Author Archive

Broadcaster to Nations

May 28th, 2019

Rupert Willoughby: tête-parlante extraordinaire

Basingstoke: A Lament

For devotees of Basingstoke, my contribution to Sarah Walker’s live broadcast on Radio Berkshire on 16 May, to mark the 25th anniversary of The Anvil, can be heard here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p077hzmp, beginning at 41:29. It’s all over in two minutes, but I contrived to mention my encounter with ‘Nigel’ from The Archers.

I was invited to participate in my role as a ‘local historian’ and author of the seminal Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture.

From our vantage point in the foyer of the Anvil, Sarah and I looked directly along Church Street, the historic heart of Basingstoke, and could clearly witness the destruction that was wrought by the developers of the 1960s. On the right hand side, buildings that were variously charming, quirky, elegant and, without exception, historic; on the left, the vast, blank retaining wall of the Basingstoke ‘megastructure’, a grotesque ‘shopping centre’ in the sky, a dismal, desolate shrine to consumerism that is the dominant feature of modern Basingstoke.

The buildings that survived the holocaust seem mostly to have been protected by their nearness to the parish church, which was sacrosanct. Countless others were needlessly felled. The photographs below, taken on the same sunny morning as my broadcast, are of parts of old Basingstoke that survive and may surprise those who know the town only for its Modernist horrors.

Château Gaillard, une forteresse imprenable

As if this were not excitement enough, I then appeared as a ‘talking head’ in a documentary called Château Gaillard, une forteresse imprenable, broadcast on the French channel RMC Découverte on 22 May (you can see it again on 3 June at midnight!).

It was made by Thomas Risch, who interviewed me in London a few months ago. I described at length the building of the Norman castle by Richard the Lionheart and its siege by Philip of France in the reign of King John.

My cousin Jean, viewing the broadcast in Paris, kindly took the photograph at the head of this article. I have yet to see the programme, but have a good impression of it from the rather excitable trailer, in which I briefly appear: see it here – https://www.programme-tv.net/programme/culture-infos/15026839-chateau-gaillard-une-forteresse-imprenable/ – or here – https://television.telerama.fr/tele/programmes-tv/chateau-gaillard,-une-forteresse-imprenable,150565339.php.

Risch asked me to read a lengthy passage from a contemporary chronicler in the original Latin, and I do hope this was included in the final cut.

Church Street, Basingstoke: on the left, the infamous 'Great Wall'; on the right, the amputated remains of a medieval market-town.

This row of charming and historic buildings survived the destruction of the 1960s because of their proximity to the church, which was sacrosanct. The Anvil, a vast concert hall, can be seen in the distance.

How modern Basingstoke might have been: picturesque and thriving.

Comments Off on Broadcaster to Nations »

Posted in The View from the Cuttings

A Dickensian Landmark in London: The Site of Fagin’s Lair on Saffron Hill

March 14th, 2019

The border between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell is seamless and invisible but one is instantly aware of passing from a genteel quarter into a raffish one. I ventured in that direction last week on a particular quest: to discover one of London’s great literary landmarks, the site of Fagin’s lair. In Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, begun in 1837, the squalid apartment of the ‘pleasant old gentleman, and his hopeful pupils’, is located with precision on Saffron Hill.

Oliver, a bemused and exhausted runaway, has joined up with the Artful Dodger on the Great North Road. That highway, known at the London end as ‘Liverpool Road’, is bordered here by market gardens, by open fields and by the cattle lairs that the drovers use on their way to Smithfield Market. The turnpike by which the boys enter London is hard by the Angel at Islington, an old coaching inn that had been entirely rebuilt in 1819. It is approaching midnight as the pair proceed along St John Street into Clerkenwell, then, by way of Exmouth Street and Coppice Row, to the prettily-named Saffron Hill, ‘along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels’.

Descending into the pit: Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell

This had once been a country lane through the Bishop of Ely’s estate, where saffron was grown, but since the late seventeenth century it had been developed into an overcrowded and impoverished residential area, a ‘rookery’. Oliver ‘could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either side of the way as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. the street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place were the public-houses, and in them, the lowest orders of Irish (who are generally the lowest orders of anything) were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in the filth; and from several of the doorways, great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, upon no very well-disposed or harmless errands.

‘Oliver was just considering whether he hadn’t better run away, when they reached the bottom of the hill: his conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field-lane, and, drawing him into the passage, closed it behind them.’ [Book I, Chapter 8.]

Field Lane was an alley at the south end of Saffron Hill that connected it to Holborn Hill. The name has since disappeared from the map. Dickens knew it well and hardly exaggerates the wretchedness of the place. Peter Cunningham, author of a Hand-book of London, 1850, describes Saffron Hill as a ‘squalid neighbourhood between HOLBORN and CLERKENWELL densely inhabited by poor people and thieves … The clergymen of St Andrew’s, Holborn, (the parish in which the purlieu lies), have been obliged, when visiting it, to be accompanied by policemen in plain clothes.’ Hepworth Dixon in The London Prisons, also published in 1850, writes that Field Lane ‘is narrow enough for [one] to reach across from house to house, and the buildings so lofty that a very bright sun is required to send light to the surface … The stench is awful. Along the middle of the lane runs a gutter, into which every sort of poisonous liquid is poured.’ A foreign observer, Flora Tristan, describes it in 1842 as ‘a little alley … too narrow for vehicles to use,’ where ‘there is absolutely nothing to be seen but dealers in second-hand silk handkerchiefs.’ Intrepid enough to visit at night, she adds: ‘There is a bustle of activity in the street as prostitutes, children, and rogues of every age and condition come to sell their handkerchiefs’ (London Journal, p.175). These had been stolen, of course, by the likes of Fagin’s crew, and the saleswomen, invariably ‘daughters of Israel’, were ‘fences’. Dixon was incensed by their attempts ‘to seduce you into the purchase of the very handkerchief which you had in your pocket at the entrance’ (The London Prisons, pp.227-8).

There is a palpably villainous and mournful air to Saffron Hill, which is still oppressively enclosed by tall buildings. The street is paved now, the original houses have all gone, and the River Fleet, a filthy open sewer that ran along its east side, is covered over; but there is a paucity here both of smart offices and of trendy warehouse developments, as if it is still a demoralised place, forsaken by the world and left to its ghosts.

The One Tun: not recommended by Charles Dickens

Descending the hill, one passes The One Tun (rebuilt in 1875, over the original cellars), which is claimed, not unreasonably, as the model of the ‘low public-house, situate in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill,’ that Bill Sikes frequents with his dog. It is described as ’a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light burnt all day in the winter-time, and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer’.

