular area were not uncommon in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but this is the first case I've heard of in which they were given the right to a free legal defense. (By the way, of an earlier era had a sense of humor too and would have been ROTFL at Chasseneux's performance IMHO.)

According to The History of Human-Animal Interaction (which also mentions the clever Chasseneux):

In the 1994 article "The Law Is an Ass: Reading E. P. Evans' The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" (Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, published by the organization Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Piers Beirne described the practice in detail.

The article reviewed books on the subject by several authors, focusing on one written by E. P. Evans in 1906. Evans described 191 animal trials, mostly from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Most of the trials took place in France, Italy, and Germany. There are also a few historical records of trials in other European countries and in the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Animals were tried for a variety of offenses besides murder, mostly fraud and theft. Records show that many were tortured for confessions (just as humans were) prior to the trial. It is not clear how animal confessions were interpreted, considering that animals cannot speak human languages.

Criminal proceedings against animals were handled with the utmost seriousness by medieval legal authorities. Animals that harmed humans were considered servants of the devil because they had violated God's directive in the Bible that humans should have dominion over animals. A particular Bible verse, Exodus 21:28, was often cited as the grounds for executing an animal convicted of murder: "If an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten." The penalties for offenses less serious than murder matched those given to humans for the same types of crimes.

Evans listed a variety of domestic and wild animals, as well as rodents, sea creatures, birds, and insects, that were tried at various times by government or church courts. Those that could not be physically brought to court were tried in absentia. In general, only the larger domestic animals, such as pigs, bulls, cows, horses, sheep, and dogs, actually appeared in court and were subjected to punishments. A few animals were found innocent or granted pardons or reprieves by authorities. Many wild animals found guilty by church courts were excommunicated (exiled from the church).

The vast majority of criminal defendants were pigs, probably because farmers allowed them to roam free much of the time. In 1386 a pig accused of murdering an infant was tried and convicted by a court in Falaise, France. The pig was hanged at the gallows by the village hangman. Her six piglets were charged with being accessories to the crime but were acquitted "on account of their youth and their mother's bad example."

A lawyer could establish his reputation by performing well in animal trials. In France in the early 1500s, a lawyer named Bartholomé Chassenée was appointed to represent some rats that had eaten and destroyed some barley (a felony). Chassenée used a series of clever legal maneuvers to delay the trial as long as possible. At one point he convinced the judge that it was too dangerous for his clients to come to court on the appointed day because of the many cats in the neighborhood. Chassenée became famous throughout France for his excellent legal skills.

I believe that many of these cases were extensions of the practice of deodand, which also pertained to inanimate objects:

Under this law, a chattel  (i.e. some personal property, such as a horse or a hay stack) was considered a deodand whenever a coroner's jury decided that it had caused the death of a human being. In theory, deodands were forfeit to the crown, which was supposed to sell the chattel and then apply the profits to some pious use. (The term deodand derives from the Latin phrase "deo dandum" which means "to be given to God." In reality, the juries who decided that a particular animal or object was a deodand also appraised its value and the owners were expected to pay a fine equal to the value of the deodand. If the owner could not pay the deodand, his township was held responsible.

Arguments for the culpability of a particular animal or object were taken quite seriously because they determined the fine imposed on the owner.

Illustration from Gode Cookery.com

*Sabine Baring-Gould was an Anglican minister who also wrote "Onward Christian Soldiers" and a famous book about werewolves.