The best editions of Oliver Twist are those accompanied by George Cruikshanks’s original illustrations, where the impoverished, under-nourished boys always appear like old men. Cruikshanks’s illustration of the pub, headed ‘Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends’, shows a doorway festooned with misspelt notices: ‘To be drunk on the premises’; ‘Licensed to sel Beerly Retail’; ‘Fine Ale 3d pr. pot’.

As for Fagin’s dwelling, it was ‘a very dirty place; but the rooms upstairs had great high wooden mantel-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceilings, which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways; from all of which tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome, dismal and dreary as it looked now.’ [Book I, Chapter 18.]

At this end of Saffron Hill, one feels trapped and cornered, as if one has descended into a pit. A steep flight of steps leads up into the street beyond and the relief of sunlight and fresh air, or what passes for it in this part of London. Literary pilgrims in search of the authentic Dickensian atmosphere will not be disappointed.

Longman's former premises on Saffron Hill: gloomy enough for Fagin

Footnote. Halfway down Saffron Hill were the premises of Longman & Co., the publishers, from 1887 – too late to have inspired Fagin’s lair, but the dirty curtains and the piles of rubbish outside evoke Dickensian squalor.

http://atinaitaly.com/charles-dickens-clerkenwell-london/ and http://writingcities.com/2015/02/13/field-lane-and-larceny-then-and-now/

Comments Off on A Dickensian Landmark in London: The Site of Fagin’s Lair on Saffron Hill »

Posted in Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

Lieutenant John Loftus Otway Mansergh, Royal Warwickshires, killed in action at the Battle of Loos

November 12th, 2018

Royal_Warwickshire_Regiment_Cap_Badge.jpg (419Ã464)

My family emerged relatively unscathed from the Great War. My grandfathers were too young to serve, my great-grandfathers too old, apart from one, Major Cyril Mumby, who survived the war, despite being severely wounded on the Western Front.

The war was, literally, a shattering experience for Cyril and was to alter the course of his life, but the same could also be said of his sister, Isabel (born in 1882).

The Mumbys were well-heeled mineral-water manufacturers, whose life before 1914 had been extremely easy and pleasant. Isabel had been adequately educated at a boarding-school in Bournemouth before embarking on a life of obvious idleness, as befitted an affluent young lady. The family regularly holidayed at Montreux, the intensely social, intensely romantic resort on Lake Leman, where, partying among Europe’s fashionable elite, Cyril met and fell in love with his future wife, a young French girl called Nicole de Faletans.

On another family holiday at Montreux in the late 1890s, Isabel had met a good-looking young man, fresh from Haileybury College, called Loftus Mansergh. His father was a major in the Warwickshires, and the Manserghs were a prominent and wealthy Anglo-Irish family. A newspaper cutting refers to a ‘Mr Mansergh’ who appeared as a Hussar at the Annual International Ball at the Kursaal, Montreux’s casino, in January 1899. It may have been around this time that he encountered Isabel.

Commissioned in December 1899 into the Royal Irish Regiment, Loftus had served in the Boer War until 1902. He had kept in touch with Isabel, sending her photographs of himself at bivouacs on the weld, which she pasted into her album. Later he had proposed to her and been accepted.

With no intention of forming a connection with trade (even if holders of a Royal Warrant), his stuffy parents had refused their consent. He had headed off to Africa instead, serving as an Assistant District Commissioner in Kenya. Isabel had eventually settled with her mother and sister at Udimore Cottage, Otterbourne (near Winchester), resigned to spinsterhood.

However, on Loftus’s return to England in May 1914, he had renewed his proposal. With a hastily-procured licence, the couple had been married at Otterbourne. A daughter, Elisabeth, was born nine months later, in April 1915.

Loftus had been recalled as a lieutenant in June 1914. On 4 August, he went out with the 2nd Battalion of the Warwickshires to France. Before embarking he had telephoned his sister-in-law, Nicole, and asked her to dine with him, as Isabel was too upset to see him off. He was killed in action at the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915. No remains were ever recovered.

Condemned to a long widowhood, Isabel died at Otterbourne in 1959. At this hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, these memories of Cyril, Isabel and Loftus have been foremost in my mind.

Easter Island or Isle of Wight? The Luccombe Chine Head

September 9th, 2018

The small museum at Newport Roman Villa includes something quite remarkable, a carved, near life-sized stone head that is every bit as powerful, mysterious and evocative as any of the Easter Island heads – and considerably older too, as it is thought to date from the late Iron Age or early Roman period. The head was discovered at Luccombe Chine, one of the prettiest places on the Island, but otherwise is entirely inscrutable.

Easter Island head in the British Museum ...

... and in situ (photo courtesy of Arthur Willoughby)

Comments Off on Easter Island or Isle of Wight? The Luccombe Chine Head »

Posted in Historical Gleanings, The Isle of Wight

The Red Roman Villa on Cypress Road, Newport, Isle of Wight: An Appreciation

September 9th, 2018

The kitchen and corridor beyond are imaginatively re-created above the original mosaic floors

Among the undistinguished suburban villas on Cypress Road, Newport, is a gem of an archaeological site. It was discovered there in 1926, while foundations were being dug for a garage.

The extremely well-preserved remains are of a Roman villa that is thought to date from the late 270s, long before the existence of any town on the Isle of Wight. It was a single-storey building with a corridor, or possibly open verandah, at the front, giving access to a series of rooms and to wings on each side. It faced southwards onto a courtyard that would have been enclosed by farm buildings. Without the modern streetscape, there would have been pleasant views across open country to the surrounding hills.

The plan of the house can clearly be read on the ground, as the stone bases of the walls are virtually intact. Above them, the timber frame of the house was infilled with wattle and daub, proofed with limewash and – it seems – painted red. The building was roofed with heavy slabs of Bembridge limestone, many of which, pierced with single holes for nails, were found on the site, along with the arched tiles that once finished the roof-ridge. Fragments of window-glass reveal that at least some of the windows were glazed. For others, wooden shutters probably sufficed.

Taking the plunge - the frigidarium

The interior walls were brightly painted, and some of the rooms had elaborate mosaic floors. As if these were not luxuries enough, the entire west wing was a purpose-built bath-house, with the classic sequence of a frigidarium (‘cold room’) leading into a tepidarium, sudatorium and caldarium (‘warm room’, ‘sweat room’ and ‘hot room’). These last three rooms were heated by an underfloor hypocaust, which depended on the stoking by a slave of a furnace outside. The pools are of similar size to a modern hot-tub – and opportunities for serious pampering.

The exterior walls of the bath-house wing may have been entirely of stone, while the three heated bathrooms were crowned by white plastered domes (domed ceilings were necessary to reduce condensation), constructed from the tufa blocks that were discovered in abundance by the excavators. The front room of the opposite (east) wing also benefited from underfloor heating, with hot air circulating from a separate furnace.

Roman hot-tub: the caldarium

It is extraordinarily easy to make a mental leap back in time, to see this place as it once was and to marvel at the level of luxury that was enjoyed here. The owners were no doubt indigenous Britons who had flourished under Roman rule and taken full advantage of its opportunities. Within about fifty years, however, the way of life here had declined to such an extent that fine mosaic floors had been taken up, and the grandest room of the house turned into a smithy. In the ensuing century, it is perhaps Saxon or Jutish raiders who were, literally, the death of the place, for the skull of a woman in her early thirties, with two huge cracks in it, was found in the corner of one of the rooms, into which her decapitated head had been heartlessly tossed.

There is even a reconstruction, based on a model from Pompeii, of a formal garden

Comments Off on The Red Roman Villa on Cypress Road, Newport, Isle of Wight: An Appreciation »

Posted in A Classical Education, Historical Gleanings, The Isle of Wight

Muslim Ancestry of the English Royal House: Zaida of Seville and Madragana of Faro, Two Moorish Ladies and Their European Descendants

June 16th, 2018

Zaida of Seville at home? John Frederick Lewis, ‘A Lady Receiving Visitors’ (1873)

Zaida of Seville

From the eighth to eleventh centuries, the greater part of what is now Spain and Portugal was under Moorish rule, the vast Muslim province of al-Andalus. The Christians huddled in their enclaves in the far north of the peninsula, until a succession of vigorous kings brought the Reconquista to its southernmost shores, reducing the once-mighty Caliphate of Córdoba to a handful of tiny taifas or republics.

The Taifa of Seville, for example, was created in 1031 by its former qadi or governor who, declaring his independence from the Caliphate, reigned there as Abbad I. The third and last Emir of Seville, Abbad’s grandson Muhammed ibn Abbad al Mu’tamid, was thus the ruler not of a glorious Islamic capital but of a tiny, weakened outpost beset by powerful enemies.

Crippled by tribute to the Christian king of Castile, al Mu’tamid rashly appealed to the Almoravids of Morocco for help. By 1091, the Almoravids had themselves occupied the remaining Islamic taifas. Seville was besieged and captured, al Mu’tamid ordering has sons to surrender the Alcazar or citadel in exchange for their lives. He himself died mysteriously in exile at Aghmat, in Morocco, in 1095.

Another of al Mu’tamid’s sons, Abu Nasr al-Fath al Ma’mum, Emir of the Taifa of Córdoba, had perished in March 1091 during the siege of that city, but had previously sent his wife, Zaida, and his children to Almodóvar del Rio, where they had sought the protection of Alfonso VI ‘El Bravo’, the Christian King of Castile. No details are known, but the widowed Muslim princess had caught the fancy of the lusty king, whose mistress she had become, though he had also been prompt in arranging for her baptism in the name of ‘Isabella’.

Isabella, formerly Zaida, duly gave birth to Alfonso’s beloved only son, Sancho, whose death at the Battle of Uclès in 1108 was to career Alfonso, broken-hearted, to a premature grave. Some say that Alfonso later married her, for his fourth wife, who died in childbirth, was also called Isabella and her identity is otherwise unknown. If so, Zaida was also the mother of Elvira and Sancha, the two daughters of that marriage. These two girls were to become the wives respectively of Rodrigo González de Lara, a Castilian nobleman and crusader who died in the Holy Land in 1143, and of Roger II, Count of Sicily. From both couples there are numerous lines of descent to the present day. (See, for example, the table of descent from Sancha of Isabella of Castile, wife of Edmund, Duke of York, in Iain Moncreiffe and Don Pottinger, Blood Royal (Edinburgh, 1956), p.16.)

It was asserted by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo (died 1135), in his Chronicon Regum Legionensium, that ‘Ceida’ was in fact the daughter of King ‘Abenabeth’ of Seville (al Mu’tamid), but this authority is expressly contradicted by the more reliable Islamic sources. Pelayo’s account has nevertheless given rise to a persistent myth about Zaida, whom a much-later tomb inscription confidently describes both as ‘uxor regis Adefonsi’ and as ‘filia Benabet’. For what it is worth, Pelayo of Oviedo does not speak of her as queen, but as one of Alfonso’s ‘duas concubinas’.

The scholarly consensus is that Zaida was indeed al Mu’tamid’s daughter-in-law and that her parentage is unknown. Her identity with the later Queen Isabella is ‘undetermined’. It is unlikely that the truth of the matter, and whether she was indeed the mother of Elvira and Sancha, will ever now be revealed.

(Evariste Lévi-Provençal, ‘La “Mora Zaida”, femme d’Alfonse VI de Castile, et leur fils l’Infant Sancho’, Hesperis 18 (1934), pp.1-8, 200-1; Alberto Frutos Montaner, ‘La Mora Zaida, entre historia y leyenda’, in Barry Taylor and Geoffrey West eds., Historical Essays on Hispano-Medieval Narrative (London, 2005), pp.273-352.)

Madragana of Faro

John Frederick Lewis, ‘The Coffee Bearer’ (1857)

In contrast to the case of Zaida of Seville, lines of descent from another Andalusian, Madragana of Faro, are well established.

The Reconquista had continued apace and, in 1249, a final assault was launched on the remaining Muslim enclaves in Portugal. The Crónica da Conquista do Algarve describes the capture of Faro by the Portuguese king, Afonso III. The city had fallen without fuss, Afonso promising the Moors that they would enjoy ‘the same laws in all things as they had received from their own king’, and that they would retain ‘all their houses, vineyards and inheritances’. They were free to move to other Moorish lands if they wished, taking their goods with them. Those who remained would become his vassals and would be treated with ‘honour and mercy’.

As a modern historian observes, these ‘businesslike negotiations were carried through without any indication of culturally based animosity’ (Stephen Lay, The Reconquest Kings of Portugal (London, 2008), p.258). By the end of 1250 the remaining Muslim strongholds had all surrendered to Afonso’s forces, having wearily resigned themselves to the inevitable. The Portuguese Reconquista was thus complete.

According to medieval sources, Afonso, having deposed Aloandro, the last qadi (governor) of Faro, had taken his daughter, Madragana, as his mistress. She had at once been baptised in the name of ‘Mor Afonso’, ‘Mor’ being short for Maior, a common female name in medieval Portuguese. The patronymic ‘Afonso’ denotes that she was the ‘daughter of Afonso’, the king himself presumably acting as godfather. Other sources refer to the girl as Mourana, a version of Ouroana which is another traditional Portuguese name.

The sources are very clear that Madragana bore two children by Afonso: a son, Martim Afonso Chichorro, born about 1250, and Urraca, born about 1260. Eventually, the royal passion seems to have waned and Madragana was married off to one Fernão Rei, whose surname (‘of the king’) suggests that he had been employed a servant at the court.

Madragana’s son Martim was married in 1274 to Inès Lourenco de Sousa de Valadares and founded the house of Sousa-Chichorro. The Duke of Lafões is its head and it is said that all the great families of Portugal can claim Sousa ancestry. So too, can many families in northern Europe, for a contingent of Sousas accompanied their cousin, Isabella of Portugal, to the Netherlands in 1429 for her marriage to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Two years later, Isabella de Sousa-Chichorro, daughter of Afonso-Vasques, married one of Philip’s nobles, Jean de Poitiers-Valentinois, lord of Arcis-sur-Aube, near Troyes, and of Vadans in the Franche-Comté; while her niece, Marguerita de Castro e Sousa, was soon to marry another Burgundian lord, Jean de Neufchatel, Lord of Montagu and Fontenoy.

The Poitiers lords of Vadans are the subject of a previous blog (http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/gleanings/the-flight-of-la-vouivre-from-dole-to-vadans-reflections-on-the-house-of-poitiers-valentinois/). I myself am descended from them, and from Madragana, through my great-grandmother, a franc-comtoise. It is from Marguerita de Castro y Sousa that the modern British royal family descends. Her granddaughter, Antoinette de Neufchatel, married Philipp, Graf von Salm. Antoinette’s daughter in turn married a Graf von Erbach. Four generations later, Sophie Albertina von Erbach married a Prince von Sachsen Hildburghausen. Their granddaughter, Charlotte von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was George III’s queen and the grandmother of Queen Victoria (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Margarita_de_Castro_e_Souza_genealogy_and_descent.JPG).

This tenuous link has given rise to much tendentious, indeed ludicrous speculation about the genetic make-up of the modern royal family, especially in the light of Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle. Madragana has unhistorically been described as ‘black’, and her remote descendant, Queen Charlotte, as ‘Britain’s first black queen’, especially as her ‘negroid’ features were often commented upon. Queen Charlotte is even listed by campaigners among ‘100 Great Black Britons’, along with such luminaries as Diane Abbott and Joan Armatrading (http://100greatblackbritons.com/bios/queen_charlotte.html).

A soi-disant ‘historian of the African diaspora’, Mario de Valdes y Cocom, has gone so far as to describe the Sousas as ‘a black branch of the Portuguese royal house’ (Mario de Valdes y Cocom, ‘The Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families’, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/royalfamily.html). A more reasonable presumption is that the ancestors of Madragana were from north Africa, possibly blue-eyed Berbers or even Vandals, a Germanic tribe who had settled there. There are even claims that the family was Jewish, descended through the Exilarchs of Babylon from King David himself (Manuel Abranches de Soveral, ‘Origen dos Souza ditos do Prado’, in Machado de Vila Pouca de Agular (Porto, 2000)). They may have been distantly descended from Jews and indeed from sub-Saharan Africans – the current fad for DNA testing reveals many surprises – but, by any stretch of the imagination, it is a ridiculous distortion to describe Queen Charlotte, the Sousas or even Madragana herself as ‘black’.

[Duarte Nunez do Lião, Primeira parte das Chronìcas dos reis da Portugal (cota RES, 574v, p.97; António Caetano de Sousa, História Genealógica da Casa Real Portuguesa, Tomo XIV, Parte III (Lisbon, 1600), pp.702-3: ‘Alguus differaõ, que fora sua mãy Moura, como foy o Desembargador Duarte Nunes de Leaõ, o que segnio o Chronista Fr. Antonio Brandaõ, dizendo ser filha de Aloandro, hum dos Alcaides de Faro, quando El Rey ganhou esto Cidade no ano de 1250, e que sendo dotada de grande fermosura, El Rey tivera trato com ella’. For the wilder theories see Stuart Jeffries, ‘Was this Britain’s First Black Queen?’, The Guardian (Race Issues section), 12 March 2009; Doreen, Lady Lawrence also alluded to Prince Harry’s ‘black’ ancestress, Ouroana, on Radio 4 the day after his wedding.]

Comments Off on Muslim Ancestry of the English Royal House: Zaida of Seville and Madragana of Faro, Two Moorish Ladies and Their European Descendants »

Posted in Historical Gleanings

Victorian Girl Power: The Education of Miss Josephine Willoughby

March 31st, 2018

Josephine Willoughby (bottom left), with Constance Maynard (centre) and Frances Ralph Gray (bottom right)

Contrary to the popular view, the Suffragettes were not the only activists in the movement for female equality. Long before Suffragettism was at its peak in the early 1900s, other women had been making an often quiet and invariably courageous stand, particularly in the field of women’s education.

Of these, the best known are Emily Davies, the co-founder in 1869 of Girton College, Cambridge; her lifelong friend Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who in 1865 was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician or surgeon; and Garrett Anderson’s younger sister Dame Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist (and opponent of the militant Suffragettes), who is considered instrumental in gaining the vote for six million British women over 30 years old in 1918.

According to the legend, it had begun with a momentous conversation one evening in 1860 at Alde House, the Garrett home near Aldeburgh. As Emily Davies and her best friend Elizabeth Garrett brushed their hair by the bedroom fire, the two young women had discussed their future lives, with Millicent, aged thirteen, observing silently. ‘Well Elizabeth,’ said Emily, ‘it is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education, while you open the medical profession for women. After these things are done we must see about getting the vote.’ She had then turned to the little girl, still sitting quietly on her stool. ‘You are younger than we are, Millie,’ she said, ‘so you must attend to that.’ (Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London, 1965), p.72.)

To women of less steely character, the barriers would have seemed insuperable. ‘The Victorian view of women,’ recalled a contemporary, ‘is that she was a creature born to please, whose personal individuality was strictly limited to, and by, this obligation. However politely expressed, it was a view in effect Oriental. Women were secondary adjuncts to the life of man … Woman’s destiny and sufficient purpose was to marry. Her education was directed to equipping her with graces and accomplishments calculated to attract a husband.’

This writer continues: ‘For “the average girl”, the “correct thing” was to be brought up at home.’ (Mary Agnes Hamilton, Newnham: An Informal Biography (London, 1936), pp.32, 47.) A clergyman’s daughter, Emily Davies had ‘learnt Latin with her brothers for her own pleasure and had written weekly English essays for criticism by her father. Yet she was forced to stay at home, her time frittered away in a multitude of small duties.’ Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had as her governess ‘a decayed gentlewoman’ who bored her rigid, followed by a few years at a private ‘Boarding School for Ladies’, the stupidity of whose teachers she remembered ‘with shudders’ (Manton, pp.32-4, 40). Even for the daughters – like her – of rich parents, the opportunities for secondary schooling were extremely limited.

Plymouth High School

It is perhaps not generally appreciated that the three renowned girls’ schools founded in the middle of the nineteenth century – Queen’s College, Harley Street (1848), North London Collegiate (1850) and Cheltenham Ladies’ (1854) – were ‘pioneering achievements’; that North London was ‘held up to scorn as a perilous innovation’; and that these were ‘tiny islands in the great sea’ (Hamilton, p.47). Fortunately, they were followed by an impressive number of similar foundations in the 1870s, particularly those of the Endowed Schools Commissioners and the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company, who between them had established, by 1880, some forty schools of the new type. St Leonard’s School, St Andrews, and Oxford, South Hampstead and Plymouth High Schools are worthy examples of these.

The pride of the Willoughbys - with an assortment of Willoughby feet

My great-grandfather’s elder sister, Caroline Annie Josephine Willoughby, born at Plymouth on 5 June 1863, was one of the original pupils at Plymouth High School (founded in 1874) and, for that reason alone, can be considered a pioneer in the history of women’s education. Of course this was made possible by well-to-do, liberal-minded parents who were not appalled by the prospect of their daughters’ being as well educated as their sons. Josephine had nine brothers and sisters, and the boys were all sent to Plymouth College, close to their home in Mutley, which, dating from 1877, is a slightly later foundation than the High School.

The father of this brood, Joseph Willoughby, was an engineer and iron founder, a long-standing member of the Town Council, and for fifty years the managing-director of Willoughby Bros. Ltd., from whose yards in Rendle Street were to emanate, in the 1890s and 1900s, such sturdy vessels as the Torpoint and Saltash chain-ferries; whilst man-hole covers in the Plymouth area are still stamped with their name. Joseph had married Ann Mason, a farmer’s daughter from Kenwyn, near Truro.

Newnham College, Cambridge

These paragons went even further, and placed themselves in a tiny minority even among the most enlightened parents. Realising that Josephine was just as clever as the most brilliant of her brothers, three of whom were to achieve doctoral degrees, they were prepared to support (in every sense) her continuing education at a university.

At Cambridge, there were now two colleges for women, who were allowed to pursue the same courses as the men and also to sit the Intermediate and Tripos examinations, though they were not permitted, as yet, to take degrees. The first of these women’s colleges was Girton, Emily Davies’s foundation of 1869. It was followed by Newnham, in the founding of which, in 1871, Millicent Fawcett had the guiding hand. Josephine was duly admitted to Newnham in 1882, to read Natural Sciences.

Her choice of college was surely influenced by her older High School contemporary, Frances Ralph Gray, who had preceded her there, whilst the presence of another Willoughby at the University – her first cousin Frederick, a second-year undergraduate at St Catherine’s – must have been reassuring for her parents. (Frederick was the son of her uncle Samuel, one of the partners in Willoughby Bros.) They were joined in 1884 by Josephine’s younger brother James, although he was to migrate after a couple of years at Selwyn Hall to Jesus College, Oxford. Both Frederick and James were marked out for clerical careers. Josephine’s youngest brother Willoughby (my great-grandfather) arrived at Caius much later, in 1894, also to read Natural Sciences and to launch himself on the brilliant medical career to which, in another age, Josephine herself might have aspired. (J. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, I, ii, 4, pp.510-11.)

Predominant among Josephine’s contemporaries at Newnham were the daughters of intellectual families like those of Professors Skeat (the Anglo-Saxonist) and Rolleston (physiologist) and Longfellow (the American poet), mingled with those of enterprising business people like the Willoughbys themselves, the Colmans (mustard manufacturers of Norwich) and the Naishes (Wilton carpet manufacturers). The three Naish girls at Newnham were the sisters of William Vawdrey Naish of Emmanuel, later an M.D., who was to marry Josephine’s sister Madeleine. The aristocracy was represented too, in the person of Eva Knatchbull-Hugesson, daughter of Lord Brabourne and, appropriately, a great-grand-niece of Jane Austen. (Newnham College Register, 1871 – 1923 (1963), pp.65, 66, 72, 76, 77, 109, 121.)

Westfield College, London

Despite achieving a ‘First’ in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1885, Josephine did not pursue the option of a medical career. Thanks to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the Medical Act of 1878, the profession was gradually opening up to women.

Instead, she was invited by Constance Maynard, its co-founder in 1882 and first ‘Mistress’, to join the staff of Westfield College for Ladies, the University of London’s equivalent of Newnham, whose premises were in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead. The key recommendation was no doubt that of Frances Ralph Grey, her schoolfriend from Plymouth and forerunner at Newnham, who had herself joined the Westfield staff in 1883, as Resident Lecturer in Classics.

It seems that Josephine was initially appointed to cover for Katherine Tristram during her sabbatical. Constance Maynard documents their meeting in her intimate diary, which for the most part combines reflections on her rather oppressive spiritual life with her barely-suppressed lesbian yearnings. ‘May 31st 1885 – I went to Newnham & got Miss Willoughby to take Katie’s place for a year or two. It was not like getting Ralph. Gentle, guileless, good, I knew I cd live with her & work with her & be happy, yet it was not with the awe of a sudden inspiration. “Dove, I cd love you, if some day you will let me.” (Queen Mary, University of London Archives, MAYNARD PP7/1/20). In other words, Josephine would never be a substitute for Frances Ralph Grey, pointedly called ‘Ralph’ in the diaries, with whom Maynard appears to have been madly in love.

There were unseemly discussions about money, the miserly college council insisting that Josephine’s first term be unpaid; Maynard had subsequently to fight on her behalf for a salary (Pauline A. Phipps, Constance Maynard’s Passions (Toronto, 2015), p.136 and n.31). Her temporary position was, however, confirmed in 1887, when she was given charge of all the elementary teaching in Science for the B.Sc. degree, which accounted for about half the student body of thirty woman – for the progressive University of London, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, had been allowing women to take its degrees since 1878.

The teaching staff at that time consisted of six women, all but one of whom were ‘Resident Lecturers’. They lived in a genteel maternal atmosphere, waited on by servants, dressing formally for dinner and observing rituals such as afternoon tea (Phipps, p.128). Josephine was to reside at Westfield for a total of nine years, but her own inclinations were to marriage and she became engaged in 1888 to William Adams Clark, a fellow medical student of her brother George at Bart’s. Their wedding was inevitably deferred until the time when he was fully qualified.

Westfield staff and students, 21 June 1889. Josephine is seated on a chair, second from left

Within a couple of years, Josephine had made herself indispensable at her college, and was considered ‘the great authority on all practical matters: it was to her, for example, that the heating engineer explained the hot water system of the “New Westfield” – the College’s expanded premises on Kidderpore Avenue, West Hampstead – “pouring facts upon her which she absorbed with the intuition of a true genius” (Constance Maynard’s Diary February 1891, quoted in Janet Sondheimer, Castle Adamant in Hampstead (Westfield College, 1983), p.31). She was also remembered as ‘the organiser of an annual river picnic for Matriculation candidates, to which her fiancé bought some of his fellow medical students’ (ibid.).

It was therefore a great loss to the college (and a personal tragedy for Maynard, who was heartbroken) when ‘Ralph’ and Josephine both departed in 1894, Miss Gray to become a headmistress and ultimately the High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, Josephine to married life with William Adams Clark, now an M.D.

A model of the new Westfield development shows 'Willoughby' at top right, facing onto Kidderpore Avenue. To the left is Kidderpore Manor, which is to be sold as a single dwelling

Their wedding took place on her thirty-second birthday, 5 June 1895, after which they settled, improbably, in unglamorous Penge, with William in general practice in the High Street, and Josephine, equipped from 1896 with the Society of Apothecaries’ Assistants’ Certificate, as his partner in all but name, dispensing medicine and performing unofficially all the functions of the modern general practitioner. She had a son and two daughters, one of whom, Dora, was to qualify as a doctor. After a reunion of the original Westfield staff in 1905, Maynard aptly described her appearance as ‘motherly’ (Phipps, illustration p.192). She died on 15 August 1945.

Josephine Adams Clark, who was finally conceded her M.A. from Cambridge in 1923, would have thought herself in no way a revolutionary or even have described herself as a ‘feminist’ – pictured at my grandparents’ wedding, the couple appear highly conventional, Uncle William resplendent in his silk ‘topper’ – though it is women such as she who have made possible the education of women on equal terms with men.

A particular beneficiary is my own daughter, Josephine’s great-great-grand-niece, who has recently been offered a place at Westfield’s successor college, Queen Mary. I myself, though a member of another college, attended courses at Westfield in the late 1980s, unaware of the family connection, and can attest to the maternal atmosphere that still prevailed there. In what by then was a mixed college, the men on the Medieval History courses were a distinct minority, but the feminine preponderance was very enjoyable, and they all seemed to live as a close and cheerful family, carefully overseen, and organised on weekend activities and trips, by their equivalent of a Resident Lecturer, the redoubtable Brenda Bolton.

I was saddened less by the college’s merging with Queen Mary in 1989 than by the abandonment of the Hampstead campus in 1992. King’s College now uses some of the buildings. The least attractive teaching blocks have made way for the ‘Westfield Apartments’, a complex of luxurious flats. To our delight, part of it, between Kidderpore Hall and St Luke’s Vicarage, whose later occupant, coincidentally, was Josephine’s brother James, is to be known as ‘Willoughby’ in Josephine’s honour (https://www.mountanvil.com/our-london-homes/hampstead-manor/about-hampstead-manor/history/).

St Luke's Vicarage, Kidderpore Avenue, was later occupied by Josephine's brother James. It is flanked by St Luke's Church and (behind the trees) by the building that is to be named 'Willoughby' in her honour

[See also http://library.qmul.ac.uk/media/library/archives/diary/Green-Book-Diary,-3-January-1885—12-August-1887.pdf – Constance Maynard’s diaries online – and http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/archives/archives-chronology/westfield-college/ – historical information from the college. Comments are welcome, but please notify the administrator at rupertwilloughby@btinternet.com, to spare him from sifting through the abundant ‘spam’.]

Comments Off on Victorian Girl Power: The Education of Miss Josephine Willoughby »

Posted in Historical Gleanings

Shalfleet: Church Tower or Castle Keep?

August 28th, 2017

The Tower of Shalfleet Church is the oldest on the Isle of Wight, and the most remarkable. Were there not a church attached to it, one would assume it was a defensive keep. The walls of this massive structure are over five feet thick, and there was originally no means of access from ground level: one had to climb an external ladder and scramble over the parapet. It is a structure that takes one’s breath away and has been described as ‘practically unique’. (Percy Stone, The Architectural Antiquities of the Isle of Wight, II, London 1891, pp.51-2.)

The Old Vicarage, Shalfleet: was it the site of the Saxon church? The Norman foundation is on the left.

The Tower was built in the later eleventh century, probably between 1070 and 1085, and may have been positioned at a distance from the Saxon church, the cemetery for which was in the garden of the Old Vicarage. (Ruth Waller, Archaeological Excavations in Shalfleet (Shalfleet, 2008.)

William fitz Osbern, the Conqueror’s cousin and close friend, to whom he had granted the lordship of the Island, had presented the manor of Shalfleet to Gozelin fitz Azur, his own subordinate knight who had probably fought beside him at Hastings, while the church was part of his endowment to the Abbey of Lyre in Normandy. The Tower that they quickly raised would not have been free-standing for long, for it was soon connected to a new church on the present site, with an arch giving access to the Tower from the nave. Apart from the Tower, their North Door has survived the subsequent alterations to the building, with its ‘quaintly carved tympanum … an ordinary Romanesque enrichment’. The best guess is that the curious scene of a man with two lions represents Daniel in the Lions’ Den.

It has been suggested that a tower of such strength was intended as a refuge, for Shalfleet, with its flat shore, was particularly vulnerable to raiders from France (Stone, II, p.52; Brian Mead, The Church of St Michael the Archangel, Shalfleet, 2004). However, what Frenchman in the 1070s would have dared to invade the newly-annexed territory of William the Conqueror, given that he was the ‘strong man’ of northern France and notoriously swift in his retribution? Moreover, how would the frail and elderly have been expected to scramble up the Tower in times of danger? Although it undoubtedly served later as a defence against the French (and was equipped with its own three-pounder gun until 1779), it seems to me most unlikely that that was its original purpose.

Was it not, rather, an outpost of the lordly control that was now being exercised from Carisbrooke Castle? Conspicuously more solid and expensive than the usual motte and bailey, a commission worthy of the Island’s central authority and ideally placed to hold sway over the West Wight, might it have been intended not to shelter the local populace, but to cow them into submission?

The Tympanum, probably illustrating Daniel in the Lions' Den

Comments Off on Shalfleet: Church Tower or Castle Keep? »

Posted in Castles!, Historical Gleanings, The Isle of Wight, The Norman Conquest

The Shalfleet Skillet: A Story of Genocide on the Isle of Wight

August 27th, 2017

The Odinist Fellowship, a body representing 2,000 so-called ‘pagans’, has applied for reparation from the Church of England ‘for its former crimes against the Odinists’ (‘We want our stolen churches back, pagans tell Archbishop’, The Sunday Telegraph, 27 August 2017). It suggests a public apology and the symbolic handing over of two churches, one from the diocese of Canterbury, one from that of York. The Bishop of Chichester has sensibly responded by saying ‘As yet I am unconvinced as to the strength of Odinist faith in these parts’; and it is difficult to see how these cranks can in any way be considered the heirs to the dispossessed pagans of the past, or even to have any coherent grasp of their religion. There is no doubt, however, that the Christianisation of England was an often brutal process, as the following story reveals.

The copper-alloy saucepan or ‘skillet’ discovered in 2005 in a shallow ditch at Shalfleet on the Isle of Wight has been dated to the late seventh century A.D. and, its long handle decorated with a cross, is the earliest Christian object to have been found on the Island. It is in remarkably good condition, given its age, and is associated with a particularly dramatic episode in Island history.

In 686 A.D, the Jutish kingdom of the Isle of Wight, then a thinly-populated place of 1,200 families, had been invaded and captured by the Saxon Caedwalla, King of Wessex. Though an uncommitted Christian, Caedwalla had, according to Bede, pledged ‘the fourth part of the land and of the spoil to the Lord, if he took the Island’, which ‘till then was given over entirely to idolatry’. Caedwalla was himself wounded in the fierce assault, his aim being ‘by merciless slaughter’ to destroy the entire population of the Island and to re-colonise it with his own people. His motives, clearly, were political rather than religious, but he was prepared to pay a high price for what was then the most impressive spiritual support on offer. (Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of England, IV, xvi, trans. A.M. Sellar (London, 1907).)

When the two young brothers of the defeated King Arwald fell into his hands, they, too, were put to death, despite having been hurriedly baptised. The genocidal Caedwalla was nevertheless true to his word. The promised quarter of the spoils was duly handed over to St Wilfred, the exiled ‘Bishop of the Northumbrian peoples’, who is said to have landed at Bembridge and to have set up his first church at Brading. Thus was England’s last pagan enclave brought to Christ.

The skillet was no doubt used by the first generation of Christian colonists in Shalfleet (‘shallow stream’ to the Saxons), perhaps in their religious ceremonies. (They were only the latest wave of incomers, for Bronze-Age chiefs had been buried in mounds to the north and south of the village and the Romans had come in their turn to build houses there.) In 2005, excavations in the garden of the Old Vicarage revealed the remains of eight of these early Christians, their skeletons orientated east to west, as was proper for people of their religion. The bones, both of men and women, were in a poor condition, in death as in life. Arthritic spines are suggestive of, literally, back-breaking working conditions on the land; pitted eye-sockets indicate dietary deficiency; all had suffered injuries of some sort (though not obviously in battle) and had rotten teeth. Half had died in their twenties or early thirties and the other four may have made it to forty-five. One of the skeletons has been carbon-dated to the years between 660 and 734 A.D., which fixes it firmly in the period described by Bede. (Ruth Waller, Archaeological Excavations in Shalfleet (Shalfleet, 2008.) The burials are evidence of the swift realisation of Caedwalla and Wilfred’s policy to pacify and Christianise the Island.

The site of the Saxon cemetery was subsequently developed for housing. In July 2008, the displaced skeletons were fittingly reinterred in the adjacent churchyard. A stone, with a touching inscription, marks the spot. The skillet, which had been discovered by a metal-detectorist, was bought by the Isle of Wight Heritage Service and can be viewed in the Museum of Island History in Newport’s former Guildhall, for the price of a mere £2.00.

Comments Off on The Shalfleet Skillet: A Story of Genocide on the Isle of Wight »

Posted in Historical Gleanings, The Isle of Wight

The First Mrs Willoughby – or The Quest for my Inner Viking

August 10th, 2017

Wilby in Suffolk is flat, featureless and sparsely-populated, with a fine old church, a handful of cottages and a few scattered farmsteads

Most English families are lucky to trace their line back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and mine is no exception. John ‘Wilbie’ of Colchester was described as a yeoman and it was the emigration of his son Thomas to Cornwall, in 1647, that turned us into West Countrymen – Poldarkian characters who in the eighteenth century combined hard farming on the county’s bleak north coast with a little light wrecking. In default of other evidence, can the surname itself tell us about our earlier origins?

The names ‘Wilby’ and ‘Willoughby’ seem always to have been interchangeable, and to have been borne by a number of distinct and unrelated families to indicate their place of origin. There are villages called ‘Willoughby’ in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire, and others called ‘Wilby’ in Norfolk, Northamptonshire and Suffolk.

Thus the remotest ancestor of the earls and dukes of Ancaster and the lords Willoughby de Eresby, Willoughby de Broke, Willoughby of Parham and Middleton was a certain William Willoughby of Willoughby-in-the-Marsh, Lincolnshire, in the time of Richard I. With their roots firmly in that county, they were entirely unconnected to Willoughbys originating in, say, Norfolk or Suffolk.

The various ‘Willoughbys’ and ‘Wilbys’ were etymologically distinct, too. The Lincolnshire Willoughby is called ‘Wilgebi’ in Domesday Book, a combination of the Old English wilig, for willow, with the Old Scandinavian byr, for a settlement or homestead. The name describes, picturesquely but prosaically, a ‘farmstead by the willows’.

The Wilbys, on the other hand, are called ‘Wilebi’ in Domesday, and are the byrs, or homesteads, of one or more men called Willa, who presumably were Viking marauders of the Danelaw period (A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-Names, (Oxford, 1991); P.H. Reaney, A Dictionary of British Surnames (1976), pp.383, 385.) As Wilby in Suffolk is the closest of the three villages to Colchester, I believe my ancestors to have originated there, and very probably to have included the eponymous Willa himself.

When might Willa, my putative ancestor, have arrived in England, and what sort of man was he?

Belying the urbanity of his current-day descendants, Willa was, no doubt, irredeemably uncouth, but charming enough for the first Mrs Willoughby

The Viking raids, the memory of which is seared on our national consciousness, had been sporadic at first. The coming of the Vikings in 793 had been announced, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by ‘immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine followed, and a little after that, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne.’ After 835, raids are regularly recorded in the south and west. The attacks soon escalated into a full-scale invasion, with a ‘great army’ landing in 865. It proceeded to conquer Northumbria (867), East Anglia (869) and – reinforced in 871 by a ‘great summer army’ – most of Mercia (874-7). Wessex itself barely escaped after a series of bloody battles in 871, but in 878 was occupied by the Danish king Guthrum, who had surprised Alfred, the new king of Wessex, at Chippenham.

Forced into hiding in the Somerset marshes, Alfred returned to win a decisive victory at Edington. The vanquished Guthrum now accepted baptism and agreed to withdraw, becoming ruler in 880 of the short-lived kingdom of East Anglia. In a subsequent treaty, Guthrum and Alfred, who had beaten off attacks by a third ‘great army’, fixed the boundary between the English and Danish spheres of influence on the line of Watling Street, between London and Chester. The old Saxon kingdoms to the north and east of this line, including East Anglia, disappeared for ever. This was to be the ‘Danelaw’, a wild, politically-fragmented area that was, for the time being, beyond the sphere of any English king.

The Gokstad Ship, now at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo

Ocean-going Viking longboats could accommodate about thirty men, or even fewer if horses, camp followers and enslaved captives were on board, so the number of settlers would not have been excessive. (A ninth-century example of such a ship, discovered in a royal burial mound at Gokstad in Sweden, is largely of oak and is 75 feet 5 inches long, with a keel of sixty feet. It has seating for 32 oarsmen.) The typical raiding fleet after 850 comprised 150 to 250 ships. Yet the impact of the Viking settlement of the Danelaw endures in aspects of our law and language, including much everyday vocabulary (anger, blunder, gift, leather etc.), and even personal pronouns like they, them and their. (James Campbell ed., The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982), pp.132-4, 147.) Moreover, the place-names of the former Danelaw are, to this day, predominantly Scandinavian, proof of the permanence and extent of the Viking settlement. It has been pointed out, for example, that to the north of Watling Street there are some six hundred place-names ending in -by – and scarcely one to the south of it. (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.38.)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers (e.g. under the years 876, 877 and 880) to the ‘sharing out of the land’ by the Viking army and their proceeding ‘to plough and support themselves’ (Michael Wood, Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (London, 1987), p.129). New lords were thus imposed on the native peasantry, and new neighbours who spoke a foreign tongue. Many of them are identifiable, for ‘the former abodes of Grim, Biorn, Thor, Guddar, and Haco go by the names of Grimsby, Burnthwaite, Harroby, Thoresby, Guttersby, and Hacconby’ (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.52), to cite only a few examples.

As long as they were compliant, they may have interfered little with the indigenous population, cultivating virgin land in outlying areas rather than ousting them from existing farms. It is noticeable that many of the ‘-bys’, including that of our Willa, have no church attached to them in 1086, suggesting that they stood apart from the main settlements. In parts of East Anglia, the Vikings spread themselves rather thinly. In Suffolk there are only ‘a few scattered Danish names, chiefly near the coast – such as Orford, Thorpe, Barnby, and Lowestoft’ (Taylor’s Words and Places, p.42), and Willa was daring indeed to have penetrated so far into English territory.

Intent on turning their swords into ploughshares, the colonisers relied for their security on standing armies that were garrisoned in the main towns, and were generally unmolested by the disgruntled English. Their status, however, was privileged, their descendants, many still with Scandinavian names, standing out as free men (sokemen) among the enserfed peasantry of Domesday. Indeed, it is remarkable that the largest concentration of the sokemen in Domesday Book – who comprise only fifteen per cent of the entire population – is in those eastern counties. (Wood, Domesday, pp.129-30, 142, 149.)

Filed teeth on a Viking skeleton - an unimaginably painful process

Belying the urbanity of his current-day descendants, Willa was, no doubt, irredeemably uncouth. In battle, he would have worn a coat of mail and a plain, conical helmet, but his appearance may have been distinctive in other ways. There is evidence of the sea-rovers enjoying their reputation as louche outsiders, like modern-day punks or Hell’s Angels, whose demeanour alone is unsettling. They wore shoulder-length hair and beards. Some were tattooed from head to foot, others filed and decorated their teeth; some even wore dark eye make-up to make themselves look all the more outlandish and frightening (The Vikings: Life and Legend, ed. Gareth Williams et al. (London, 2014), p.80).

The annual Horn Dance is an immemorial custom at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire. The horns are reindeer antlers and one has been carbon-dated to the eleventh century. They are evidence of Viking settlers' sending home for their herds

Willa was, quite possibly, a frenzied, homicidal maniac, like the berserkir of later tradition, crazily biting his shield while preparing for battle. The Vikings, moreover, were pitiless in their assaults on the English. When raids from Scandinavia were resumed in the late tenth century, marauding bands of sea-rovers preyed at will on the populace, setting fire to the houses of the English, feasting on their cattle, killing anyone who dared oppose them (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 991). Powerless even to defend their own homes, the English thegns were forced to witness the rape of their womenfolk, sometimes by a dozen Vikings in turn. People watched helplessly as gangs of their fellow Christians were driven to the ships by two or three seamen to be sold as slaves (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, in English Historical Documents, I (1955), ed. David C. Douglas, pp.857-8). It is too much to hope that Willa would have handled his victims any less roughly. (I am neither proud nor ashamed of my Viking ancestry: are we not all descended from the rapists and murderers of the past?)

Willa may have been the younger son of a lordly family, fated, like so many Scandinavians, to be a wanderer, but with a significant following of his own. The imperative for all was seek out their kinsfolk and connections and to attach themselves to a community, with the great hall of a benevolent lord at its heart – a place for feasting, gambling, gift-giving and entertaining, and for the recitation of heroic poems. Willa must have re-created this for himself at Wilby, perhaps on the site of the present moated manor-house, Wilby Hall, but a key ingredient for his happiness was lacking:

The man has now

laid his sorrows, lacks no gladdeners;

he has a hoard and horses and hall-carousing

and would have everything within an earl’s having

had he my lady with him.

So we are not surprised to discover from a twelfth-century court poem, The Husband’s Message, that the settlers would often send home for their womenfolk, once they had established a safe homestead on which to raise a family (Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (London, 1970), pp.19-20). So I imagine the first Mrs Willoughby as a Dane, rather than a local girl, who had crossed the North Sea on a ship loaded with her dowry and her lord’s reindeer herd, never once looking back to the land of her birth.

Appendix: The two Wilbys – relevant Domesday extracts (from Domesday Book (Penguin, 2003), pp.1219 and 1254):

Lands of Robert Malet in Suffolk: ‘In Horham 1 free man, Aelric, by commendation [a form of vassalage] holds 1 carucate of land … In Wilby Leornic holds 20 acres which the same Aelric held. 1 bordar [a cottager, a peasant of lower economic rank than a villein]. It is the same valuation. It is 12 furlongs long and 4 furlongs broad …’

The fief of the Bishop of Thetford in Norfolk: ‘In Wilby, 1 free man with 10 acres … In Wilby, 1 free man by commendation and soke [a specific right of jurisdiction enjoyed by a lord][held] 40 acres. Then as now 1 bordar.’

The moat at Wilby Hall, which perhaps occupies the site of Willa's homestead

Comments Off on The First Mrs Willoughby – or The Quest for my Inner Viking »

Posted in Historical Gleanings, The Norman Conquest

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »