Subscribe now

By the early 19th century clocks were pretty good at keeping time, but not perfect. A number of institutions, such as business in the City of London, law offices, et cetera were keen to ensure that their time was perfect with “perfect” in this context meaning being exactly the same as the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) measured at the Royal Observatory. Whether such accuracy was strictly necessary is somewhat open to question as a good clock would only drift by a few seconds each week, but people believed that it was, and so they took steps to ensure that they were in sync. These businesses would generally rely on the clockmakers of London having the correct time, and so would send their clerks over to get regular updates. The clockmakers themselves would send each someone up to the Royal Observatory a few times a week, where they would knock on the door, ask to see the clock, then set their watch by it.

So many people ended up doing this that it began to seriously interrupt the work of the Astronomer Royal, George Airy (1801-1892)1 that he imposed a restriction. Soon after taking up the post in 1835 he limited people to only coming to check the time on Monday mornings. By 1840 even this was too much of a hassle and he moved to block all access. The Observatory’s second assistant John Henry Belville (1795-1856) saw the opportunity for a nice little side-hustle. As people couldn’t come to see the time, he would take the time to them. And so with Airy’s blessing he did just that. Setting his pocket watch from the observatory clock he would go around London and let people look at it each week, provided they paid an annual subscription. This worked very well, and soon he had 200 clients signed up to his service.

Clearly the watch he used had to be very accurate, and it was. It was a 1794 John Arnold pocket chronometer (No. 485/786) which had originally been made for the Duke of Sussex, who refused to take it on the basis that it “looked like a bedpan”! I think that is somewhat unfair, but you can judge for yourselves:

John Henry continued this operation for 20 years until his death in 1856. This was obviously a tragic event personally for his widow, Marie, but it was also devastating for her financially. She was not entitled to his civil service pension, and as she wasn’t an employee of the Royal Observatory she had no access to the precious time that was the foundation of their side business. In desperation she wrote to George Airy, requesting that she be allowed access to the clock and be able to continue her husband’s business:

I am encouraged by your goodness to advance another petition. Being engaged to take the Greenwich time to 67 of the principal chronometer makers in London I have to request admission once a week to the clocks in the observatory in order to test my own regulator – it would inspire those who have taken up the widow of their esteemed friend with additional confidence if you could accord me this favour.

Airy, being by all accounts a pretty decent human being,2 agreed to this, and Marie continued selling time for another 36 years before retiring. Her rights of access were then passed down to their daughter Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (1854-1953) who carried on the family business.

By this point, however, there was some competition in the world of time-selling. The General Post Office had for some time been offering a service that was the bleeding edge of chronological technology at the time. This was a telegraphic subscription by which the Greenwich Time Signal was sent to devices within the client businesses which would automatically ensure that their clock was perfectly correct. You may think that would have spelled the end for the hand-delivered time service, but it didn’t. For at start it was much more expensive – in 1881 it cost £14 a year for companies within half a mile of the post office (and they needed to buy the appropriate kit), whilst the Belvilles were charging a mere £4 a year. I also suspect that some people simply liked the tradition of in-person timekeeping.

So Ruth Belville continued her daily routine of collecting the time and sharing it around London to her happy customers. Then, on the 8th of January 1908 a letter appeared in The Times claiming the the clocks of London were “lying” and, by extension, slandering the work of Ruth:

LYING CLOCKS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.

Sir,—Surely there should be some censorship as to the time kept by clocks exposed to public view in the streets of London. It is not unusual within a hundred yards to find clocks three or four minutes at variance with each other. Highly desirable as individualism is in many respects, it is out of place in horology. A lying time-keeper is an abomination, and should not be tolerated. A by-law might well be framed requiring clocks in public places to be synchronised with standard time; the penalty for repeated disregard to be removal of the offending dial.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,
JOHN A. COCKBURN.
10, Gatestone-road, Upper Norwood, S.E., Jan. 6.

Who was this John A. Cockburn? Was he just a “concerned citizen”? No, far from it. He was a director of the Standard Time Company (and also a “Sir”) that, surprise, surprise, offered just such a time synchronisation service as the one he suggested be mandated in his letter. The company had started out as Barruad and Lund making clocks and watches, but they branched out into electrical time synchronisation from around 1868. They had one of the Post Office time subscriptions which ensured their central clock was correct, and then over rented telegraph wires they would send out hourly signals to specialist clocks in their clients’ premises which would synchronise to this time. Crucially they undercut the £14 fee charged by the GPO (I have seen references to their service costing £4 and £5 5s 0d a year at different points).

The business did well, particularly gaining a new client base in the form of pubs with the introduction of the Licensing Act of 1872 (which required a precise closing time)3 but nonetheless John thought that it wouldn’t hurt trying to raise a bit of a stir. And stir he did create. An editorial appeared in the paper the following day, which whilst broadly supportive of his take on the issue felt that he went a little far in suggesting a legal remedy:

“A by-law,” says Sir John Cockburn, “might well be framed requiring clocks in public places to be synchronised with standard time; the penalty for repeated disregard to be the removal of the offending dial.” We are not sure that this is the right way to go to work. It is quite true that individualism is, as our correspondent says, “out of place in horology.” But perhaps the remedy rather lies in co-operation than in compulsion. Many of the clocks exhibited in public places in London are exhibited by private persons who probably believe they are doing a public service, and undoubtedly are doing it, if they only take reasonable care to keep their clocks reasonably accurate.

The paper published a slew of letters on the issue in the weeks that followed, some being very much on his side, whilst others took issue with his claims about the accuracy of public time:

We note with pleasure your memorandum announcing the great clock at Westminster as being the “nearest approach to a standard timekeeper that we have in London.” Might we add a record of its performance from the last official report of the Astronomer-Royal based upon automatic signals received at Greenwich?

“Its apparent error was not greater than 0.5 sec. on 39 per cent. of the days of observation, not greater than 1 sec. on 67 per cent., not greater than 2 sec. on 89 per cent., not greater than 3 sec. on 99 per cent., and exceeded 4 sec. on only two occasions.

This is surely entitled it to be London’s standard time-keeper.

We are, Sir, yours respectfully,
E. DENT AND CO. (Ltd.)
(W. A. PYALL, Secretary,

Makers of the Standard Clock (the Great Standard Timekeeper) of the United Kingdom to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, also makers of the Great Westminster Clock, “Big Ben.”4
61, Strand, W.C., Jan. 13.

What really made things personal for Ruth Belville happened a few months later on the 4th March 1908. That evening another director of the Standard Time Company, St John Winne,5 delivered a lecture at the United Wards Club entitled “The Time of a Great City: A Plea for Uniformity”. This was essentially an extended version of the case made by his colleague’s letter to The Times but he went out of his way to single out – and ridicule – poor Ruth:

It may be interesting and amusing to some of you to learn how Greenwich mean time was distributed amongst the clock and watch trade in London before the present arrangements came into vogue… A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the astronomer royal of the time to call at the observatory and have it corrected as often as she pleased. She then made it the business of her life, until she reached a great age, to call upon her customers with the correct time, and on her retirement this useful work was, and even today is, carried on by her successor, still a female, I think.

A fair few people in the audience were clockmakers, and took some umbrage at Winne’s comments about the quality of their products. That didn’t, however, stop them piling in on Ruth. One person doing so was Daniel Buckley, who worked for Dent and Co., as the minutes recorded:

…it is quite true, a lady did do it [delivered Greenwich time], and another took her place, but I may say that that lady calls at our establishment to see whether she has the correct time (laughter)

Having attacked the quality of her product, Winne went on to attack Ruth’s character, suggesting that she had used her feminine wiles to gain access to the observatory:

A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the Astronomer Royal at the time (perhaps no mere man could have been successful) to call at the Observatory and have it corrected as often as she pleased.

Winne’s attempt to destroy his competitor backfired on him. The press got wind of the lecture, and though Winne had been careful not to name Ruth directly, it was very clear who he was talking about, and reporters tracked her down. The public, it turned out, loved the idea of a woman going around London selling the time and Ruth acquired new customers as a result. Amongst the wealthy there was a certain cachet to having your time delivered each week by a real person. And not just any person, she was the “Greenwich Clock Lady” (newspapers such as the Kentish Mercury dubbed her thusly in their case using the headline “Greenwich Clock Lady: Romance of a Regular Visitor to the Observatory.”) And as for Winne’s service people were quick to point out that it could be described as “second-hand time”. His customers were not getting the time directly from the source at the Observatory, rather it went from there to the Standard Time Company before then being passed on. Of course this didn’t make any technical difference, but it still felt as though it was somehow less pure.

As for Ruth Belville herself she, astonishingly, went on selling the time until 1940 (albeit to perhaps 50 customers at that point) when a combination of her age, and the fact that the country was in the midst of World War Two, caused her to retire. She died three years later, and even though she had long drifted from the public consciousness she still merited an obituary in The Times, the very paper that had started the Lying Clocks debate some 35 years earlier:

Miss Elizabeth Ruth Belville, who has died at Wallington, Surrey, at the age of 89, devoted half a century to taking the correct Greenwich time to business houses in London on a watch 100 years old. Three times a week6 she went to Greenwich where she obtained a certificate of accuracy for her watch.

Subscribe now

In my first piece on time I explained how the duodecimal (base 12) system was probably an obvious choice for ancient peoples, rather than the base ten that we might otherwise think is instinctual. The three joints on each of our four fingers allowed for easy tallying up to the number 12, through the tapping of the thumb on the appropriate juncture. This twelve, when splitting both day and night, then logically led to the system of 24 hours with which we are all too familiar. That makes sense, or at least it makes a kind of sense – we can see how it came about. But having done so, what would then have motivated people to break those hours into a collection of sixty minutes? And then, further divide those each of those minutes into sixty seconds? Put simply, where the hell did the number sixty come into all of this?

To answer this question we have to go back a long way. A very long way, more than 5,000 years. The sexagesimal (base 60) system was first used in ancient Mesopotamia in accounting and calculation before, it seems likely, even the first cuneiform writing systems were developed. Quite why the number 60 was chosen is unclear, but it seems as though there are a couple of factors that come into play. The number 60 can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30 – in other words one can easily make useful factors from it. Another possible reason is that prior to its adoption both base 10 and base 12 were in use. Rather than select one over the other using base 60 is something of a compromise, being the lowest number that has each of them as a factor.

The system employed wasn’t a pure base 60 system (there were not 60 distinct symbols for the numbers) but to all intents and purposes it was used as one. The numbers were made up of a collection of different cuneiform marks:

Now it may seem to you that this was a cumbersome number system to use, but the Babylonians were incredibly adept at employing it. A clay tablet (with the catchy name YBC-7289) dating back an incredible 3,600-3,800 years shows it being deployed to calculate the square root of 2, accurately, to six decimal places. This has been described as “the greatest known computational accuracy… in the ancient world.” Furthermore the tablet is fairly small and round, and it is thought that it is something a student would have held in their hand – basically the equivalent of a notebook to be used in a lecture. Now without wishing to sound arrogant, I am pretty good at maths (“math” for our American readers) and I could work the same thing out with a pencil and paper, but I wouldn’t find it particularly easy and it would take me some time.

How though did we get from gifted mathematicians using clay tablets to having 60 minutes in an hour today? A key link in this chain is the Greco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – 160s/170s). He used the ancient Babylonian system of base 60 (likely because of its easy divisibility)1 to subdivide degrees into 60 parts, and thence 60 smaller parts. He describes this in his work Almagest which was translated into Arabic in the 9th century (for use by Arabic astronomers) before being translated into Latin in the 12th century. We know that a Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona existed by about 1175, and in it we have (amongst others) this line:

…ergo, quia iam ostensum est quod chorda AB est cifre et 47 minuta et 8 secunda secundum quantitatem qua diameter est 120, erit chorda AG minus parte una et duobus minutis et 50 secundis secundum quantitatem illam, tertiis pretermissis…

…therefore, since it has already been shown that chord AB is zero and 47 minutes and 8 seconds, according to the scale in which the diameter is 120, chord AG will be less by one part and 2 minutes and 50 seconds on that same scale, the thirds being omitted…

The “minutes” and seconds come from the Latin “partes minutae primae” and “partes minutae secundae” meaning “first diminished parts” and “second diminished parts”. Each of those original phrases got shortened in a different way over time. The first to “minutae” giving us “minutes” and the second, to, you guessed it “secundae” giving us “seconds”. Okay, so Ptolemy was using minutes and seconds, but that was to divide angles and suchlike, not time – who first decided to split up hours in the same manner?

The earliest known person doing so was the Khwarazmian Iranic scholar and polymath Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (c. 973 – c. 1050). We find evidence of this in The Chronology of Ancient Nations (al-Āthār al-bāqiya), written around the year 1,000:

He takes that portion of hours, minutes, seconds, etc. which corresponds in the tables to each of these numbers of great and small cycles

It would, however, be another 400 or so years before such divisions could be practically used in timekeeping because, as we learned in the last piece, early mechanical clocks were simply not that accurate. Not only were they not very good at keeping time, they were also big - they consisted of a drum from which a weight on a rope would hang, that would slowly turn as the weight descended. The game-changer in both clock size and accuracy came with the invention of the spring clock.

We don’t know exactly when this development took place, nor who was responsible for it, but it probably happened around the year 1400, inspired by crossbow-winding technology. The way these new clocks worked is as follows:

• A long strip of steel, the mainspring, would be coiled inside a drum called the barrel

• Winding the clock tightens the spring and stores energy in it

• Stop winding and the spring tries to relax, releasing energy, and turning the barrel

• The barrel then drives the gear train, escapement, and regulator, thus driving the clock hands.

This alone is not enough though: the mainspring doesn’t pull with the same force all of the time. It is at its strongest when it is fully wound, and weakens as it runs down. The earliest spring clocks were inaccurate as a result, but this was resolved with the addition of the fusee. The fusee is a cone-shaped, grooved pulley that is connected to the barrel with a length of chain. When fully wound the chain is at the top of the cone, with the smallest radius, As it gradually winds down the chain descends down the cone on what are effectively larger and larger wheels. The lower pull of the weakened spring is offset by the increased torque multiplier of the larger wheels – think of gears on a bike. It is probably easiest to show this rather than try to explain it further:

And here is another one in a spring-driven machine designed by Leonardo Da Vinci in around 1490:2

The difference that this made to the size of clocks can easily be seen in what is thought to be the oldest surviving spring-clock. This glorious contraption was made for Philip the Good,3 Duke of Burgundy, in around 1430:

The sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this clock still only had an hour hand; whilst minutes were known about at this point, the clocks lacked the accuracy to measure them properly. It also didn’t really matter as such measurements had no real utility value – people were not using time measured that accurately to order their lives. The earliest reference we have to a clock with minutes shown on a dial is from an illustration of one in a manuscript by Paulus Almanus in 1475 but this still lacked the all-important hand. The generally accepted first instance of this is a clock made in 1577 by Jost Bürgi to allow for precise astronomical observations. Such devices were rarities however; well into the 17th century town clocks in England would only have an hour hand.

Weirdly the second hand may have come first, as one can be found on a clock dating from 1560, but rather than being a meaningful indicator of time, it would simply spin around the dial as a ready way of seeing if the clock was actually working or not. Again, even with these innovations the clocks were not accurate enough to meaningfully display such small divisions of time. Really accurate time measurement came with the invention of the pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695) which happened on Christmas Day 1656.4 Galileo had come up with the idea of using a swinging bob to measure time some years earlier, but it was Huygens who came up with the mathematical formula that related pendulum length to the duration of the swing. Specifically he calculated that for a one-second movement the pendulum had to be 39.1 inches (approximately 99.4 cm) long.

In the centuries that followed numerous inventions drove both the accuracy and miniaturisation of clocks, with both things famously combining to allow for the correct calculation of longitude. There was however still something about the way people measured time that was very different from today. Okay, perhaps “measured” is the wrong term; “set” would be better. Until very recently in historical terms, time would vary from one town to the next. The reason for this was simple – each would set their clocks to the solar noon of their location. People wanted to know what the accurate time was for where they lived, they operated by local time. Time shifts by around four minutes per degree of longitude, so in my home town of Oxford, roughly 1.25° west of London, the solar time is around five minutes behind that of our capital city. To this day the bell “Great Tom” in Christ Church college (which you may remember was cast from the bronze of the Osney Abbey bell) chimes each evening at 9:05, respecting the original local time.

The fact that different towns, even ones fairly short distances apart, had different times didn’t really matter until the middle of the 19th century. If you were to meet someone at noon, then obviously it would be noon where they lived, and the fact that this might have been a few minutes earlier or later than the place you had come from was a trivial concern. What changed things was the introduction of both the telegraph and particularly the railways. If you were writing the timetable, would you set the time of a train’s arrival to the time from the place it had come from or the place that it had arrived at? Choose the first and people would be confused by the arrival time being out of kilter with the local clocks; choose the second and the duration of the train journey would be wrong. In Britain in the 1840s the railway companies began using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard across their networks (my local train company, Great Western Railway, did so in November 1840, for example).

This standardisation of time was very much a thing driven by private enterprise, the railway networks and telegraph companies, rather than the government. Just because they were all using GMT didn’t mean that the locals were. This meant that there were decades where one had to think for a moment when deciding when to leave the house to catch a train. The time on the timetable would of course be GMT but that of the one on your mantelpiece could be showing the local time. Gradually convenience led to increasing adoption of GMT across the board, but it wasn’t until 1880, with the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 which required that expressions of time in Acts, deeds, and legal instruments were to be read as Greenwich Mean Time across all of Great Britain, that standard time was required by law.

The next challenge was international in nature. Standardising time within one country was hard enough, but global navigation, telegraphy, and commerce required agreement on a prime meridian and on a shared system for counting time. This culminated in the International Meridian Conference held in Washington in October 1884 where delegates were gathered specifically to consider a common prime meridian and a universal day. The conference adopted the meridian of Greenwich as the prime meridian for longitude and recommended a universal day beginning at midnight at Greenwich. Why Greenwich? Well in part it was due to Britain’s global power at the time, but also because of its maritime and scientific clout. The majority of the world’s shipping already reckoned longitude from Greenwich so this approach was pretty much the de facto standard before it was formally agreed.

The final piece of standardisation concerned the units of time themselves. For a long time, the second was effectively tied to the Earth’s rotation via the mean solar day: 1 second was treated as 1/86,400 of a day. But astronomers and physicists discovered that the Earth’s rotation is not perfectly uniform – basically not all days are quite the same length. Before 1960 the second had been defined as a fraction of the mean solar day, but irregularities in Earth rotation made this unsatisfactory. In 1960 the second was redefined astronomically using the tropical year 1900, however this was still not accurate enough for the modern age. In 1967, the General Conference on Weights and Measures redefined the second in atomic terms, as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation corresponding to the hyperfine transition of caesium-133.

There was still a final problem to solve. Civil time still needed to stay reasonably aligned with day and night, which depend on the Earth’s actual rotation. But atomic time runs uniformly, whereas Earth rotation drifts slightly. The compromise was Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC runs at the same rate as International Atomic Time but differs from it by an integral number of seconds. What that practically means is the insertion of leap seconds, the first of which was inserted on 30 June 1972 to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1, a form of time based on the Earth’s rotation.

When I started researching this series, I didn’t think that I would cover history all the way from clay tablets to atomic clocks. But I absolutely love the fact that some of the most precise devices in existence today are measuring something whose definition can be traced back to 5,000-year-old cuneiform characters!

It is a singular coincidence that the murder was committed during Bank Holiday night, and is almost identical with another murder which was perpetrated near the same spot on the night of the previous Bank Holiday.

Those words were printed in London’s Pall Mall Gazette on 24th August 1888. Given the year, you might well connect them with the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. But… this was printed a whole week before the first of the five ‘canonical’ murders attributed to him, that of Mary Ann Nichols. Wait, what?

So the murder the report discusses is that of Martha Tabram, aka Turner:

Mr. George Collier, coroner, resumed his inquiry yesterday, at the Working Lads’ Institute, into the circumstances attending the death of a woman, supposed to be Martha Turner, aged thirty five, a hawker, lately living off Commercial road, E., who was discovered early on the morning of Tuesday, the 7th inst., lying dead on the first floor landing of some model dwellings known as George yard buildings, Commercial street, Spitalfields. The woman when found presented a shocking appearance, her body being covered with stab wounds to the number of thirty nine, some of which had been done with a bayonet.

And the previous one is that of Emma Elizabeth Smith – she was attacked in Whitechapel early on the morning of Tuesday 3rd April. Emma actually survived the attack (which was by two or three men rather than one) but then died in hospital the next day. The earliest news story (syndicated across the country) I can find is this:

MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL

A widow named Emma Elizabeth Smith, aged 45, of Spitalfields, was returning home late on Easter Monday, and when in Whitechapel Road, she was set upon and brutally maltreated by some men at present unknown. She was taken to the London Hospital, where she died this morning from the injuries.

I’m certainly not the first to discuss these women in the context of ‘Jack’ – they and another case, Annie Millwood (she was stabbed on 25th February by someone demanding money, survived but then died of natural causes three days before Emma) have often been discussed by ‘Ripperologists’, some saying they were Jack’s victims too, most saying they weren’t. But what interests me here is the history of an idea, the idea of this being a serial killer, as well as the idea of ‘Jack’ (and I certainly don’t intend to add to the endless speculation about who ‘he’ was, nor dwell on the gory details).

Subscribe now

The origin of the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ is well known, the phrase first being used by the author of the infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter, sent to the Central News Agency of London on 25th September, after the deaths of the first two canonical victims, Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman.1 The letter is widely regarded as a hoax, possibly perpetrated by a journalist.

‘Jack’ of course had a many-centuries-long history of being used to refer to an otherwise unspecified man. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that ‘ripper’ in this violent context appears to originate with this letter – though a more specialist use of the term for ‘one who rips things’ seems to go back to the 17th century.

As is often the case, though, the slow-moving OED isn’t always right. Here’s a report from the Manchester Courier of 7th February 1887, for example, a whole year before any of the Whitechapel events (and there are earlier examples):

LIVERPOOL HIGH RIPPERS

At the Liverpool Police-court, on Saturday, before Mr. Raffles, stipendiary magistrate, three youths named John Baker, George Baker, and Francis M’Tavey were charged with stabbing several people in Scotland-road, on Friday night.

And indeed the ‘High Rippers’ were well known in the 1880s specifically, as the Liverpool equivalent of Birmingham’s well-known Peaky Blinders. It’s not a wild linguistic leap to connect their activities with the London stabbings (especially for a journalist).

Going back to London in 1888, as well as that report linking Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, on 1st September we have this report from the Evening News a day after Mary Ann Nichols was killed: “The theory that the murder is the work of a lunatic, who is also the perpetrator of the other two murders of women which have occurred in Whitechapel during the last six months, meets with very general acceptance amongst the inhabitants of the district…” (The report goes on to offer its own take: “The more probable theory is that the murder has been committed by one or more of a gang of men…” – and later on references the High Rippers, in fact.)

On the same day, the New York Times was also quick to join the dots: “All three victims have been women of the lowest class; all three murders have taken place in the same district, at about the same hour, and have been characterized by the same inhuman and ghoul-like brutality.” And two days later, the Daily News made even more explicit the hypothesis “that all three sanguinary deeds are by one and the same hand”.2

So what’s my point? Simply that the whole Whitechapel community was very early on primed to envisage the same perpetrator for each new killing, without necessarily looking into all the detailed, varying circumstances of each. People rush to make connections.

Someone who has studied all this in much more detail than me is Richard Walker, who runs one of London’s best-rated Jack the Ripper tours. And now he has written a book, Yours Truly Jack the Ripper, which draws on his own painstaking research, combined with his experience of the geography of Whitechapel – which turns out to make a big difference to how you might interpret the events. Full disclosure: I published the book for him, and I want you to buy it! It’s refreshing because it’s about the victims (like Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five) as much as the perpetrator, and about the circumstances rather than the wild obsession with identifying ‘Jack’ (though Richard does offer some reasoned arguments on that). What Richard reveals so clearly is that Victorian society – particularly from a mixture of the sensationalist press and cultural prejudice against poor women – in many ways created its own monster.

If that doesn’t convince you to check it out, readers of Histories can get an exclusive 25% off by using the code DYA25 in the checkout here until the end of April:

25% off here

(Or you can pay full price at Amazon if you insist!)

I’ll be back again soon – and not trying to sell you something :)

Subscribe now

We have a lovely example of just how foreign hours were to most people at that time (and thanks to Mary Catelli for bringing this to my attention!) from a fragment of a lost play Boeotia (The Boeotian Woman) which was probably written by Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC):

Par ut illum di perdant, primus qui horas repperitquique adeo primus statuit hic solarium;qui mihi comminuit misero articulatim Diem!nam <unum> me puero Venter erat solarium,multo omnium istorum optumum et uerissumum.ubi is te monebat, esses, nisi quom nil erat.nunc etiam quom est non estur, nisi Soli lubet.itaque adeo iam oppletum oppidum est solariis, maior pars populi aridi reptant fame.

May the gods ruin the fellow who first invented hours, and moreover the one who first set up a sundial here; poor me, he tore Day to pieces for me, limb by limb! When I was a boy, Belly was your only sundial, and by far the best and truest of them all. When he reminded you, you’d eat, unless there was nothing there. Now even when there is something there one doesn’t eat, unless Sun sees fit. What’s more, the town is now so full of sundials, the majority of the population creep around dry from hunger.

Move on a thousand years, to the start of the second millennium, and things have not really changed very much at all. In researching this piece I have been surprised (though upon reflection probably shouldn’t have been) to discover quite how relatively recent “our” form of timekeeping really is. Unequal hours still persisted, and work was driven by light, rather than a clock. One thing that was different was that more people would have at least been aware of which (unequal) hour it was, even if that did nothing to modify their behaviours. Christian institutions, such as the Benedictines, had very structured days, with activities taking place at specific times. Monks and nuns would have been frequently made aware of what the hour was by the ringing of bells, and these aural time-signals would have been heard by the people living outside the institutions’ walls.

In the Rule of St Benedict we see clearly how, due to unequal hours, the time of, for example, dining, varied over the course of the year:

From holy Easter until Pentecost
let the brothers take dinner at the sixth hour
and supper in the evening.

From Pentecost throughout the summer,
unless the monks have work in the fields
let them fast on Wednesdays and Fridays until the ninth hour;
on the other days let them dine at the sixth hour.
This dinner at the sixth hour shall be the daily schedule
if they have work in the fields
or the heat of summer is extreme;
the Abbot’s foresight shall decide on this.

Thus it is that he should adapt and arrange everything
in such a way that souls may be saved
and that the brethren may do their work
without just cause for murmuring.

From the Ides of September until the beginning of Lent
let them always take their dinner at the ninth hour.

In Lent until Easter let them dine in the evening.
But this evening hour shall be so determined
that they will not need the light of a lamp while eating,
Indeed at all seasons
let the hour, whether for supper or for dinner, be so arranged
that everything will be done by daylight.

The notion of splitting the day into 24 equal hours had actually been around for more than a thousand years in Europe by that time (and longer in China, as we saw in my last piece). And whilst it wasn’t being used in day-to-day life we know that people like the Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus (c.190 - c.120 BCE) were using it in their work. In his Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus he wrote about using equal hours for astronomical observation:

Χωρὶς δὲ τῆς ἐν ταῖς συνανατολαῖς καὶ ⟨συγκατα-⟩ δύσεσι θεωρίας εὔχρηστον εἶναι νομίζω καὶ τὸ παρακολουθεῖν ἡμᾶς, τίνες τῶν ἀπλανῶν ἀστέρων ἀπέχουσιν ἀπʼ ἀλλήλων κατὰ τὸ ἑξῆς ὡριαῖα ἰσημερινὰ διαστήματα. τοῦτο γὰρ ἡμῖν εὔχρηστόν ἐστι πρός τε τὸ τὴν ὥραν τῆς νυκτὸς ἀκριβῶς συλλογίζεσθαι καὶ πρὸς τὸ τοὺς ἐκλειπτικοὺς τῆς σελήνης χρόνους καὶ ἕτερα πλείονα κατανοεῖν τῶν ἐν ἀστρολογίᾳ θεωρημάτων.

But apart from the theory of the East and the West, I think it is useful to observe which fixed stars are separated from one another by successive equinoctial hourly intervals. For this is useful for us both for determining accurately the hour of the night and for understanding the times of lunar eclipses and many other astronomical matters

We also have a nice example from Ptolemy’s Geography (c. 150CE) where he notes the length of the longest day in equal, rather than seasonal, hours:

Paphos has its longest day of 14,25' equinoctial hours, and varies eastwards from Alexandria one quarter of an equinoctial hour.

In terms of actually using “modern” hours to organise one’s whole day the first European of note that we know did so was none other than the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great (849-899). The Welsh monk Asser describes him doing so in his The Life of King Alfred (written in 893 and is a rare, detailed example of a first-hand account of a notable person from that period):

After long reflection on these things, he at length, by a useful and shrewd invention, commanded his clerks to supply wax in sufficient quantity, and to weigh it in a balance against pennies. When enough wax was measured out to equal the weight of seventy-two pence, he caused the clerks to make six candles thereof, all of equal weight, and to mark off twelve inches as the length of each candle. By this plan, therefore, those six candles burned for twenty-four hours, a night and a day, without fail, before the sacred relics of many of God’s elect, which always accompanied him wherever he went.

Sometimes, however, the candles could not continue burning a whole day and night, till the same hour when they were lighted the preceding evening, by reason of the violence of the winds, which at times blew day and night without intermission through the doors and windows of the churches, the sheathing, and the wainscot, the numerous chinks in the walls, or the thin material of the tents; on such occasions it was unavoidable that they should burn out and finish their course before the appointed hour.

The king, therefore, set himself to consider by what means he might shut out the wind, and by a skilful and cunning invention ordered a lantern to be beautifully constructed of wood and ox-horn, since white ox-horns, when shaved thin, are as transparent as a vessel of glass. Into this lantern, then, wonderfully made of wood and horn, as I before said, a candle was put at night, which shone as brightly without as within, and was not disturbed by the wind, since he had also ordered a door of horn to be made for the opening of the lantern. By this contrivance, then, six candles, lighted in succession, lasted twenty-four hours, neither more nor less. When these were burned out, others were lighted.

The use of what were then very expensive candles for accurate timekeeping was pretty much the preserve of kings. In order for equal hours to take hold in the general population you needed to come up with better ways of measuring time. The Chinese had been already using equal hours (or equal double hours, to be more precise) for more than a thousand years at this point. To measure and report these hours they developed water1 clocks of the most astonishing complexity. The Chinese polymath Su Song (蘇頌, 1020-1101) built a clocktower which, though water driven, used both an escarpment and a chain-drive. This enabled a highly regulated clock to be constructed, as Su Song himself explained:

The chain drive is 19.5 ft long (5.9 m). The system is as follows: an iron chain with its links joined together to form an endless circuit hangs down from the upper chain-wheel which is concealed by the tortoise-and-cloud (column supporting the armillary sphere centrally), and passes also round the lower chain-wheel which is mounted on the main driving-shaft. Whenever one link moves, it moves forward one tooth of the diurnal motion gear-ring and rotates the Component of the Three Arrangers of Time, thus following the motion of the heavens.

He later wrote in his memorial:

According to your servant's opinion there have been many systems and designs for astronomical instruments during past dynasties all differing from one another in minor respects. But the principle of the use of water-power for the driving mechanism has always been the same. The heavens move without ceasing but so also does water flow (and fall). Thus if the water is made to pour with perfect evenness, then the comparison of the rotary movements (of the heavens and the machine) will show no discrepancy or contradiction; for the unresting follows the unceasing.

The motion gear rings and upper drive wheel each had 600 teeth, which broke the day into increments of 2 minutes and 24 seconds (which, as we learned in my previous piece, allowed the 12 shí and 100 kè that they day was broken down into to be meshed mathematically). The resulting device was a thing of both mechanical and aesthetic beauty and contained 133 different clock jacks to indicate and sound the hours.

Water clocks similar to, but less elaborate than, the Chinese ones were in use in medieval Europe. For example, according to Jocelyn de Brakelond, in 1198, during a fire at the abbey of St Edmundsbury (now Bury St Edmunds), the monks “ran to the clock” to fetch water (so it must have held enough of the stuff to be useful in fire-fighting). But the real game-changer was the invention of the fully mechanical clock. For a device that would achieve such ubiquity it may come as a surprise to learn that we know neither who invented it nor even roughly when it was invented. What we do know is that between 1280 and 1320 there was an increase in the number of references to clocks and horologes in church literature, which suggests that there were more of these devices being installed in religious institutions. What we don’t know for sure is whether this was an expansion of water clocks or if perhaps a new invention, the fully mechanical clock, had entered the scene. In 1283, for example, a large clock was installed in Dunstable Priory, and whilst no trace of it now remains, the location, behind the rood screen, would have been too small for it to have been a water clock, so it was probably a mechanical one.

A decade earlier in Norwich Cathedral there is a reference to a payment for a mechanical clock in what was then the priory but it turned out to be not that great at keeping regular time, so in 1308 a new one was commissioned. The costs of the replacement device (sadly destroyed in a fire in the 17th century) we have recorded in wonderful detail:

Clock – For one plate of metal bought, 4½d. Sounds purchased, 16d; for making five images, 20s. Item, boys making heads, 3s. In wages of Master Robert, 30s. Andrew and Roger, carpenters, are also mentioned as employed at this period. The total of the expenditure, between Michaelmas and Christmas, amounted to £4. 19s 8¼d.

In the Compotus for 1323, several entries occur under the head Orologium. Payments of wages to Andrew the carpenter, to Robert, to Roger de Stoke; with the following payment for the latter for carriage of his clothes and tools, 8s. For a hose of Latoun, 4s. 7½d.

Also to Master Adam, the sculptor, for making twenty-four little images, 11s. Also for 200 Caen stones, 22s. Also to John, blacksmith, for ironwork for the clock, 3s. 9d, Also delivered to Robert of the Tower, for making of the great dial, 10s; and so much in danger of being lost, because from his poverty he was unable to perfect the work, nor was any thing to be obtained from him. Total, £6. 13s. 9¼.

The oldest surviving mechanical clock is probably the one in Salisbury Cathedral which dates from 1386 (though this title is somewhat disputed and fought over!).

What was the innovation that enabled these clocks to be constructed? I am not particularly mechanically minded so I am going to explain this in fairly simplistic terms. These early mechanical clocks worked like this:

• A drum or barrel around which a rope or chain was wound

• A heavy weight was attached to the end of the rope/chain

• As the weight descends, so it would turn the drum

• The turning of the drum would drive a set of gears inside the clock, which would process the time.

There was, however, a problem. If there was nothing to restrain them the gears would spin freely. In order to prevent this there was the key invention, the verge escarpment which worked like this:

• The last toothed wheel in the gear train was called the crown wheel

• As the wheel turned a tooth of the wheel presses on one pallet

• That push rotates the verge and foilot

• As they rotate, the first pallet moves clear

• The tooth of the crown wheel escapes

• The wheel advances until a tooth on the opposite side

• The second tooth now pushes the verge out of the way

• The cycle then repeats

This means that the rotation of the crown wheel progresses in consistent, uniform steps. Now I realise that this description may not make much sense (it didn’t to me until I saw it)2 so here is a little animation showing how it worked:

Or if this helps more, here is a one of the earliest existing drawings of a verge escapement, in Giovanni de Dondi's astronomical clock, the Astrarium, built 1364:

Whilst these clocks kept time, they didn’t necessarily keep good time (as the replacement of the one in Norwich shows). In part this was because they were hard to accurately construct and configure, and in part due to their design. The speed of the rotation of the drum was dependent upon the force of the weight pulling down on it, and the radius of the drum itself. When freshly wound all of the rope (or chain) would be wrapped around the drum.As time went on, and the rope descended, there would be less and less of it so the radius of the drum would diminish.

A surprising feature of many of these early clocks is that they lacked a face. They signalled the time by ringing bells upon the hour. For most people back then a clock wasn’t something that one looked at, it was something one heard. Those that did have faces would only have a single hand, showing the slow progression of the hours. Indicating minutes was simply not a thing. In my final piece I will (at last!) explain how we started using minutes and also look at how time became standardised around the world.

Subscribe now

If you are American you may have been taught that the concept was invented by Benjamin Franklin whilst living in France and well, err, that isn’t really true. What he did do is write an amusing, satirical, letter to The Journal of Paris in 1784 which was more a comment upon what he perceived as the slothfulness of French (specifically the late-rising Parisians) and how the result of spending more hours conscious during the hours of darkness than strictly necessary led to the wasteful consumption of candles.1 He begins his letter by expressing astonishment at how early the sun arose:

I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light; and I imagined at first, that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.

I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but six o’clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for his rising on that day. I looked forward, too, and found he was to rise still earlier every day till towards the end of June; and that at no time in the year he retarded his rising so long as till eight o’clock. Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon,2 and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.

He then turns his brilliantly analytical brain to the challenge of calculating quite how much this cost the city, should all other residents follow his behaviours:

This event has given rise in my mind to several serious and important reflections. I considered that, if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light; and, the latter being a much more expensive light than the former, my love of economy induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was master of, and to make some calculations, which I shall give you, after observing that utility is, in my opinion the test of value in matters of invention, and that a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.

I took for the basis of my calculation the supposition that there are one hundred thousand families in Paris, and that these families consume in the night half a pound of bougies, or candles, per hour. I think this is a moderate allowance, taking one family with another; for though I believe some consume less, I know that many consume a great deal more. Then estimating seven hours per day as the medium quantity between the time of the sun’s rising and ours, he rising during the six following months from six to eight hours before noon, and there being seven hours of course per night in which we burn candles, the account will stand thus; [calculations excluded for brevity] …makes the sum ninety-six millions and seventy-five thousand livres tournois. An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.

Knowing his fellow Parisians well, he then suggests some somewhat absurdist measures to ensure that they got out of bed at daybreak:

I believe all who have common sense, as soon as they have learnt from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises, will contrive to rise with him; and, to compel the rest, I would propose the following regulations;

First. Let a tax be laid of a louis per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun.

Second. Let the same salutary operation of police be made use of, to prevent our burning candles, that inclined us last winter to be more economical in burning wood; that is, let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, and no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week.

Third. Let guards also be posted to stop all the coaches, &c. that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives.

Fourth. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient?, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.

This was all very much tongue-in-cheek but he was hinting at something he considered important beneath the wit (after all this is the man who coined the phrase “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”.3 But there is nothing in his letter that involved changing the actual time. In Europe at the end of the 18th century, much like the Roman Empire two thousand years earlier, people didn’t tend to follow the times shown on clocks, rather they would order their days by the passage of the sun, there wasn’t yet standardised time that was religiously followed.

An early hint at DST came 26 years later in 1810 when the Spanish National Assembly enacted a resolution to move some meetings forward by an hour between the 1st of May and the 30th of September – but this was a behaviour change, not a temporal one. It was only at the end of the 19th century when we see the first real proposal to change the clocks. George Hudson (1867–1946) was a New Zealand entomologist who did shift work in order to free up time to catch bugs in his off-hours. Irked at the lack of daylight hours in summer evenings he proposed pushing the time forwards by two hours at a meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. It think that it is fair to say this was not received with rapturous enthusiasm:

The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and, by utilising the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin4, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.

Hudson persevered, presenting another paper on the matter in 1898 but it was the English builder and outdoorsman William Willett (1856–1915) who really helped to bring the matter to the attention of the political establishment. He independently came up with the idea in 1907 after becoming annoyed that he had to cut his evening’s golfing short when dusk fell.

Willett published a pamphlet entitled “The Waste of Daylight” laying out his ideas and his cause was taken up by the Liberal MP Robert Pearce who put a bill before Parliament in 1908, alas to no success. What Willet proposed is essentially the system we have today:

Everyone appreciates the long light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as Autumn approaches, and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the clear bright light of early morning, during Spring and Summer months, is so seldom seen or used.

Nevertheless, Standard time remains so fixed, that for nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.

NOW, if one of the hours of sunlight wasted in the morning could be added to the end of the day, many advantages would be gained by all, and especially by those who would spend in the open air, whatever time they might have at their disposal after the duties of the day have been discharged.

By a simple expedient, these advantages can be secured. If we will reduce the length of one Sunday, in the Spring, by 60 minutes, a loss of which no one would be conscious, we shall have 60 minutes more daylight after 6 o’clock, on each succeeding day, until the Autumn.

I therefore propose, that at 2 o’clock in the morning of the third Sunday in April, Standard time shall advance 60 minutes, and on the third Sunday in September, shall recede 60 minutes. We should then have one Sunday in April 23 hours long, and one Sunday in September 25 hours long. Having made up our minds to be satisfied, on one occasion, with a Sunday of 23 hours, tile advantages aimed at would follow automatically ; everything would go on just as it does now, except that the later hours of the day would bring more light with them.

Those who have travelled by sea, will remember how easily they accommodated themselves to the alterations of time on board ship, how they adjusted their watches, attended to the engagements of the day in correspondence therewith, and dismissed from their minds all recollection of the alterations that had been made. If this can take place at sea, day after day, without discomfort, may not a similar operation be possible on land. twice in the year?

The measure was adopted by some parts of Canada in 1908, but it was the First World War that really caused things to change. Austria-Hungry adopted DST in 1916, and Britain and most of its allies swiftly joined them, with the USA following the trend in 1918. Despite Hudson’s efforts New Zealand was a laggard, only enacting the Summer Time Act in 1927.

During WW2 the UK adopted “Double Summer Time” meaning that it was BST from October to March with the clocks advanced an additional hour in April to September. In the USA they simply stuck to DST the whole year around during the war, but returned to normal after the end of the conflict. In January 1974 Richard Nixon signed a law resurrecting this war-time change and making it permanent to much consternation, and his successor, Gerald Ford, repealed it in October of the same year.

It is usually said that the group most benefitting from DST is farmers, but this really doesn’t seem to be the case. Very much like the agricultural workers of two thousand years ago, their working days are driven by the sun, not clocks (it isn’t as though the cows have another meeting to go to at 11am).

A meta-analysis in 2007 found that DST resulted in electricity savings of 0.3% during the days on which it was applied, but these benefits seem likely to be offset by other costs. The change to circadian rhythms by the changing of the clocks has, for example, been estimated to cause 30 deaths a year in the USA and increase the incidence of heart attacks and obesity. Traffic collisions seem to increase in the UK and the USA, but not so much elsewhere. On the plus side DST does seem to increase participation in sport and other outdoors activities. The issue remains politically charged, with some advocating for its abolition and others its year-round enactment. I am more of a night-owl than I am a morning person, so personally I am happy to trade an hour’s lost sleep for more light to go walking in the evenings, though I realise that many readers of this piece will have opposing views!

Subscribe now

The concept of breaking up the day into 24 segments probably arose in Ancient Egypt probably around the start of the New Kingdom 3,500 years ago. As you might have guessed there is some uncertainty about this but we know that they were doing so at this point due to the discovery of an ancient sundial. This shows the day being divided into 12 sections, and the night was similarly divided into 12. You may be wondering, why 12? After all, we have ten fingers and ten toes and now pretty much everyone uses base-10 in their day-to-day lives. One long-held theory is that each of your four fingers has three joints, so you can easily count up to 12 on one hand by tapping them with your thumb. 12 is also easily divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6.

When it comes to specifically measuring time there is another explanation. The Egyptians defined a set of 36 stars which could be used to segment the heavens into equal slices. Of these 18 were used to track the passage of time, and of those 3 each were assigned to dawn and dusk leaving the appearance of 12 stars to break the night into “hours”. Having broken the night up into 12 chunks it then seemed pretty logical to do the same for the day, hence 24 hours.2

These hours were, however, very different to the ones that we use today. The day (meaning period of light) was separated into 12 equal parts however the length of the day, and hence the hours, would vary significantly by season.3 This means that the ancient concept of time was very different to the one that we are familiar with today. The “time” of, for example, the third hour would be radically different in December when compared to June (though obviously noon and midnight would be the same).4 The timings of the hours in Ancient Rome would have looked something broadly like this:5

It may seem strange to us that time was measured, but inconsistent over the year, and could still be of use, but it was quite straightforward. If you arranged with someone to meet at “the third hour tomorrow” they would know exactly when you meant. People would use measured hours to organise their days to an extent, but which hours they chose would vary over the course of the year. We have a nice example of this from a letter Pliny wrote, describing how the bathing time of one of his friends varied:

When he is told that the bathing hour has come – which is the ninth hour in winter and the eighth in summer – he takes a walk naked in the sun, if there is no wind. Then he plays at ball for a long spell, throwing himself heartily into the game, for it is by means of this kind of active exercise that he battles with old age. After his bath he lies down and waits a little while before taking food, listening in the meantime to the reading of some light and pleasant book.6

One of the most common means of measuring time, as already mentioned, was something we are doubtless all very familiar with – the sundial. As you know they consist of a flat plate (or dish) and a gnomon7 which casts a shadow upon it. As the sun moves over the course of the day, so the shadow moves across hour lines, enabling the time to be easily read. For a sundial to measure time correctly, it has to be configured to the location of its use. A sundial’s geometry has to match the latitude of the place, because the Sun’s daily path across the sky changes with latitude. The gnomon is typically set parallel to Earth’s axis, so its angle to the horizontal depends directly on local latitude. Sometimes though people, err, forgot about this point, as Pliny once again records:

Marcus Varro records that the first public sundial was set up on a column along by the Rostra during the First Punic War after Catina in Sicily had been taken by the consul Manius Valerius Messala [263 BC], and that it was brought from Sicily thirty years later than the traditional date of Papirius's sundial. The lines of this sundial did not agree with the hours, but all the same they followed it for 99 years, till Quintus Marcius Philippus who was censor with Lucius Paulus [164 BC] placed a more carefully designed one next to it, and this gift was received as one of the most welcome of the censor's undertakings. Even then however the hours were uncertain in cloudy weather.

As Pliny noted, sundials are great so long as the sun is shining so what did people do when it was cloudy, or nighttime? The answer is through the use of waterclocks, the oldest known example of which is the approximately 3,400-year-old Karnak clepsydra. This is a stone vessel with a hole at the bottom through which water dripped out, with tapered sides to ensure that the rate of dripping would be constant as it emptied out. Down the sides is a series of 12 marks or “false holes” – to tell the time you just had to look where the water level was in relation to those holes. Ah, but hang on, how would that work given that the length of each hour would vary over the course of the year? Simple, there were 12 columns of marks, one for each month of the year (Egyptians had been dividing the year into 12, 30-day months and five feast days since around 4,500 years ago).8

Obviously there would be some variation within a month, but this was deemed accurate enough for ensuring that religious rites took place at the correct time. Suffice to say it was no small challenge to accurately taper the clock and calibrate for it to be of use, but devices such as this seem to have worked exceptionally well. We also have a good idea of who the person was with the smarts to invent this as the tomb of an Egyptian court official, Amenemhet, dating back more than 3,500 years has an inscription upon it reading:

I was the one who devised the water-clock (clepsydra) for the measurement of the hours of the night.9

Water clocks of this nature were also used to measure precise intervals of time, such as in Roman courts of law, where the advocates had strict limits placed upon the extent to which they could speak, though it turns out that one could haggle for more time as Pliny (yet again!) explains:

However, as soon as I had pulled myself together and collected my thoughts, I began my address, and though I was nervous I was on the best of terms with my audience. I spoke for nearly five hours, for, in addition to the twelve water-clocks — the largest I could get — which had been assigned to me, I obtained four others.

The technology of water clocks soon developed far beyond simple clay jars, floats were used that could more directly indicate the time or even play sounds as Vitruvius recorded in his Ten Books on Architecture (late 1st century BCE):

Hence, Ctesibius, observing that sounds and tones were produced by the contact between the free air and that which was forced from the pipe, made use of this principle in the construction of the first water organs. He also devised methods of raising water, automatic contrivances, and amusing things of many kinds, including among them the construction of water clocks. He began by making an orifice in a piece of gold, or by perforating a gem, because these substances are not worn by the action of water, and do not collect dirt so as to get stopped up.

Water clock innovation was also taking place in China. Around the year 200 BCE they moved away from vessels that had water flowing out of them, and replaced them with ones that filled with water, with a float indicating the time. Measuring time with water could be problematic though. It would evaporate, would expand and contract with temperature and even freeze if the temperatures fell sufficiently low in the winter. This latter problem was addressed by keeping the water heated with burning torches, until the year 976 when the engineer Zhang Sixun hit upon the idea of replacing the water with mercury. Some clocks were thus designed to work with water in the summer, and mercury in the winter.

The Chinese were also doing something that the European’s weren’t – they were dividing their days into consistently equal, rather than seasonal, hours. More than two thousand years ago they divided their days into 12 double hours called shí (時) that were named with the Twelve Earthly Branches: zǐ, chǒu, yín, mǎo, chén, sì, wǔ, wèi, shēn, yǒu, xū, hài. Alongside shí, the day was also divided into kè (刻), literally “marks,” probably referring to marks on a clepsydra or sundial. For long stretches of imperial history, a day was treated as 100 kè, so one kè was 1/100 of a day: about 14 minutes 24 seconds. Because 12 shí and 100 kè do not divide neatly into one another, traditional Chinese systems often used smaller intermediate fractions. One important one was a subdivision equivalent to 1/600 of a day, about 2 minutes 24 seconds which let the 12-shí and 100-kè systems mesh mathematically.

So there were several pretty good ways of measuring time two thousand years ago, but they weren’t exactly portable were they? What did people do when they were out and about, or did they simply not worry about time too much? You may have seen a scene in a historical comedy where someone is asked the time and they pull up their sleeve revealing a sundial strapped to their wrist. This is obviously a gag, but interestingly it isn’t that far from the truth! Vitruvius, writing in the late 1st century BCE describes in the context of many sundial innovators how they left instructions for making “portable pendulous dials”:

Berosus the Chaldean, was the inventor of the semicircle, hollowed in a square, and inclined according to the climate. Aristarchus the Samian, of the Scaphe or Hemisphere, as also of the discus on a plane. The Arachne was the invention of Eudoxus the astrologer, although some attribute it to Apollonius. The Plinthium or Lacunar, an example of which is to be seen in the Circus Flaminius, was invented by Scopas the Syracusan. The sort called Πρὸς τὰ ἱστορούμενα, by Parmenio. That called Πρὸς πᾶν κλίμα,º by Theodosius and Andrias. The Pelicinon by Patrocles. The Cone by Dionysodorus. The Quiver by Apollonius. The persons above mentioned not only invented other sorts; but the inventions of others have come down to us, such as the Gonarche, the Engonatos, and the Antiboreus. Many also have left instructions for constructing the portable pendulous dials.

And one dating from around the year 250CE can be seen in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. For sure, it wasn’t something to be worn on the wrist, but it was basically the ancient equivalent of a pocket watch:

“Hang on a minute!”10 you may be thinking “why hasn’t he mentioned hourglasses yet?” Surely they are one of the oldest means of measuring time?” So that is what I assumed as well before researching this piece, but what I learned was quite surprising. It seems that hourglasses are actually not really that old at all. There is a relief on a sarcophagus from Villa Albani in Rome dating from around 350 CE (or perhaps 120-130 CE) which shows something that looks a bit like an hourglass but beyond that possibility the earliest visual representation we have can be seen in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government, painted in 1338–1339, where the figure of Temperance holds an hourglass.

Obviously they must have been invented prior to that point, but it seems unlikely that they had been in use for a thousand years without any other mention of in literature or representation in art. The earliest written reference we have dates from around the year 1345, mentioned in a receipt of Thomas de Stetesham who was the clerk of the King’s ship La George:

The same Thomas accounts to have paid at Lescluse, in Flanders, for twelve glass horologes (" pro xii. orlogiis vitreis "), price of each 4¹⁄₂ gross', in sterling 9s. Item, For four horologes of the same sort (" de eadem secta "), bought there, price of each five gross', making in sterling 3s. 4d.

Despite having numerous ways to measure it, ancient peoples clearly had a very different relationship with time than the one we have today. You were very unlikely to have many set events at specific times of the day, arrangements would be much more general, other than in formal legal, government and military situations (and even then, as we have learned, the clock in Rome was wrong for nearly a century). The standardised measurement of time was also very unevenly distributed. Only a handful of incised sundials survive from the Roman era,11 for example. If you lived outside of a significant urban centre you simply would have had no access to the measuring of time. People in rural villages would probably have known about the division of time into hours, but they would not have used that system. Rather their days would have been structured around natural indicators of time – sunrise, noon, sunset etcetera. They didn’t have access to time, but they also had no need to know what the time was, their lives were ordered by nature rather than a clock.12

In my next piece I’ll explore some other ways of measuring time, including the use of scent, as well as digging into how we ended up with minutes and seconds.

I was raised in suburban Surrey, in the village of West Byfleet, to be precise. Unless you have passed it on the train you are unlikely to have ever heard of it. It stumbled into being towards the end of the 19th century with the arrival of railway and is perhaps only notable for the fact that it is one of a curious slew of places whose name begins with “W” on that line (Wimbledon, Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge, West Byfleet, Woking, and Worplesdon).

I read avidly as a child, intoxicated by stories of knights and kings and battles. Of intrigue and betrayal. Of fantastical beasts and thrilling adventures. And throughout that childhood there always lay, in the back of my mind, a crushing disappointment in the banality of the place that I called my home. My house was built in the early 1970s, before that the ground had been rough Surrey heath. No knights had ever ridden down my road. No kings had ever feasted here. And certainly the place had never been visited by mythical creatures.

Subscribe now

I moved into the house in which I now live 19 years ago and was thrilled to discover that the land beneath and around this otherwise unassuming Victorian terrace was steeped in history. I can only guess at the delight the younger me would have taken from living here, but I can guess pretty well. Unlike so many of my childhood infatuations that ebbed away as I aged, my love of those tales still remains. So today I’ll share some of the stories of my current home. Stories of kings. Stories of conflicts. And things even more incredible, because here be dragons…

I live in Oxford, on Osney Island, a little over a hundred acres bordered by the Thames to the west and south, the Sheepwash Channel to the north, and the Castle Mill Stream to the east.1 The river runs past the end of my road, less than fifty yards from my front door, and when it is in full spate, as it is at the moment, I can hear it churning and boiling as I lie in bed at night. The name probably comes from the Old English for “Osa’s Island” but we have no idea who Osa was, though we do know it has been called “Osney” for over a thousand years. The Thames has shaped the place, both geographically and socially, for centuries, and it plays a crucial role in the first of my stories.

Frithuswith (Better known as “Frideswide”) was born in 650 to King Dida of Eynsham and his wife Safrida. Dida ruled over a chunk of Mercia, including Oxford, and upon the tragically early death of his wife he consecrated an abbey in her memory (somewhere in Oxford, quite possibly on Osney island itself). Frideswide, always a pious child, took holy orders, a vow of chastity, and at the age of 18 was put in charge of the abbey. Then disaster struck, her beloved father died and Algar,2 King of Leicester, took over his lands. Land alone was not enough for him; he also sought to take the virgin Frideswide as his wife. She naturally rejected him, for she was already a bride of Christ, and so he then attempted to take by force what he couldn’t gain by request. Frideswide fled into the wilderness outside Oxford, but struggled to survive in the harsh conditions that she found there. At this point God came to her aid, and provided a magical boat in which she sailed (or rowed, accounts vary) up the river Thames, passing by the end of my road, to Bampton. This scene is vividly captured, carved in wood, on a door which resides in St. Frideswide’s Church a stone’s throw from here. This door was carved by two sisters, pupils of John Ruskin, Rhoda and Violet Liddell. For many years though it was attributed to their more famous sister, Alice, the “original” Alice in Wonderland.

Algar did not take rejection lightly, and demanded that the people of Oxford tell him where his putative bride was to be found. The good citizens of the city refused to tell him anything, and so he stood spitting in rage at their gates, vowing to make them pay for their silence. Luckily, however, God intervened once more and struck him down blind!

Frideswide, in the meantime, had moved down the river to Binsey, to be closer to Oxford, and hid in the nunnery there. Noticing how long it took the nuns to walk to the river each day to collect water she caused a spring to gush forth from the ground. This not only saved the aching legs of the nuns; it turned out that the water had miraculous healing powers! The well that was constructed above it was thus known as a treacle3 well and yes, it was this very well that inspired Lewis Carroll to have his dormouse claim to have lived in just such a place in Alice in Wonderland. The well remains to this day, albeit with a much later housing.

Algar, meanwhile, repented his actions and sought Frideswide out to beg her forgiveness. This she graciously gave him, and used the water from the well to restore his sight.4 She then returned to Oxford to establish St Frideswide’s Priory before dying in 727. Such were the miracles that were associated with her relics, she was beatified and became the patron saint of Oxford in 1440. Our next story also involves the formation of a religious institution, but one borne out of sexual guilt…

Edith Forne (also known in contemporary records as Eda, and later as Edith FitzForne or Forne’s Edith) was born into an Anglo-Saxon noble family probably in the 1090s. She was the daughter of Forn (or Forne) Sigulfson, a landholder in the north of England. Forn was a Cumbrian lord of probable Norse descent who managed to thrive under Norman rule. The Domesday Book (1086) records him as a king’s thegn with estates in Yorkshire, and during King Henry I’s reign he either acquired or was confirmed in the barony of Greystoke in Cumberland. Edith was clearly a very attractive woman and at some point, possibly when he was on one of his northern expeditions, she caught the eye of King Henry I. Sometime around the year 1120 she became the king’s concubine, and bore him at least one child, Robert FitzEdith (“son of Edith”)5 but the tryst probably only lasted a couple of years before the king tired of her and moved on to someone else. He did, however, set her up with a husband, Robert D’Oilly the Younger, prominent royal official. He was the High Sheriff of Oxfordshire and Constable of Oxford Castle – and notably the nephew of Robert D’Oilly the Elder, a companion of William the Conqueror who had built Oxford Castle in the 1070s.

Edith had wealth and status now but, like Frideswide before her, she was a pious Christian woman. She had been little more than a child when she had been beguiled and seduced by a king, and whilst one may consider this an easily forgivable transgression, she did not forgive herself. The king had been married; she had committed a sin. That she found peace, and indeed happiness, with Robert seems clear, but her guilt remained. So she would take long walks with her ladies in waiting on the water meadows where my house now stands, but let me handover to the great antiquarian, Anthony Wood, writing in the 1660s, to take the story from here:

A noble lady of this city called Editha Forne wife of Robert de Oilley, (a woman given to no lesse superstition then credulity)6 to recreate and solace herself therin when she lived at the Castle. Who more particularly, as upon an evening she with her attendance walked by the river’s side, saw a great company of pyes [magpies] gathered together on a tree, making a hideous noise with their chattering. Which she beholding, did with slight notice passe it by for that time; but the next evening walking that way againe with her maidens, (as she did afterwards the third time) found againe the pyes on the same tree, and making the like noise as before, seeming as ’twere to direct their chatterings to her.

Bewildered, and somewhat intimidated, by this corvid cacophony she did what any good Christian woman would – she spoke to her confessor about it. Her confessor, alas, was somewhat lacking in her moral qualities, and decided to use these noisy birds for his own ends:

With which being much perplexed, wondered what the meaning might be; and returning home againe, sent for her confessor who was one Radulphus, a canon of St. Frideswyde’s, and relating all the particulars that had severall times hapned to her in this place, demanded of him what the reason of their chattering might be. He told her he could not directly resolve her at that time; but if she would walke there againe the next day, he would wait upon her and veiw the matter himselfe, and then give her an exact account. That time being come, they all walked the same way; where they found the pyes againe as before and making the like noise. Radulphus, seeing all this, seemed at the present to be amazed; but after mature deliberation told her (upon her often demands for resolution) “O Madam,” the wiliest pye of all, “these are noe pyes, but soe many poore soules in purgatory that doe begge and make all this complaint for succour and relief; and they (knowing you to be pittyfull and one that will have regard of their condition) doe direct their clamours to you, hoping that by your charity you would bestow something both worthy of their relief as also for the welfare of your’s and your posteritye’s soules as your husband’s uncle did in founding the College and Church of St. Georg.” These wordes being finisht, she replied:—“And is it soe indeed? now, de pardieux, if old Robin my husband will concede to my request, I shall doe my best endeavour to be a means to bring these wretched soules to rest.”

Her husband did concede, and, unsurprisingly, Radulphus became the prior to Osney Priory (later Osney Abbey), a position of huge wealth, power and influence.7 The main church was over 300 feet long, comparable to Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, and it remains without a doubt the greatest building Oxford has lost. The Reformation saw it stripped of its titles, and it became little more than an open quarry for people to loot stone from. The back gardens of my street lie over the site of its precincts, and though little remains on the surface of it now, just part of a building, if you dig down a few feet you will find, as I have done, fragments of medieval tile, worked stone, and animal bones.

Edith’s tomb itself did survive for more than a century after the Reformation, and Anthony Wood was able to record it:

[she] was buried on the north side of the high altar with her image of stone, in the habit of a vowes and holding a heart in her right hand, lying upon the tumbe. In the wall of the arch over her tumbe was painted her comming to Ousney, and Radulph waiting upon her (as I have before shewed) and the tree with the chattering pyes8 theron.

Whilst the building has all but vanished, the sounds of it still persist. Its bell was taken and recast as “Great Tom” which I hear every day ringing out from Christ Church College – bronze that was first smelted the best part of a thousand years ago. And then there are the magpies, who visit my garden each day, whose chattering cuts through the morning air, and whom it amuses me to believe are the direct descendants of the ones that Edith heard all those years ago…

Edith and her husband Robert now go on to play a role in my next tale. If you mention the Civil War to someone in the UK then they will probably think about the events of the 17th century – Cromwell, the beheading of King Charles, all of that kind of stuff. Many will not realise that this is not the only civil war the country has experienced; it is simply the most recent one. Between 1138 and 1153 the country was thrown into turmoil by a conflict known as The Anarchy. Edith’s former lover, Henry I, died in 1135 and whilst he had a legion of illegitimate children, the only son he had by his lawful wife, William Adelin, died in 1120 in the White Ship disaster. His desire was to leave this throne to his daughter, the Empress Matilda, but his nephew, Stephen of Blois (better known as King Stephen) had other ideas. He had himself crowned on the 22nd of December 1135 and soon found himself battling rebellious barons, a situation exacerbated by Matilda invading the country from Normandy in 1139.

What followed was a long drawn-out series of skirmishes with the fortune of each side rising and falling. By 1142 Matilda, recently expelled from her base in London, set up her headquarters in Oxford. In addition to being a well-defended city the castle was run by the aforementioned Robert D’Oilly who had personal reasons to be sympathetic to her cause, as Edith was the mother to Matilda’s step-brother. On the 26th of September Stephen’s forces attacked the city, with his forces swimming across the Thames and other waterways. Matilda and her forces were taken by surprise, and those who were not killed or captured in the initial onslaught fell back to Oxford Castle. The complex was too well-defended to fall by force, so Stephen decided to besiege it and starve his enemy out.

By early December things were getting pretty grim in the castle, supplies were running low, and the weather turned bitterly cold – though as it turned out it was the cold that saved Matilda. What follows may sound like something from a fairy-tale, but the broad elements of what happened are true. One night Matilda and a couple of her closest companions lowered themselves out of a window of St George’s Tower (one version has them doing so with a rope made from bed-sheets). Snow lay heavy on the ground, so when they landed they took care to walk backwards, so as not to make it appear that anyone had walked away from the castle, rather towards it. All were clad in white cloaks, camouflaging them against the snow, and so dressed they were able to sneak through the lines of Stephen’s forces, undetected.

Once past the troops they were able to cross the frozen Thames, and make their way to another loyal stronghold, the castle in Wallingford. Now exactly where they crossed the Thames has been subject conjecture for centuries. I like to image that having escaped from the tower they headed to the west, away from the city and potential discovery. This would have taken them past Osney Abbey which would make sense as this was an institution founded by her ally, Robert, and so the monks there would have likely turned a blind eye. If (and this is obviously a big if) she did so then her route to the river would have taken her past my front door, and she would have crossed the frozen waters at the end of my road!

The castle surrendered the day after her escape, and it appears that loyal Robert was put to death shortly afterwards.9 The war continued for another eleven years and ended with a compromise – Stephen would remain king but upon his death Matilda’s son Henry would then become Henry II.

But what about the dragons that I promised you? Fear not, they are central to my final tale. Long ago, sometime shortly before the Roman invasion of England, the country was plagued by two rambunctious dragons. Lludd, the King of the Britons, decides that he really has to do something about this, but luckily his younger brother, Llevelys, who is the King of France, has had similar dragon issues, so he goes to meet him to ask for his advice. To make sure that they don’t get spotted by the dragons they meet on ships in the middle of the English Channel10 and Llevelys tells Lludd what he needs to do:

When you arrive home, have the length and breadth of the island measured, and where you find the exact centre, have a pit dug. In the pit, place a vat full of the best mead that can be made, and cover the vat with a silk sheet.

The idea is that the dragons will be attracted to the mead, gorge themselves upon it and fall into a drunken stupor. The sheet can be dropped upon them, trapping the beasts, and Lludd can then do with them as he sees fit. The King follows this advice and gets his men to measure the country so as to find its centre. After much careful work this turned out to be Rhydychen, which is the Welsh name for Oxford. The pit is dug, the mead procured, and just as predicted the dragons fall into the trap and are captured! Lludd then locks them in a stone chest and buries them beneath a mountain in Snowdonia (also known as “Eryri”).

But where in Oxford was this pit dug? In his wonderful book The Ancient Paths Graham Robb makes the case that the true centre of Oxford, the omphalos, is in fact Osney. Not necessarily in the sense of it being the pure geographic centre, but rather that it was the confluence of ancient Celtic paths and that as such it had a deep spiritual significance. Were you to trap dragons anywhere in Oxford, then it would be here. And this older sense of importance could well explain why Osney was perhaps where Frideswide’s first Abbey was built, and why Edith Forne’s was definitely constructed here – the place has religious saliency that goes back millennia.

If it was in Osney, then where? Some years ago Andrew (the other half of Histories) and I spent a summer’s afternoon circumnavigating Osney Island with the support of a bottle of wine (not exactly an arduous task). We then set about finding the centre, the place where the dragon pit had been dug. And after some walking and consulting of maps we determined that it was here, on an unremarkable stretch of road near the end of a footbridge over the railway.

Unremarkable or not, I can’t help but think that the nine-year-old me, on being told this story, would have been slack-jawed in wonder at the thought that possibly, a long time ago, there had once been dragons on this spot…

Subscribe now

It turns out that the practice of throwing shapes with your hands to settle disputes or win friendly bets is both much older than I would have imagined and a surprisingly recent arrival in the West. The earliest mention of a game like this can be found in the book written by Xie Zhaozhe (alive around the year 1600) which describes it as being played during the later Han Dynasty (947- 951 CE):1

In the Later Han, when various generals and high ministers gathered at banquets, they played a “hand-gesture command” (shǒushìlìng, 手勢令). Its method was: the palm represented a “tiger’s breastplate”; the finger joints, “pine roots”; the thumb, a “crouching owl”; the index finger, a “hooked halberd”; the middle finger, a “jade pillar”; the ring finger, a “submerged dragon”; the little finger, “surprise troops”; the wrist, the “three Luo”; and the five fingers, “strange peaks.” But I do not know how its rules were actually used. Nowadays, children in the lanes have a game of grabbing the middle finger—could that not preserve its leftover idea? Yet for generals and ministers to do this was already quite improper; and that Shi Hongzhao, because he did not understand it, drew his sword and cursed at others is even more laughable — eventually it opened the way to a calamity of family slaughter. Alas!

Clearly this version is more complex than the three-choice set that exists today, and as noted in the text, we don’t know how it was played. Li Rihua (1565–1635) also recorded a description of something similar in Note of Liuyanzahi (probably compiled around the time of his death in 1635) and makes it clear that this was a popular drinking game:

In common drinking [games], people use their fingers—bending and extending them and ‘contending’ (matching/striking) with each other—this is called huoquan (豁拳), also called huozhitou (豁指頭). It works by watching from a distance how many fingers a person extends or retracts, using hidden tactics and competing for speed. I very much dislike it, because it becomes a gateway, little by little, to changing seats and noisy shouting.

By the 1600s the game had travelled from China to Japan, and this is where the now familiar set of three moves developed (though as we shall see, they have different names in the many iterations of the game). As a group they are called sansukumi-ken (ken of the three who are afraid of one another). From the 18952 book Korean games with notes on the corresponding games of China and Japan by Stewart Culin we find a description of the game we know today:

The same name, Ken, is applied in Japan to a large number of games played by two persons with the hands and fingers. One of the commonest of these games is Ishi Ken, or "Stone ken', usually called Janken, In Ishi Ken the fist is called ishi, "stone”; “the open hand”, kami, "paper," and the extended index finger and thumb, hasami, "scissors" The players extend their hands simultaneously. Stone beats scissors, as scissors will not cut stone. Paper beats stone, as paper will wrap up stone, and scissors beat paper, as scissors cut paper. Janken is often used to decide who shall perform some duty or task. Thus, jinrikisha men play it to determine which is entitled to a passenger. In this case it is customary to cry "one, two, three," which is uttered as a thrice-repeated hissing sound before each decisive movement of the hand.

I am a little sad that this is the version I learned, rather than Reptile Ken which Culin goes onto describe:

MushiKen, or " Reptile Ken'' is played like Janken, The thumb is called hebi, "snake”; “the forefinger”, kairu, "frog"; and the little finger, namekuji, "slug." The snake beats the frog, the frog the slug, and the slug the snake.3

Some versions of the game involved more than just the hands. Tora-ken (Tiger-ken) involves Watonai (a warrior hero popular in early 18th century Japanese theatre) who beats the Tiger, who beat’s Watonai’s mother, who in turn beats Watonai. The standard set of three, but the players would enact their selection using their entire bodies – crouching for the tiger, standing tall as the warrior, and stooping as the aged mother. You may be wondering how readily this could be played, as surely it would take time to adopt the various positions, clueing the selection the player was making? It seems that the answer was that the players would make their choices on either side a screen, which would be pulled away to reveal the outcome as shown in this woodcut of 1809:

If you wanted to do something more than simply decide who buys the next round, or has to down a shot, then there was a more grown-up version of the game that uses both hands as Culin once more explains:

These may be regarded more as play than as serious games. Such is not always the case with the following game of Ken commonly known as Kitsune Ken, or “Fox Ken.” In Kitsune Ken, the two hands slightly bent forward and raised to the ears is called kitsune, “fox”; the two hands placed on the thighs in the respectful posture, shdya, “the headman of a village”; and the extended forefinger, teppo, “gun.”

In this game kitsune beats shdya, because the fox can deceive the man ; the shdya beats teppo, because the gun may not shoot the magistrate, but the teppo beats the kitsune, because the gun kills the fox. There are a great variety of positions in which the hands may be placed to represent the figures in Kitsune Ken, no less than twenty-five4 different attitudes being used for kitsune, and ten, it is said, for shdya,

This wasn’t simply a game, it was a full-on spectator sport:

Kitsune Ken is said to be more properly called To Hachi Ken, after an itinerant quack doctor named To Hachi,5 some two hundred years ago, when the game was very popular. Instruction is regularly given in Hachi Ken by teachers of the game, who are usually schoolmasters. In Tokyo matches are held at places devoted to the game, such as the Kotobuki Tei. The announcement is made by circulars and an admission is charged. Many hundred spectators assemble, and from 70 to 120 contests are held during the day and evening. A structure, shi hon bashira, “four posts,” consisting of a square pavilion, supported by four bamboo posts, is erected for the players. This pavilion is similar, only smaller, to that used in wrestling, and the posts are colored in the same manner – green, red, white, and black – to represent the four seasons.

The players sit opposite to each other at the sides of the pavilion, within which a small narrow table, ken dai, is placed, upon which they rest their elbows. Two umpires, called Gyoji and Mukogyoji, who have fans, gumbai, like those used by umpires in wrestling sit on the other sides. At the corners are four men called Toshiyori, “Elders,” who watch the game. They are usually experts who have retired from contests. They are appealed to when a controversy arises. They are called respectively: Asakusa, Shiba, Kanda, and Kojimachi, Toshiyoti, from the four principal wards of Tokyo, which they are supposed to represent. Small prizes are given, such as inexpensive watches or kimono (coats) to the successful players.

It is hard to say exactly when awareness of the game began to spread from Japan to the West, but it seems likely that the 1910 book Home Life in Tokyo by Jukichi Inouye played a role:

There is a curious diversion called the game of ken, or fists, which, its name notwithstanding, has nothing to do with pugilism. The principle of the game is that there are three positions of the hands or fingers, each one of which beats one and is beaten by the other, of the remaining two. The game is played with one or two hands. That played with both hands is called the fox-ken; its three positions are the putting of the open hands with the palms outward close to the temples in imitation of the fox, the stretching out of the right arm with the hand closed while the left hand is brought to the breast, which represents the huntsman with a gun, and the placing of both hands on the knees to show the staid manners of the village headman. The fox may bewitch the headman as that animal is popularly believed to possess magical powers, but may be killed by the huntsman, who, however, must not shoot the headman; thus, the fox beats the headman, who beats the huntsman, who, in his turn, beats the fox.

The game is played by two persons, who must move their hands with uniform rapidity, for the game is spoilt if either side moves more quickly or slowly than the other. It is a favourite game at convivial parties, especially if one of the parties is a geisha, though it is not so popular now as it used to be. The person who beats the other three times running is declared the winner, and the defeated party has, as forfeit, to drink a cup of sake.6 The stone-ken is played with one hand; in this the closed hand represents a stone, the open hand a piece of paper, and two fingers or a finger and the thumb spread out a pair of scissors; the stone may be wrapped in the paper, but is proof against the scissors, which may, however, cut the paper. This ken is played less often as a game than for deciding in a case where one would toss a coin in England, for tossing up is unknown in Japan.

Certainly by 1916 it was well known enough to get name-checked in The Campfire Girls go Motoring by the wonderfully named Hildegard G. Frey. Here it is called “John Kempo” a phonetic Anglicisation of the standard chant じゃんけんぽん (jankenpon, often rendered jan-ken-pon) — the cry used to start rock–paper–scissors in Japanese.

As there didn’t seem to be much difference between them we played ‘John Kempo’ and the northern route won, two out of three.

Hang on, you7 might be thinking, surely the game came to the USA much earlier, for it is sometimes called Rochambeau? So yes, it is claimed that the even more wonderfully named Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), the French army officer who played a key role in achieving the American victory at the siege of Yorktown played the game and gave his name to it. Specifically it is said that he, George Washington, and Cornwallis (the British commander) used it to determine who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. There is, alas, no historical evidence to back this up. The earliest association I can find between his name and the game dates from 1936.

The game is, when you think about it rather odd. The best strategy is to have no strategy at all, to make purely random selections, hard though this might be. That way you can ensure that you don’t provide any clues to your opponent as to what your next move is. In theory a person with sharp eyes, and even sharper reflexes, can guess the shape you are going to make as your hand comes forwards, and rapidly pre-empt it, but really is a form of cheating, I think. And if that approach is allowed, then it turns out that humans can be defeated every single time by, appropriately enough, a Japanese robot with cameras and micro-second reaction times. You can watch a video of it doing just there here!

Subscribe now

To this day a festival takes places each year in Ypres, Belgium, called Kattenstoet1 which is devoted to cats. There is a cat parade, people dress up (oftentimes as cats), there are simply massive floats that look like cats. “Hang on,” you might think, “you don’t seem to be making a very good case here, you are talking about an adorable cat celebration!” Well, yes, today it may seem to be an adorable celebration of all things feline, but the origin of the tradition is much more gruesome. You see, kattensteot ends each year with someone dressed as a jester throwing toy cats off the top of the belfry2 of the cloth hall down to the square below.

Originally real, live, cats were thrown from the tower to their death or serious injury on the ground. It is unclear exactly how the tradition started. One theory is that over the winter the cats helped protect the wool that was stored in the call by keeping down the mouse population. In the spring the wool was sold, the cats were no longer needed so obviously the only thing to do with them was take them up to the top of the tower and throw them off. An alternative explanation is that cats were associated with witchcraft, and by killing the cats one was also killing evil spirits. We will learn more about cats and witches in a minute, but in case you think that I am being unfair to the good people of Ypres by mentioning a gruesome tradition from the ancient past, this might shock you. The last time that real cats were thrown from the top of the tower was 1817, little more than two hundred years ago.

Why did the Europeans hate cats? Well, to put it simply they thought that they were evil. For sure, they were handy to have around for killing mice and suchlike, but they really couldn’t be trusted at all. Why was this? Well, in Christian teachings the act of a cat playing with a mouse was often likened to the say in which the devil would play with a sinner before ultimately casting them down to a eternity of damnation and torture in hell. In 1484 Willian Caxton wrote in his Royal Book:

The devyl playeth ofte with the synnar, lyke as the catte doth with the mous.

Cats were not simply considered to be allegories of the devil, some also believed that they actually were a facet of the great Satan himself, taken beastial form to represent him on Earth, do dire deeds, and be worshiped by witches and heretics. The concept of cat-as-the-devil can be traced back to the 12th century and St Bartholomew of Farne. Obviously he wasn’t actually a saint at that point,3 but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that he used to fight against the devil, really quite often. In these battles the devil would take the form of a mouse. Or a lion. Or a bull. Or an ape. Or (finally) a cat. Now it may seem a little odd that only the cat got associated with the devil as a result, but the reason seems to be that the whole “cat playing with a mouse is like the devil playing with a sinner” thing had already set people against them.

Around the same time that Bartholomew was fighting a devilish cat the Welsh writer (and later archdeacon of Oxford) Walter Map was stoking the anti-cat fire. In his book De nugis curialium (which roughly translates as “Trinkets for the Court”) he wrote about the heretical activities of the Publicans4 and the Patarines. Anyway, Map wrote of the devil-worshiping practices of these heretics. In them the devil would appear to them in the form of a black cat. After he had appeared the Satanists would then, err, extinguish all of their lamps and fumble around in the dark until they could get their hands on the cat. Having grasped the feline, sorry, the devil, they would demonstrate their devotion to him by, um, kissing him under the tail. Whatever these people actually believed I have to say that you have to be pretty dedicated to kiss a cat’s bum to prove it. Whilst this probably sounds totally absurd it was very bad news for cats, and also for humans (particularly women) who liked cats. De nugis curialium, and manuscripts like it, played a role in defining medieval notions of witchcraft, and cats were very much a part of it.

The practice of “black cat bum kissing” astonishingly appears multiple times in the literature of the period. A few decades later Willam of Auvergne wrote in Tractatus de fide et legibus of Cathars and Waldensians taking turns to kiss the bottom of a black cat described as being the size of a small dog (possibly he could have just said “a cat the size of a large cat”). Alan of Lille wrote of the Cathars:

Vel Cathari dicuntur a cato, quia, ut dicitur, osculantur posteriora catti, in cujius specie, ut dicunt, apparet eis Lucifer5

Not long afterwards the devilish nature of cats acquired an official status that was to haunt them for centuries to come. The German preacher Konrad von Marburg claimed to have uncovered a Satanic cult that worshiped a diabolical black cat. “Uncovered” in this context needs to have the slight caveat that the people involved confessed to their behaviour when tortured to the point of death, so maybe it wasn’t totally true. It was, however, good enough proof for Pope Gregory IX to establish the Papal Inquisition, and to issue the decree Vox in Rama which called for a crusade against such heresy.

This decree goes into some detail about the rites of the heretics. A ceremony that involved meeting a giant toad, and kissing a skinny white man, ended with a statue of a black cat coming to life. This living statue-puss would walk backwards towards the participants with its tail raised in the air so that the master of the sect, and any new initiates, could kiss it on the bum. From then on cats in general and black ones in particular, were considered to be highly suspicious.

The specific connection between witches and cats dates from around the same time. Gervase of Tilbury, a favourite of King Henry the Second, wrote in his Otia Imperialia6 of witches who flew through the air at night and could change their shape to take on the form of a cat. Unluckily for the cats, he also claimed that if a witch was wounded when in the shape of a cat, her injuries would remain when she retook human form. This basically gave people free rein to abuse cats, on the off-chance that some were transformed witches who they could identify later on by looking for injured women. It pretty much goes without saying that in a culture where there were high levels of spousal abuse it wasn’t going to be that hard to find women with cuts and bruises and so the process appeared to confirm its own validity.

There is an extensive list of folk tales that tell some form of the “woman and cat sharing injuries story”. From the Netherlands there is the story of a cat that has a pan of hot butter thrown over it, only to reappear as an old woman, covered in burns the following day. In both Norway and Germany tale is told of a cat that had its paw cut off, only for the following day the miller’s wife to be missing a hand.7 And other versions also exist from Wales, Austria, and the USA where the woman isn’t necessarily the miller’s wife, but the whole severed paw/hand thing happens.

Things really came to a head in 1486 when Heinrich Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum.8 This was basically an all-purpose guide that taught you all about witches and what to do with them.9 It was a prime text in the witch trials that, over the following centuries, resulted in around 50,000 people (mostly women, mostly over the age of 40) being burned at the stake. In the book Kramer restates the “women as cats” myth with a story in which a man beats off an attack from three cats, only to be thrown in prison a short time later, accused of assaulting three “matrons of the town”. Things are looking bad for this chap – he is facing a sentence of death, when the wise magistrates realise that of course there was some devilish connection between the women and the cats and he is quite innocent of the crimes of which he has been accused. As for the fate of the women, the book does not recount, but Kramer makes it perfectly clear that they were in no-way innocent bystanders – they had to have formed a pact with the devil. I find it hard to imagine that things worked out well for them…

You may be thinking that such absurd (and utterly horrendous) beliefs are artefacts long consigned to Europe’s past. If so, you may be in for a shock. The last victim of a witch-hunt in England, was “Dummy” the Witch of Sible Hedingham,10 in 1863. Yes, Victorian England with its railways, telegraphs, industry, and science. And witch hunts. Poor Dummy was an elderly deaf-mute man. He worked as a fortune teller, and was accused by one Emma Smith of cursing her with a disease.11 A drunk mob threw him in a brook, beat him with sticks, and he died as a result. Smith and a friend of hers who led the mob were caught, tried, and convicted of causing his death.12 That isn’t even the last killing of a witch. In Ireland, in 1895, Bridget Clearly was beaten and burned to death by her husband because he believed that his “real” wife had been taken away by fairies and replaced her with a witch. And in 1997 - yes 1997 - two Russian farmers killed a woman and injured five members of her family because they believed that she had used folk magic against them.13

Rumours abound that centuries of cat persecution in Europe ultimate came back to bite the humans who carried it out. It has been claimed that the reduced numbers of cats allowed rats and mice to flourish. The rats in particular were hosts for the fleas that carried the bubonic plague that ravaged the continent on multiple occasions from the 14th to 18th centuries. The evidence to back up this theory really doesn’t exist though. It is possible that the demonisation of cats reduced their numbers sufficiently for there to be slightly high numbers of rats around, but the impact is likely to be trivial. Despite the church and various obsessed citizens taking issue with cats (and the people who lived with cats) there were still a hell of a lot of cats around.

One reason we can be sure of this is actually due to the outbreak of the Black Death in London in 1665. In order to slow the spread of the disease the mayor ordered the killing of all of the cats and the dogs in the city (as it was thought, wrongly, that they were, at least in part, responsible for transmitting it). This was an estimated total of 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats. Given that the population of London at the time was around 460,000 people that works out at more than one cat per household on average. To put this in context, there are thought to be 580,000 cats living in London today, with a human population of nearly 9 million people. There were a lot more cats per head of the population 350 years ago even though we don’t think that they are manifestations of the devil any more.

Franz Helm of Cologne an artillery master14 in the first half of the 16th century wanted to make things even worse for cats. Five hundred years ago there weren’t really such things as artillery battles – two forces opposing each other on the opposite sides of a field and firing things at each other. No, artillery was used to overcome besieged cities, by smashing holes in their defences or setting them on fire. Helm was an expert in this field, and in 1625 a collection of his works was published as the influential Armamentarium principale oder Kriegsmunition und Artillerie-Buch.15 In this tome he critically assessed all of the existing means of attacking cities (including many detailed in 1420’s Feuerwerkbuch)16 as well as suggesting a number of innovative means of attack.

In order to set fire to well-fortified cities that were impregnable to other forms of attack Helm proposed the use of the “rocket-cat”. Now you may think that is some kind of mistranslation, or misunderstanding. Surely he didn’t propose using cats with rockets attached to them? Nah. He did. He totally did. How did the “rocket-cat” work? Helm usefully explains what to do in the text:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow ... if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.

Thankfully there is no evidence that anyone ever actually followed Helm’s advice. It has been pointed out that whilst you may be able to strap a load of burning stuff and explosives to the back of a cat you sure as hell can’t control where they are going to run to. The poor, freaked-out, animals are just going to go crazy and run in all directions. Quite possibly into your own camp, setting that on fire instead.

Well, at least more recent military minds don’t have such bat-shit crazy ideas about using wild animals as incendiary devices! Hold that thought for a second. During the Second World War the United States military came up with something called the “bat-bomb”. The concept was simple. Take a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat. Actually, take a thousand of them. Stick them into a large bomb casing. Oh, wait, before you do they attached a 14 gramme (0.5 ounce) timed napalm incendiary bomb to each bat. Then drop the bat-bomb over Tokyo (where many houses were made of wood and paper). As the bomb wafts down on its parachute the bomb casing would spring open, releasing (and, presumably, rudely awakening) the bats. The bats (a little bleary-eyed) would head to the nearest places to roost. The bombs would detonate, Tokyo would burn to the ground. Simple.

The man behind the bat-bomb was a dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams who believed that bats were created:

…by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life.

President Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of this plan, and said of Adams:

This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.17

This wasn’t just some crazy theoretical exercise. The USA actually built and tested bat-bombs. In the first test the bats were accidentally released early and roosted under a fuel tank. Which they ignited. Incinerating the test range. Ultimately the project got canned because it was decided that nuclear weapons would be more effective.

I have tried to find some positive medieval European descriptions of cats and it has been a bit of struggle. There is this from 1397 in De proprietatibus rerum (“On the properties of things”) by Bartholomaeus Anglicus which starts okay, but then, err, gets pretty bad:

He [the cat] is a full lecherous beast in youth, swift, pliant, and merry, and leapeth and reseth on everything that is to fore him: and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith: and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice: and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and reseth on them in privy places: and when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play. In time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grievously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with another: and unneth is hurt when he is thrown down off an high place. And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about: and when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home; and is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.

Although it took centuries, views did begin to change and this is perhaps best signified by the 1727 book Les Chats by François Augustine de Paradis de Moncrif (1687-1770). This is probably the first book dedicated exclusively to cats and whilst it is in part a satire upon the French upper classes at the time it is nonetheless clear in its affections for our feline friends. It ends, as I now shall as well (in part, at least), with the 1558 poem Épitaphe d’un chat by Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560):

Now living makes me angry;

And so, Magny, that you may know,
Why I am so distraught,
It is not for having lost
My rings, my money, my purse;

And why is it then? Because
I have lost for three days
My possessions, my pleasure, my loves.

And what? Oh, grievous memory!
My heart almost bursts,
When I speak of it, or when I write of it:
It is Belaud, my little gray cat:
Belaud, who was by chance
The most beautiful work that Nature
Ever made in matters of cats:
He was Belaud, the death of rats,
Belaud, whose beauty was such,
That it is worthy of immortality.

Subscribe now

Evidence has been found of cats living around humans in China around 5,300 years ago. It is not clear that they were what we would consider to be domesticated cats, but the handful of bones recovered from an ancient refuse pit indicate that they were smaller than wild cats and much more likely to be similar to the domesticated cats that were living in Egypt at the same time. It is possible that the practice of keeping cats spread from Africa to Asia, or that it emerged independently in both places – we simply can’t be sure. Certainly by around 2,000 years ago cats were widely kept in ancient China and held in considerable regard. This has caused some people to wonder why the cat is not one of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. There is a myth that says the animals were chosen by the Jade Emperor by holding a race – the first 12 to finish would be selected. As the cat was nocturnal and would normally be sleeping during the day when the race was going to be held it asked its friend the rat to wake it before the race was due to start. The rat, alas, broke its promise leaving the cat happily snoozing, and in so doing gained a place in the zodiac itself. When the cat finally awoke it was, to put it bluntly, very cross with the rat, and swore vengeance upon it and all of its enemies. And that is why, to this day, cats are ferocious hunters of rats.

Cats spread to Japan via China, possibly as early as the sixth century, and were likely first presented as gifts to members of Japanese nobility. The kanji character for the Japanese word for cat neko (猫) looks like the Chinese word kone: “likes rats”. They were certainly well established in the Imperial Court more than a thousand years ago. We can be sure of this because of the diary of Emperor Uda who ruled Japan from 887 through 897. The entry that he wrote on the 11th March 889 is titled For the Love of a Cat and I think that it is one of most beautiful love-letters to a cat ever written:

On the 6th Day of the 2nd Month of the First Year of the Kampo era. Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat. It arrived by boat as a gift to the late Emperor, received from the hands of Minamoto no Kuwashi.

The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink. It has an air about it, similar to Kanno. Its length is 5 sun, and its height is 6 sun. I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.1

In rebellion, it narrows its eyes and extends its needles. It shows its back.

When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds.

By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night. I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.2

Uda was not the only Japanese emperor to be fond of felines. Emperor Ichijo who reigned a century later owned a beast that he named Myoby no Otodo, which translates as Chief-Lady-in Waiting-of-the Inner Palace – a very fancy title indeed! Myoby no Otodo had more than just a title – she had actual, human, ladies-in-waiting to tend to her needs,3 and the emperor instructed his tailor to make tiny suits of clothing for her and her kittens. That is very sweet (I should note that this happened in the year 999 when the emperor was only 13 years old) but if Myoby was like the cats I have known then I think she was probably a bit pissed off at being made to play dress-up.

Now, you may be thinking “hang on, surely commoners (that is “working folks”) couldn’t be allowed to live in the Imperial Court of Japan?”. Okay, so you probably weren’t, but if you had been you would have been quite correct. In order for his beloved cats to live in the court Emperor Ichijo decreed that cats were not allowed to work, and they were officially part of the aristocracy, specifically the “Fifth Order of the Court”. This life of feline leisure astonishingly lasted more than six hundred years until 1602. At that time rats and mice were causing a serious threat to Japan’s crucial silk trade (they like to eat the silk worms) and so the government was forced to act. A decree was issued that made it illegal to house or feed cats, or to sell them or give them as gifts. Pretty much overnight cats were cast out of their comfortable homes and forced to fend for themselves, which must have been a bit of a shock to the kitties concerned. It would certainly have been very tough for them, but as far as the government was concerned the law worked. Without humans to feed them the cats decimated the rodent population and saved the silk trade.

These imperial cats were very distinctive in that they had very short bobtails, and they exist to this day as the Japanese Bobtail breed. This distinctive feature is the result of a genetic mutation in the cats originally brought over from China. At least that is what scientists will tell you based upon their DNA analysis and suchlike. The real reason is somewhat different. Originally Japanese cats had long tails, just like all of the others. Then disaster struck. Many years ago a cat was curled up by a fire on a cold winter’s day. A bit too close to the fire it turned out… Its tail caught alight and the poor kitty ran in panic through the city, accidentally setting fire to many buildings in the process. The emperor, seeing his magnificent capital reduced to ashes, was furious. He decreed that all cats should have their tails chopped off to ensure that it never happened again.4

Another legendary Japanese cat is more fondly remembered. You may well have seen a small model cat in a shop or restaurant window (or indeed a home) with its paw raised. There are also battery and solar powered versions where the paw bobs up and down waving. It actually isn’t waving at you – the Japanese gesture to beckon is made by holding up the hand, palm down, and folding the fingers back and forth. That is why this is the Maneki-neko, the “beckoning cat”. Maneki-neko are believed to bring their owners good luck and there are a number of stories about why this may be the case. One is that its gesture is similar to the movement a cat makes when it is washing its face, and there is an ancient Japanese belief that when a cat washes its face a visitor is soon to arrive (I should note that if a visitor arrived every time the cat I live with washed its face there wouldn’t be any room left in my home). This belief possibility originated from an old Chinese proverb that says that when a cat washes its face then rain is coming. Why is rain going to bring visitors (and, indeed, be lucky)? Well, if you run a shop or inn, rain is good for business as people will come inside to shelter from it. Statues of cats washing their ears that are more than 1,500 years old have been found in China, and these could be the earliest forms of Maneki-neko.

There are a couple of alternative stories that may explain why this beckoning cat is considered to be lucky. One is that the 17th century samurai Li Naotaka was caught in a torrential storm and took shelter under a tree. Looking out through the rain he saw a cat sitting in a nearby temple, waving its paw in a beckoning manner. Intrigued he headed over to the temple to find out why the cat was calling him over (or maybe because he just wanted to give the kitty a quick fuss, the story is unclear on this point). When he got to the cat the tree he had previously been sheltering under got struck by lightning, were it not for the cat, he would have surely died! Another tale tells of a poor shopkeeper who took pity upon a stray, starving cat and shared his meager supplies of food with it. To thank him the cat would sit in his window and beckon in customers and the business flourished as a result.

The reverence with which cats were held in Japan is maintained to this day, most notably on the island of Tashirojima. In the 18th century the silk was, like many other places in Japan, a hugely important industry, and as we have learned cats were vital to saving this trade from the attacks of rats and mice. Being an island there was no way for cats to naturally migrate to the area, so they were imported by the industrious locals and allowed to flourish. In addition to silk production, fishing was an important industry on Tashirojima and this worked out well for the cats. Not only were there lots of scraps of fish lying around, the fishermen believed that the cats brought them good luck, and that the behaviour of the cats could be used to predict the weather and the locations of fish. In order to help bring in a good catch the fishermen would ensure that the cats were well fed.

Tragedy struck one day when a cat was killed by a falling rock whilst the fishermen were working. The men were so upset that they buried the cat and raised a shrine to it – a Nekoj-inja. Over the years more shrines were built for cats and as a result there are now more than ten on this tiny island. As the fishing and silk industries slowed, so the population of the island reduced and it is now home to around 70, generally older, humans. The story is somewhat different for the cats, they are now believed to number more than 500, so many in fact that Tashirojima is now known as “Cat Island”. Most of these cats are what we would term feral, but that does not mean that they are unloved and poorly cared for. The islanders continue to feed them and tend to their needs, with a special team of volunteers called Nyanko Kyouwakoku. That whole notion of cats bringing good luck and wealth? Well, for the people of Tashirojima it looks like it is true. Thousands of tourists visit the island each year to see their amazing cats! And what about cats predicting what is going to happen in the seas, surely that can’t be true too? Well, probably not in the way that the sailors thought hundreds of years ago, but something happened fairly recently that suggests that cats can sense things in nature that are invisible to us. In 2011 the island was struck by the tsunami caused by the Tohoku earthquake (don’t worry, both cats and humans got through it okay). Before the waters arrived a number of the cats were seen to be behaving very strangely, yowling at things that weren’t there and generally being very stressed out. Were they trying to warn the humans who had looked after them for so long? I’d like to think that perhaps they were.

The respect shown to cats in the Middle East is in part a result of how highly they are revered in Islam, and the prophet Muhammad was known to love the creatures. His favourite cat was named Muezza and there are numerous stories about her. One tells how she bowed to the prophet one day as he returned from the mosque, he stroked her three times in return and gave her the power to always land on her feet if she fell. In another she was sleeping on the sleeve of his robe when the call to prayer sounded. Rather than move and wake the cat Muhammad instead cut the sleeve off his robe allowing her to continue to sleep peacefully. One of Muhammad’s companions was known as Abu Hurairah which literally translates as “Father of a Kitten” a name bestowed due to his huge affection for felines. Abu Hurairah once said that Muhammad declared that a woman who starved a kitten and didn’t even give it water was destined to go to hell. Another companion of the prophet, Abu Saeed reportedly owned a cat who once saved Muhammad from a poisonous snake. There is also said to be a connection between the markings on cats and Islam. Muhammad petted the cat that had saved his life from the snake and left four dark lines on its forehead. Similarly the “M”-shaped marking on the heads of tabby cats is said to arise from him gently resting his hand on Muezza.

Because cats are so obsessed with washing themselves they are considered in Islamic tradition to be ritually clean which means that they are free to enter people’s homes and even mosques. Indeed cats are so clean that water they have drunk from is permitted to be used for wudu, the ritual washing of the body. It isn’t just Japan that has places dedicated to cats. In Aleppo, Syria, there used to be a compound known as Jami al-Qitat which translates as “Mosque of the Cats”. It is said to have been built as a cat hospital by a wealthy merchant, Osman Pasha, in 1730 to thank the feisty felines for ridding his granaries of rats and mice. Now, you might be thinking that might have been a couple of rooms and a handful of cats. If so, you are way off in terms of scale. Victorian travellers reported hundreds, sometimes even thousands of cats being fed each day on a special feeding ground. There was also a special nursery for kittens and a hospice for elderly cats to live out their final days in comfort. Osman Pasha left sufficient funds in his will to ensure that the operations could continue for decades after his death. This may sound like a lovely thing to you, but European visitors in the 19th century found it, well, pretty appalling. One traveller expressed surprise at the fact that the Muslims of Aleppo refused to drown kittens (as that was common practice in Europe at the time) and commented:

How strange it is, that Christianity should be harder towards animals than the inferior religions, just as slavery is worst among Christian nations.

In ancient Perisa the attitude to cats was somewhat different. In Zoroastrian mythology they were said to have been the unholy product of sex between the human woman Jamak and a devil. Far from being the epitome of cleanliness they were classed as a hated “wolf species”. It was said that if a cat ate from a bowl it would still be unclean even if it had been washed seven times. Were a cat to urinate in water then it would kill all of the fishes in the sea. It wasn’t just fish that they could kill – if a person ate food that had been touched – even fleetingly – by the whiskers of a cat they would then waste away and die.

Despite all of these stories it seems that cats were much loved by the Persians and, as in many other places, played a valuable role in keeping down the populations of rats and mice. According to legend, this fact was once used for political advantage. King Khosrow II who ruled Iran from the late sixth and early seventh centuries sent an evil man named Ray to be the governor of the city of his rival Bahram Chobin. Once settled, Ray ordered all of the cats in the city to be killed, which led to a massive explosion in the population of rats and mice. So much so that the people were forced to flee the city. The tale goes on to say that the city was ultimately saved by the Queen, who gave a playful kitten to Khosrow and in so doing persuaded him to let the cats return.

Much like their contemporaries in Japan, Persian royalty at the end of the first millennium were very attached to their feline friends. Prince Rukn al-Dawla was noted for his adoration for his cat-friend. So much so that when people wanted to petition him for favours they would tie their requests around the neck of his cat because in that way he was sure to see them. One Sufi sheik was also said to love his cat so much that he had tiny shoes5 made for it so that it could sleep on his prayer carpet without its claws damaging the costly material.

Persian cats, those glorious balls of floof, have their own creation myth. The great hero Rostam6 is said to have once saved a magician from a gang of thieves. The magician wanted to repay the man who had saved his life, but Rostam told him that he had everything he desired in the world. The magician took that as a challenge, and decided to create something that the great hero had no idea that he desired. He sat by the fire and took up a handful of smoke, a pinch of fire, and reached up to grab the brightest star in the sky. He mixed them all up together and then opened his hands and there sat a perfect Persian kitten. Its soft fur was like a cloud of smoke, its eyes glinting like starlight, and its tiny pink tongue like a tongue of flame.

In my final piece in this mini-series I’ll be exploring the history of cats in medieval Europe (spoiler, it wasn’t great for much of time) including a hare-brained scheme to use them as a weapon of war…

Good riddance? 1661

The Restoration of Britain’s monarchy in 1660 did not simply bring Charles II back to the throne; it reopened old wounds from the Civil Wars. None cut deeper than the execution of Charles I in 1649 – which happened on 30th January, in fact.1 Eleven years later, on the anniversary of that regicide, the restored regime staged an extraordinary act of symbolic vengeance: the posthumous execution of Oliver Cromwell, who had died peacefully in 1658. His corpse – exhumed, dragged to Tyburn, hanged, beheaded and displayed – was meant to rewrite memory itself: to show that even death did not absolve a regicide.

Londoners did not experience this as an abstract political lesson, but as a macabre public spectacle. Surprising, the diary of Samuel Pepys, who was generally present at all the big occasions in that era, does not directly cover this event, but he does say that his wife and a friend “are lately come back again from being abroad, and seeing of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw hanged and buried at Tyburn”. However, the editors of Pepys’s diary2 also quote a contemporary news journal, Thomas Rugge’s ‘Diurnal’, also known as Mercurius Politicus Redivivus:

This morning the carcasses of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw (which the day before had been brought from the Red Lion Inn, Holborn), were drawn upon a sledge to Tyburn, and then taken out of their coffins, and in their shrouds hanged by the neck, until the going down of the sun. They were then cut down, their heads taken off, and their bodies buried in a grave made under the gallows. The coffin in which was the body of Cromwell was a very rich thing, very full of gilded hinges and nails.

And for a more energised account, we need to turn to our old friend John Evelyn, 17th-century Britain’s other great diarist:

This day (Oh, the stupendous and inscrutable judgments of God!) were the carcasses of those arch-rebels, Cromwell, Bradshawe (the judge who condemned his Majesty), and Ireton (son-in-law to the Usurper), dragged out of their superb tombs in Westminster among the Kings, to Tyburn, and hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument in a deep pit; thousands of people who had seen them in all their pride being spectators. Look back at October 22, 1658 [the entry where Evelyn describes Cromwell’s funeral] and be astonished! and fear God and honor the King; but meddle not with them who are given to change!

Cromwell’s head remained on a spike above Westminster Hall for decades,3 a permanent warning embedded into London’s skyline. (We met Cromwell in better times a few months ago.)

Subscribe now

Not quite goodbye, 1835

30th January is also a significant date in the life of another polarising figure in politics, this time in the United States. Andrew Jackson was a war hero turned populist president, he inspired fierce loyalty – and equally fierce hatred. On 30th January, as Jackson exited the US Capitol after a funeral service for a congressman, a house painter named Richard Lawrence stepped forward and fired a pistol at point-blank range. It misfired. Lawrence drew a second pistol. It misfired too. What followed was chaos, disbelief and one of the strangest scenes in presidential history: an elderly president beating his would-be assassin with a cane.

Private letters written in the days immediately after the attempt show how shocking the event felt to contemporaries, who had never imagined a president could be attacked so directly. For example, three days after the event, an eyewitness we only know as ‘H’ wrote the following to his wife:4

Nothing more of consequence is known of the man who attempted the President’s life… His name is Lawrence – a painter by trade and an Englishman by birth. His father died in this city where this fellow has long resided. The Opposition contend earnestly that he is insane. I have seen nothing as yet to make me believe it. The pistols were well laded – and it is impossible to account upon any known principles for their not going off.

I believe a special Providence saved the old Hero’s life. He (the Genl) behaved most gallantly upon the occasion, & if he had not been jerked back by his friend, would probably have knocked the 2nd pistol out of the fellow’s hand by striking his arm with a cane, – & would then have laid him out by another blow over the head!!! They say he was a foot taller than usual! He was the coolest man on the ground & can tell more about it than anyone else. He says after this he will lock arms with no man. Then his hands & arms will be free.

When his friends crowded close around him he said stand back gentlemen, I shall be stabbed by some unseen hand! Few men would have thought of it – but the precaution was very proper. An Assassin would run his arm thus between two men in a crowd and stab him – and no one see who did it. It is a great blessing to the Country that he did not fall. The excitement would have been fearful indeed!

Lawrence was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity, becoming the first person in US history acquitted on that basis in a presidential assassination attempt. Jackson emerged bloodied but triumphant, reinforcing his image as indestructible. More quietly, the event reshaped thinking about presidential security and criminal insanity. The misfiring pistols – later blamed on damp weather – gave the episode an almost supernatural quality for contemporaries, many of whom believed Jackson had been spared by providence. Lawrence remained in insane asylums until his death in 1861.5

Farewell, 1901

When Queen Victoria died on 22nd January 1901, she had ruled for more than 63 years. Britain did not simply lose a monarch; it lost a living symbol of an age. Her funeral, held on 2nd February, was unlike any before it. At Victoria’s own instruction, it was to be a military funeral, not a black-draped state pageant.

For ordinary Londoners, the funeral was experienced from the pavement: hours of waiting, vast crowds and a silence broken only by marching boots. One of the most vivid contemporary records comes from a young woman’s diary, written the same day. The diarist in question is Katharine (Kate) Frye (1878–1959), an interesting character in her own right – a year after the events described below, she went to acting school, wrote plays of her own and went on to become a suffragist.6 Here’s what she had to say about Victoria’s funeral, having seen the crowds at Hyde Park and then walked to a grocery store in Edgware Road owned by her father, where she took up a viewpoint for several hours:

Miles and miles of soldiers – a regal soldier’s funeral truly and the most impressive one possible. We could see them coming half the length of the Edgware Road – from the Marble Arch and they looked like some long long wave. The brass helmets then the banners. I never took my eyes off the coffin whilst it was in sight – as if I couldn’t let our Queen go. Before the body had gone a band playing Chopin’s Funeral March and now ever will the scene come back to me when I hear those sad strains – that to me is the only Funeral March.

Some of the uniforms were magnificent – but the German Emperor had a Field Marshall’s uniform as had the King. I do love the Emperor’s face – he is so striking – I am glad to have seen him. The King looked round our way – so I saw him well – he looked very pale and puffy but nicer than I expected.

A similar account was given by 14-year-old Hester Fraser Tytler in a letter to her father a few days later:7

The road was lined each side with one row of soldiers, each touching the other, just 24 inches was allowed for each man, & behind them was a row of policemen, leaving a narrow passage in between, up which we often saw the ambulance men. The crowd was all as black as it could be just now, but when the procession came & they took off hats it looked all white faces so closely were they packed… The Duke of Norfolk was by himself a little in front on a very fidgety horse… Then came the King & the Kaiser & all the other Royalties, but I only made out the little Duke of Saxe Coburg, the Kings of Portugal & Greece & the Crown Prince of Germany. Then the closed carriages of the Princesses & the King of the Belgians & at the very end an enormous number of the different suites. We thought it was never going to end. The procession began to pass us at 11:30 & the end disappeared soon after 12:30. We waited a few minutes & then walked along Piccadilly to see the decorations which were all in white or purple. Every lamp post had a huge laurel wreath hung on it…

And thus the Victorian era was over.

Farewell… for now, 2026

And while we’re on a valedictory note, I’m hanging up my hat here at Histories – at least for now. After five years of writing articles here – more than 200 of them! – first every week, then every fortnight, I’m taking a sabbatical to work on a few other projects. My excellent friend and colleague Paul will still be here with a new ‘A history of…’ piece every two weeks – and both of us will occasionally write extra features in the gaps when we have something extra to share. Thanks for reading!

Meanwhile, if you’re into landscape, archaeology and folklore (mostly British, but not exclusively), I also edit a little magazine called Northern Earth on these subjects, which has a related free monthly newsletter:

The Hare

Regular news about archaeology, folklore and landscape from Northern Earth, the journal of people, place and experience

By Andrew Chapman

Subscribe now

The first cats are believed to have appeared a little over 30 million years ago, with the earliest known ‘true’ cat found in the fossil record being Proailurus who lived around 25 million years ago in Europe and Asia. The now extinct Proailurus was not much larger than the average domestic cat of today, weighing in at around 9kg (20 pounds), and it is believed that they were the ancestor of all of the cat species living on the Earth today.

The domestic cat is Felis catus, a member of genus Felis along with the Sand Cat, the Chinese Mountain Cat, the Black-footed Cat, the African Wildcat, the Jungle Cat and the European Wildcat, all of whom genetically diverged from a common ancestor at various times over the course of the last four million years. Some of these species are still sufficiently genetically similar that they can cross breed with each other – indeed cross-breeding with domestic cats is a significant threat to the survival of the European Wildcat.

So when did cats and humans start living together? In 2004 archeologists working on a dig site on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus found the skeletons of a cat and human buried together in a grave that was 9,500 years old. Now, you may be thinking “Well, that doesn’t prove that cats and humans were living together; someone could have simply chucked the dead cat in when they were filling in the grave?” Leaving aside the fact that that would have been a pretty odd thing to do the cat hadn’t simply been thrown into a hole. Its body had been laid out in its own tiny grave, a mere 40 cm (one and a half feet) away from the human, and it had been aligned in the same westward direction as the human body. This was a considered, deliberate act. The fact that the cat was only around eight months old also raises the (depressing for cat-lovers) possibility that the cat had been killed when its human had died so that the two could be laid to rest together.

Then there is the fact that cats are not native to Cyprus – they would have to have been brought there by humans on boats. Could some cats have snuck aboard a boat, unnoticed? That seems pretty unlikely – 9,500 years ago boats were dug-out canoes or small vessels of woven reeds so there wouldn’t have been much space for a cat to conceal itself for the duration of the voyage. This ancient grave cat was not a domestic cat as we would know it; rather it was a tamed African wildcat. Nonetheless it can lay claim to the oldest known house cat.

We can be pretty sure then that cats (albeit not the species we know today as the domestic cat) and humans have been living together for the best part of 10,000 years – possibly much longer. Dogs, on the other hand, have definitely been living with humans for more than 14,000 years, and possibly as long as 36,000 years. (In case you were wondering, goats, pigs, sheep and cattle are believed to have been domesticated 10–11,000 years ago; horses 5,500 years ago). As we mentioned earlier, there is still something weird about the domestication of cats. Most of the other animals we have domesticated already lived in either packs or herds. Pack animals have dominance hierarchies with obvious leaders. Put simply, if a human can supplant the alpha dog then the other dogs will follow them. Pack animals were already used to living in large groups, their migrations mostly driven by the hunt for fresh grazing. If you provide them with sufficient food then you can corral and control them fairly easily.

Cats are very different beasts. They are primarily solitary hunters who come together to mate. As anyone with an outdoor cat knows they are very territorial and will challenge any other puss who wanders onto their home turf. It is highly unlikely that ancient humans caught and trained cats to be useful companions. What seems most likely, as we suggested at the beginning, is that as humans developed agriculture and established settlements, and (most importantly) grain stores, so they also created the ideal conditions for mice to live and thrive. The first ‘domestic’ cats would have hung around the edges of those early villages and towns, preying on mice, rats, and other vermin. Initially they would have been wary of humans. We know that today’s European wildcats, even if raised by humans from kittens, are both nervous of, and aggressive towards, people. Then evolution would have kicked into play. If a random genetic mutation arose that made a cat less fearful of humans then the beasts that possessed it would likely have a better chance of survival than those who didn’t. Why? Well they would have hung around the grain stores for longer, continuing to hunt, while others had fled at the approach of the villagers. They would have started venturing into houses to hunt down the rodents that lived there, and also been able to feast upon discarded scraps. They would have been better able to find warmth and shelter during storms and winter months.

There is good evidence to suggest that domestic cats have evolved to like (well, perhaps not always ‘like’ – let’s say ‘tolerate’) human company. If you cross breed a European wildcat (who, as mentioned above, really don’t like humans) with a domestic cat then the resulting offspring will be much more relaxed around people. Our ancestors would have readily seen the benefit in having these furry creatures wandering around, though perhaps they saw more in cats than simply their utility. Put simply, cats just look cute to us, and probably always have. To be more specific, cats have flat faces with little snubby noses, large eyes, a high forehead, all very similar to something we have evolved to find super-cute: a human baby.

The ancient Egyptians are, of course, famous for their worship and veneration of cats. The earliest evidence of this relationship dates from the First Dynasty of Egypt almost 5,000 years ago when the cat-headed goddess Mafdet was worshiped. Mafdet was known for protecting the pharaohs against poisonous animals such as snakes and scorpions, a role that real-life cats would most likely have performed. She was also reputed to tear the hearts out of criminals and drop them at the feet of pharaoh, much as a cat will present a dead mouse to their human today.

Mafdet was not the only cat-related god in the Egyptian pantheon. She was followed by Bastet (better known in the West as Bast). Originally Bast was a fierce lion-headed, warrior, goddess but over the course of a couple of thousand years she mellowed somewhat and became represented more in the form of a domestic cat – or as a woman with the head of a domestic cat. In this new form she was a goddess of fertility and pregnancy probably because cats were seen to be good mothers to their kittens, taking great care over feeding and protecting them. It is also likely that because cats have lots of kittens they were seen to be particularly good animals to worship if you wanted to have lots of children. For similar reasons the mother goddess Mut was also sometimes depicted as a cat (or being with a cat).

Why were the Egyptians so crazy about cats? Well, for starters they lived in a place that had lots of small, venomous animals and cats were very good at hunting down and killing these. Of course, the cats would have been doing this out of a sense of self-preservation, but it is easy to imagine that the Egyptians could have also seen this as the cats protecting humans. Much more importantly though, cats kill rats and mice. Grains such as wheat and barley were a major part of Egyptian agriculture and if you grow grain, then you need somewhere to store it once it has been harvested. Every village would have had a grain silo of some kind, as did temples and palaces. Some stores that have been excavated in recent years are vast and would have held tonnes of grain.

Although the regular annual flooding of the Nile river was well understood and forecast by the Egyptians, there would occasionally be poor years when crop yields were much lower, so maintaining large stores of grain was essential to prevent famine. There is even a story in the Old Testament whereby Joseph made a tidy profit by building up such supplies and selling them during a famine:

...he gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities ... And Joseph stored up grain in great abundance, like the sand of the sea, until he ceased to measure it, for it could not be measured. “So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians.”

Where you have large amounts of grain sitting around for years it is pretty likely that you are going to get large numbers of rats and mice. After all, the closest human equivalent to being a mouse in one of those grain silos is being at an all-you-can-eat buffet that lasts for eternity. As with the earlier domestication the first Egyptian cats probably started hanging around because it was an easy way to get a meal. It wasn’t long before their value was noticed and the locals began to actively breed and house them. This relationship between humans and cats soon became more than simply utilitarian, and developed into one of affection. Crown Prince Thutmose (alive approximately 3,350 years ago) was the eldest son, and original heir apparent, of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. We don’t know very much about this life, but we can be pretty sure that he loved cats. Alongside his sarcophagus was one containing his cat, Ta-miu1 – this is probably the oldest cat name that we are aware of. Even older cat-tombs have been found, some with small pots that are believed to have originally contained milk for the cats to lap at in the afterlife.

Egyptian cats were subject to great protection by law – killing or injuring one was a serious crime, indeed the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus tells the story of a Roman citizen who was lynched by an Egyptian mob around 60 BC for (accidentally) killing a cat:

And whoever intentionally kills one of these animals is put to death, unless it be a cat or an ibis that he kills; but if he kills one of these, whether intentionally or unintentionally, he is certainly put to death, for the common people gather in crowds and deal with the perpetrator most cruelly, sometimes doing this without waiting for a trial. And because of their fear of such a punishment any who have caught sight of one of these animals lying dead withdraw to a great distance and shout with lamentations and protestations that they found the animal already dead. So deeply implanted also in the hearts of the common people is their superstitious regard for these animals and so unalterable are the emotions cherished by every man regarding the honour due to them that once, at the time when Ptolemy their king had not as yet been given by the Romans the appellation of “friend” and the people were exercising all zeal in courting the favour of the embassy from Italy which was then visiting Egypt and, in their fear, were intent upon giving no cause for complaint or war, when one of the Romans killed a cat and the multitude rushed in a crowd to his house, neither the officials sent by the king to beg the man off nor the fear of Rome which all the people felt were enough to save the man from punishment, even though his act had been an accident. And this incident we relate, not from hearsay, but we saw it with our own eyes on the occasion of the visit we made to Egypt.

Despite these laws it seems as though there must have been some loopholes when it came to the killing of cats. Mummified cats were often given by pilgrims as offerings to their gods. And when I say often, I really mean often. In just the single cemetery of Beni Hasan in central Egypt more than 200,000 mummified cats were found. Most of these were then shipped to Liverpool ground up, and used as fertiliser.2 There is no way that these were all cats who died peacefully in old age of natural causes. They would have been bred, and then killed, to supply the pilgrim industry. Given their beliefs about human mummification it is quite possible that the people involved thought that this was okay, as the cats would be heading to some glorious cat afterlife.

That isn’t to say that cats were not much-loved in ancient Egypt. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that when a cat died all of the (human) inhabitants of the house would shave off their eyebrows to show that they were in mourning. Once their eyebrows had grown back this period of grief was considered to be formally over. This may seem a little extreme, but wait till you hear what he reports they do when the household dog dies:

And in whatever houses a cat has died by a natural death, all those who dwell in this house shave their eyebrows only, but those in whose houses a dog has died shave their whole body and also their head.3

Perhaps the most extraordinary Egyptian cat story relates to the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC when King Cambyses the Second of Persia invaded Egypt seeking that country’s throne.4 As the two armies faced each other, with battle about to commence, Cambyses ordered his troops to… bring forward armfuls of live cats (while they were Persian cats they probably weren’t Persian cats as we would know them today). and put them on the ground in front of them. The Egyptians, so fearful of injuring the cats, refused to fire their arrows at the enemy and were brutally defeated. Full disclosure, it wasn’t just cats that the Persians used, but I like to think that they were the most important animals:

When Cambyses attacked Pelusium, which guarded the entrance into Egypt, the Egyptians defended it with great resolution. They advanced formidable engines against the besiegers, and hurled missiles, stones, and fire at them from their catapults. To counter this destructive barrage, Cambyses ranged before his front line dogs, sheep, cats, ibises, and whatever other animals the Egyptians hold sacred. The Egyptians immediately stopped their operations, out of fear of hurting the animals, which they hold in great veneration. Cambyses captured Pelusium, and thereby opened up for himself the route into Egypt.

– Polyaenus, Stratagems, Book 75

The Roman and Greek empires coexisted with that of Egypt for many centuries, so you might have expected them to have adopted similar attitudes towards cats. Not the whole “worshipping them as gods and executing people who kill them” part of it, but certainly the “having them around to kill rats and mice” thing. In reality house cats were very rare in ancient Greece and Rome. It has been suggested that there was an Egyptian law that forbade the export of cats and that soldiers were even sent out to retrieve kitties that had been smuggled to other countries. Despite this being asserted as a fact in a number of places online I have been unable to track down a reliable source for it. It may be true, for sure, but I kind of doubt it.

A good reason for suspecting that there was no prohibition on the export of cats is that we know for a fact that there were domestic cats in ancient Greece at least as early as the mid-fifth century BC. Two coins from that era have been found showing the Iokastos and Phalanthos, the founders of Rhegion and Taras, playing happily with their pet cats.

These two seemed to be unusual in their feline affections. Rats and mice were a problem for the Greeks and the Romans, much as they were for the Egyptians, but they sought to address it by keeping pet weasels6 and ferrets. In the remains of the city of Pompeii, which was destroyed in AD79, hardly any cat bones have been found. Those that do appear to be from strays, they weren’t yet being kept as pets. As the centuries passed however it became clearer to the Romans that cats were simply better and, I would argue, nicer, to have around to solve rodent problems and they replaced weasels in the household.

Rats weren’t just a problem in Roman homes, they were also a problem for the Roman army – eating food stores and chewing through equipment. And it seems likely that legions travelled with cats, or at least allowed cats to settle with them. At Hadrian’s wall, the very northern limit of the Roman Empire, cat bones have been found at sites of forts such as Vindolanda. In my next piece I’ll explore the history of cats in Asia and beyond, including possibly the most perfect description of a cat ever recorded, written over 1,100 years ago, but for now I’ll leave you with a picture of the cat who currently shares my home.

Arrival, 1788

In 1787 the British government sent the ‘First Fleet’ – 11 ships carrying around 736 convicts plus marines and officials – to establish a penal colony on the far side of the world. The official destination was Botany Bay, charted by James Cook in 1770.1 Ships of the fleet arrived between 18 and 20 January 1788. One of the marine officers, Watkin Tench, later published A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789), based on his contemporary journal. It contains one of the most vivid on-the-spot descriptions of the First Fleet’s arrival and the decision, a few days later, to abandon Botany Bay for Port Jackson. Here’s his description of their arrival:

In running along shore, we cast many an anxious eye towards the land, on which so much of our future destiny depended. Our distance, joined to the haziness of the atmosphere, prevented us, however, from being able to discover much. With our best glasses we could see nothing but hills of a moderate height, cloathed with trees, to which some little patches of white sandstone gave the appearance of being covered with snow. Many fires were observed on the hills in the evening…

The wind was now fair, the sky serene, though a little hazy, and the temperature of the air delightfully pleasant: joy sparkled in every countenance, and congratulations issued from every mouth. Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it.

“Heavily in clouds came on the day” which ushered in our arrival. To us it was “a great, an important day,” though I hope the foundation, not the fall, of an empire will be dated from it.

On the morning of the 20th, by ten o’clock, the whole of the fleet had cast anchor in Botany Bay, where, to our mutual satisfaction, we found the Governor, and the first division of transports. On inquiry, we heard, that the ‘Supply’ had arrived on the 18th, and the transports only the preceding day.

Tench ends his mostly upbeat account of their arrival with an interesting dig at the government:

Thus, after a passage of exactly thirty-six weeks from Portsmouth, we happily effected our arduous undertaking, with such a train of unexampled blessings as hardly ever attended a fleet in a like predicament. Of two hundred and twelve marines we lost only one; and of seven hundred and seventy-five convicts, put on board in England, but twenty-four perished in our route. To what cause are we to attribute this unhoped for success? I wish I could answer to the liberal manner in which Government supplied the expedition. But when the reader is told, that some of the necessary articles allowed to ships on a common passage to West Indies, were withheld from us; that portable soup, wheat, and pickled vegetables were not allowed; and that an inadequate quantity of essence of malt was the only antiscorbutic supplied,2 his surprise will redouble at the result of the voyage. For it must be remembered, that the people thus sent out were not a ship’s company starting with every advantage of health and good living, which a state of freedom produces; but the major part a miserable set of convicts, emaciated from confinement, and in want of cloaths, and almost every convenience to render so long a passage tolerable. I beg leave, however, to say, that the provisions served on board were good, and of a much superior quality to those usually supplied by contract: they were furnished by Mr. Richards, junior, of Walworth, Surrey.3

Tench goes on to describe the bay itself, the surf and reefs, and first encounters with Aboriginal people coming out in canoes. He is struck both by the apparent infertility of much of the soil around Botany Bay and by the skill of the local people with their spears and canoes. A few days later, he records Governor Phillip’s decision to explore Port Jackson to the north, and his return with news of “the finest harbour in the world” – which led to the move to what became Sydney Cove. From that decision flowed the growth of a vast settler colony and, ultimately, the modern state of Australia.

Subscribe now

‘We are arrived’, 1793

Just five years after those Antipodean events and back in Europe, the French Revolution had dismantled the old monarchy. Louis XVI had been tried by the National Convention on charges including conspiracy against liberty and foreign intrigue. On 20 January the Convention condemned him to death; the next morning, 21 January, he was taken from the Temple prison to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution. His confessor, the Abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth, accompanied him throughout the last night and final morning and later published a poignant narrative of these hours:

The King, finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence… The gendarmes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.

The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens – citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.

The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, ‘We are arrived, if I mistake not.’…

As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness – he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. ‘What are you attempting?’ said the King, drawing back his hands. ‘To bind you,’ answered the wretches. ‘To bind me,’ said the King, with an indignant air. ‘No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me…’

The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard it the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: ‘I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I Pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.’

He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and showed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of ‘Vive la Republique!’ were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air.

So it goes. Within months, the Revolution slid into the radical phase known as the Terror, in which thousands were executed as ‘enemies of the people’, including Queen Marie-Antoinette and, later, many of the revolutionaries themselves.

Arrival, 1912

By January 1912, Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition had been on the polar plateau for weeks, man-hauling sledges in brutal cold and thin air. They knew that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team was somewhere on the continent, racing them to be first to the South Pole. On 17 January, Scott’s polar party – Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Evans – finally reached their goal, only to find that Amundsen had beaten them there by about a month. Scott recorded the moment in his sledging diary, which survives and is now held (and fully transcribed) by the Scott Polar Research Institute. Here’s what he wrote:

Camp 69. T. -22º at start. Night -21º. The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day – add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22º, and companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.

We started at 7.30, none of us having slept much after the shock of our discovery. We followed the Norwegian sledge tracks for some way; as far as we make out there are only two men. In about three miles we passed two small cairns. Then the weather overcast, and the tracks being increasingly drifted up and obviously going too far to the west, we decided to make straight for the Pole according to our calculations… We have been descending again, I think, but there looks to be a rise ahead; otherwise there is very little that is different from the awful monotony of past days. Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow.

Scott’s party took photographs at the Pole, collected a few geological specimens as planned, and then turned north for the 800-mile return journey – now with morale shattered. (“Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it,” he wrote.) The return was devastated by extreme cold, storms, injuries and scurvy. Evans died in February; Oates walked out into a blizzard in March; Scott, Wilson and Bowers died in their tent later that month, only 11 miles from a supply depot. Their bodies and diaries were found by a search party in November 1912. So it goes.

Subscribe now

People of that era would typically stay in coaching inns and taverns, usually family-run, where the facilities were pretty basic and you could often end up sharing a bedroom with strangers. Even well into the 19th century such conditions prevailed, as shown by the account Charles Dickens gave of The Great White Horse in Ipswich (which is a real inn that survives to this day)1 in The Pickwick Papers (1837), that was almost certainly based upon first-hand experience:

In the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space fronting the Town Hall, stands an inn known far and wide by the appellation of the Great White Horse, rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some rampacious animal with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, which is elevated above the principal door. The Great White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or a county-paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig—for its enormous size. Never was such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich.

Improvements to the industry had, however, been afoot for a while. 1769 saw the opening of the Royal Clarence Hotel2 in Exeter, described in a 1770 newspaper advertisement as a “New Coffee-house, Inn, and Tavern, Or, The Hotel, In St. Peter’s Church-yard, Exeter.”, purpose-built and offering a much higher standard of accommodation than establishments such as The Great White Horse. It was still very-much an inn-scale enterprise, and we need to look to the USA to find the first truly large-scale hotel. The City Hotel opened in New York in 1794 with 137 rooms spread over five stories. An 1828 guide book described it in gushing terms:

City Hotel, [operated] by Chester Jennings, is the chief place of resort, and … the loftiest edifice of that kind in the city, containing more than one hundred large and small parlours and lodging-rooms, besides the City Assembly Room, chiefly used for Concerts and Balls. The rooms appropriated for private families, parlours, and dining rooms are superbly fitted up, and constantly occupied by respectable strangers. Extensive additions have recently been made to this establishment. The principal Book stores and Libraries are in the vicinity. Prices, over two days, $1.50 per day, $10 per week,3 $416 per year—Board only, $5.50 per week, dinner only, $3.50 per week.

The year after that review was written, 1829, saw the opening of Tremont House in Boston. Often hailed as America’s first modern hotel, guests entered a grand foyer and were shown to private, locking bedrooms – each equipped with a washbowl, pitcher, and a bar of soap, courtesy of the management. Even more incredibly, the Tremont House had indoor plumbing! It featured eight water closets (toilets)4 on the ground floor and running water supplied by a tank in the roof that was filled using a steam-powered pump. There were bathtubs in the basement which would be filled with cold water that was then heated by gas, and finally gas-lighting in every room.5

Soon similarly grand establishments were springing up all of over the country, though not all achieved the high standards set by Tremont House. Our old friend Dickens proved that he could be grumpy about his sleeping arrangement irrespective of which side of the Atlantic he was on, writing in American Notes (1842):

The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum’s, in that city: where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself, which is not at all a common case.6

It wasn’t just the absence of curtains or the location of water that irked some European travellers. In most American hotels guests dined at communal tables regardless of social rank, and a traveler might rub elbows with merchants, lawyers, farmers, and senators in the same dining hall, all easting the same meal at the same time. This stood in sharp contrast to European customs, where class distinctions in lodgings persisted – the elites would generally stay in the houses of friends, or if forced to use a hotel then one that would be out of the financial and social reach of the hoi polloi. The English writer Frances Trollope, visiting America in 1832, was shocked by the informality she encountered:

The steam-boat had wearied me of social meals, and I should have been thankful to have eaten our dinner of hard venison and peach-sauce7 in a private room; but this, Miss Wright said was impossible; the lady of the house would consider the proposal as a personal affront, and, moreover, it would be assuredly refused. This latter argument carried weight with it, and when the great bell was sounded from an upper window of the house, we proceeded to the dining-room. The table was laid for fifty persons, and was already nearly full. Our party had the honour of sitting near “the lady,” but to check the proud feelings to which such distinction might give birth, my servant, William, sat very nearly opposite to me.8 The company consisted of all the shop-keepers (store-keepers as they are called throughout the United States) of the little town.

The expansion of railway networks in the mid-19th century vastly increased the number of people travelling both for business and for pleasure, and naturally these people needed someone to stay. The most obvious solution was to build a large hotel slap bang next to (or even above) the railway stations, and so ‘railway hotels’ were born. In Victorian Britain this led to the creation of some truly astonishing brick edifices, including my favourite, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station in London, which opened in 1873:

The late 19th century also witnessed the birth of the ‘palace hotel’. These were not merely places to sleep; they were urban monuments designed to mirror the residences of the aristocracy. By attempting to replicate the opulence of royalty for a wealthy public, these hotels utilized soaring marble atria, gorgeous crystal lighting and vast corridors to cultivate a sense of awe. The goal was psychological: to make the paying guest feel like an esteemed visitor in a nobleman’s estate, and hence be happy to pay the steep price demanded to do so. The amenities kept pace too, by the 1870s, many grand hotels had gas lighting throughout (allowing for well-illuminated reading rooms and salons in the evenings) and indoor plumbing for bathrooms (often located down the hall, but increasingly en suite for deluxe rooms).

Perhaps nothing symbolized the technological leap of this age better than the adoption of the lift (elevator). In 1857, the first passenger elevator had been installed in a New York department store, and hotels soon followed. By the 1880s, luxury hotels were equipping themselves with ‘ascending rooms’. The five-storey Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York installed an early elevator (steam-powered) in the 1860s, and guests marvelled at being lifted to their floor without climbing stairs. In 1889, London’s Savoy Hotel one-upped its rivals by unveiling the first electric lifts in a British hotel. The Savoy was a showcase of late-Victorian innovation as it was also the first hotel in Britain fully lit by electricity, allowing guests to flip switches in their rooms to control the lights at will.9

Other palace hotels soon followed on the Continent and beyond. César Ritz, a visionary Swiss hotelier, managed and improved iconic properties like the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne and then the Savoy in London before founding his own Hôtel Ritz in Paris in 1898 (and London’s Carlton in 1899). Ritz became known for pioneering the credo that “the customer is never wrong”,10 instilling a new level of service excellence. His hotels were famed for lavish décor and innovative touches: private baths attached to suites, one of the first ‘concierge’11 staffs to arrange theatre tickets or travel for guests, and wonderful kitchens run by chefs like Auguste Escoffier.

In the 1850s another change began to work its way through the industry which would have doubtless pleased Frances Trollope. Rather than all guests eating the same meal, at the same time, often communally (hotel rates were usually full-board) the concept of having dining rooms with individual tables where one could choose one’s dishes from a menu became a thing.Hotels like Boston’s Parker House (opened 1855) offered this à la carte dining option to their guests and it soon became very popular.

Hotels spread wherever the European empires did. In colonial port cities and trading outposts, new hotels sprang up catering to Western travelers and expatriates. These establishments were often oases of European comfort in unfamiliar lands, and they took on an outsized romanticism in the Western imagination. Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, founded in 1841 by Englishman Samuel Shepheard, became one of the world’s most celebrated hotels in the late 19th century – a gathering place for aristocrats, adventurers, and officers. It was said you could hear a dozen languages spoken on its terrace on any given evening. Shepheard’s was considered opulent for its day, yet Mark Twain,12 who stayed there in 1867, was decidedly unimpressed, writing in his notebook:

We are stopping at Shepheard’s Hotel – which is the worst on earth, except the one I stopped at once in a small town in the United States. It is pleasant to know I can stand Shepheard’s, because I have been in one just like it in America and survived.

One feature of all of these hotels was that they were unique. I mean, of course, all hotels are unique, but nowadays a lot of them try to be incredibly similar to each other; they are parts of chains. Sure some companies in the 19th century owned multiple hotels but they never attempted to perfectly mimic each other. The godfather of the chain hotel was one Ellsworth Milton (‘E. M.’) Statler (1863–1928) who started off by building vast, temporary hotels, at expos – such as the 2,100 room monster he constructed for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Using the money that he made from this he decided to build permanent hotels that would be of decent quality and, critically, have a private bathroom for every room. To achieve this he created the Statler plumbing shaft – something which is so common today, and so seemingly obvious, it may be surprising that someone had to come up with the idea in the first place.

The idea was simple, yet novel – build hotels with a common vertical service shaft running basement-to-roof, where two adjacent guest rooms had bathrooms placed back-to-back, stacked identically floor-to-floor, so they could share one concentrated run of water/waste lines (and often other utilities) – cutting the building cost and simplifying ongoing maintenance. Statler probably came up with the concept when building his vast, temporary, hotels where budgets were stripped to the bone and efficiencies had to be found wherever possible. He opened his first hotel in Buffalo in 1907 and charged a mere $1.5013 a night, and used the advertising slogan “A Room and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half”. Statler’s innovations did not, however, end with the plumbing. He standardised not just the designs of the rooms and the hotels but the level of service guests could expect. Every member of staff had to sign off on the following eight-point pledge:

1. To treat our patrons and fellow employees in an interested, helpful, and gracious manner as we would want to be treated if positions were reversed;

2. To judge fairly–to know both sides before taking action;

3. To learn and practice self-control;

4. To keep our properties—buildings and equipment—in excellent condition at all times;

5. To know our job and to become skillful in its performance;

6. To acquire the habit of advance planning;

7. To do our duties promptly; and

8. To satisfy all patrons or to take them to our superior.

The rational behind this pledge was obvious to Statler,14 who wrote:

Statler Hotels are operated primarily for the comfort and convenience of their guests. Without guests there could be no Statler Hotels. These are simple facts, easily understood. It behooves every man and woman employed here to remember this always, and the treat all guests with courtesy and careful consideration.

By 1955, when the chain was purchased by Hilton for $111m15 it consisted of 10,400 very similar, but very affordable, hotel rooms that provided their guests with consistent, great, service. In the absence of Statler I am pretty sure that someone would have come up with, and implemented, similar ideas at scale, but I can’t help but think that without him the development of hotels as we know them would have been set back years, if not decades. The Hilton chain that bought Statler out, for instance, didn’t open their first hotel until 1919, some 12 years after E. M. first opened his. As it happens I am finishing this piece on the morning of December 3116 before travelling up to Glasgow for Hogmanay. I am sure that when I check into my hotel17 this evening I will give a little nod of thanks to E. M. knowing now, as I do, that without him hotels could have been rather different today.

A king loses control, 1642

By early 1642, the struggle between King Charles I and Parliament had reached a dangerous pitch. Parliament had been pushing back against royal policy and finances, and Charles – feeling authority slipping – decided on an act of theatre backed by force: he would personally enter the House of Commons with armed men and seize leading opponents for treason. It was a move that crossed a line. The Commons was not just another room in the palace; it was the symbolic heart of parliamentary privilege.

On January 4, 1642, Charles walked into the chamber (backed up by 400 soldiers) and demanded five MPs (Denzil Holles, John Pym, Sir Arthur Haslerig, John Hampden and William Strode). But they had been warned and were gone. What followed – especially the Speaker’s carefully worded refusal to assist the King – became one of the defining moments in the story of constitutional monarchy.

The clerk of the Commons was recording proceedings until the King ordered him to stop. What he noted survives in the House of Commons Journal:

King Charles sits in the Speaker’s Chair and Speaks to the Commons:
His Majesty came unto the house and took Mr. Speakers Chair.
Gentlemen I am sorry to have this occasion to come unto you.

A 1650 compilation of writings by or about Charles, the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae, takes up the story with the rest of the king’s speech:

I am sorry for this occasion of coming unto you: yesterday I sent a Serjeant at Armes upon a very important occasion, to apprehend some that by my command were accused of High Treason, whereunto I did expect Obedience, and not a Message. And I must declare unto you here, that albeit no King that ever was in England shall be more careful of your Priviledges, to maintain them to the uttermost of his power then I shall be; yet you must know, that in cases of Treason, no person hath a priviledge, and therefore I am come to know if any of those persons that were accused are here; for I must tell you, Gentlemen, that so long as these persons that I have accused (for no slight crime, but for Treason) are here, I cannot expect that this House can be in the right way that I do heartily wish it: Therefore I am come to tell you, that I must have them wheresoever I finde them.

But the five men had already fled. When Charles demanded of the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall, whether the men were present (“Mr Speaker, I must for a time make bold with your chair”), Lenthall famously replied:

May it please Your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here, and I humbly beg Your Majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what Your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.

This is held to be the first time that a Speaker had asserted his duty to Parliament over the monarch. And this is Charles’s alleged reply:1

Well, [since] I see all the Birds are flown, I do expect you, that you shall send them unto me, as soon as they return hither.

And according to one eyewitness, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, who had been keeping a journal of parliamentary proceedings, Charles stormed off “in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in”.

The attempted arrests quickly destroyed trust. London turned openly hostile to the King; Charles left the capital a few days later (only returning for his execution), and the slide into full civil war accelerated. Politically, the episode hardened the idea that the monarch could not simply override parliamentary privilege by force – and it permanently elevated the Speaker’s role as servant of the House rather than agent of the Crown.

Subscribe now

Also this week…

A soldier loses face, 1895

France in the 1890s was politically brittle: nationalism, fear of espionage and antisemitism were powerful currents, and the army’s prestige was treated as a national pillar. When Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was accused of passing secrets to Germany, the case quickly became more than a trial – it became a test of whose ‘truth’ would prevail: institutional certainty or evidentiary rigour.

On January 5, 1895, Dreyfus was brought before troops for the ritual of military degradation – his insignia torn away, his sword broken – meant to be both punishment and public warning. The power of the event is that Dreyfus himself left an account of what it felt like to be the body at the centre of the spectacle.

This is Dreyfus describing the degradation itself:

The degradation took place Saturday, the 5th of January. I underwent the horrible torture without weakness.

Before the ceremony, I waited for an hour in the hall of the garrison adjutant at the Ecole Militaire, guarded by the captain of gendarmes, Lebrun-Renault. During these long minutes I gathered up all the forces of my being…

I protested against the vile accusation which had been brought against me; I recalled that I had written again to the Minister to tell him of my innocence…

After this I was marched to the centre of the square, under a guard of four men and a corporal.

Nine o’clock struck. General Darras, commanding the parade, gave the order to carry arms.

I suffered agonizingly, but held myself erect with all my strength. To sustain me I called up the memory of my wife and children.

As soon as the sentence had been read out, I cried aloud, addressing myself to the troops:

“Soldiers, they are degrading an innocent man. Soldiers, they are dishonoring an innocent man. Vive la France, vive l’armee!”

A Sergeant of the Republican Guard came up to me. He tore off rapidly buttons, trousers stripes, the signs of my rank from cap and sleeves, and then broke my sword across his knee. I saw all these material emblems of my honour fall at my feet. Then, my whole being racked by a fearful paroxysm, but with body erect and head high, I shouted again and again to the soldiers and to the assembled crowd the cry of my soul.

“I am innocent!”

The parade continued. I was compelled to make the whole round of the square. I heard the howls of a deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France; and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill,—belief in my innocence.

The round of the square made, the torture would be over, I believed.

But the agony of that long day was only beginning.

They tied my hands, and a prison van took me to the Depot (Central Prison of Paris), passing over the Alma Bridge. On coming to the end of the bridge, I saw through the tiny grating of my compartment in the van the windows of the home where such happy years of my life had been spent, where I was leaving all my happiness behind me. My grief bowed me down.

At the Central Prison, in my torn and stripped uniform, I was dragged from hall to hall, searched, photographed, and measured. At last, toward noon, I was taken to the Sante Prison and shut up in a convict’s cell.

The degradation was not the end; it was the beginning of the affair’s long afterlife. Dreyfus – who was indeed innocent – was sent to Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, and the controversy metastasized into one of modern Europe’s defining political battles: press campaigns, forged evidence claims, whistleblowing, and the eventual split between ‘Dreyfusards’ and anti-Dreyfusards. Its consequences shaped debates about antisemitism, civil rights, the authority of militaries in republics, and the responsibilities of intellectuals in public life.

A pilot loses control, 1941

Amy Johnson was already a household name: record flights, celebrity and the image of modern aviation wrapped in one person. But in wartime, fame doesn’t exempt you from risk. With Britain fighting for survival, many civilian pilots were pulled into ferrying work – moving aircraft, doing essential but hazardous flights under bad weather, blackout conditions and relentless operational pressure.

Around January 5, 1941, Johnson’s aircraft went down near the Thames Estuary. What makes this story unusually vivid is that witnesses described a parachutist in the water calling for help – “Hurry, please hurry”. She was drifting towards HMS Haslemere nearby – but vanished under the ship – and sadly the ship’s captain Walter Fletcher also died from exposure after diving in to try and rescue her. Rumours persist to this day about why she was on the journey, whether she was shot down and precisely how she died.

As a poignant final note, here is the telegram sent to her father Will:

And here’s part of a diary entry written by Will a few days later and preserved by the RAF Museum:

It was a heavy time for us all between 11.45 & 3.30 as that is just a week since Amy did her fatal flight. At 3.30 we drank a silent toast to the Memory of Amy…

If you’d like to keep up with the latest discoveries in the world of British history, sign up here to my new sister newsletter:

UK History News

Short, regular bulletins about the latest British history news, curated and summarised for you.

By Andrew Chapman

A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day!1 … In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843

Histories is a couple of days early this week as I’d like to do a Christmas special before returning to the final part of the history of hotels in my next piece. My Christmas childhood memories always involved a Christmas pudding,2 lit on fire with brandy, and with a silver sixpence hidden inside it, so what better subject to delve into the history of?

Subscribe now

Long before it was a sweet pudding, the ancestor of Christmas pudding was a spiced porridge served during winter feasts. In medieval England, grand holiday banquets often began with a thick pottage – a stew-like mixture of meat and grains – enlivened with expensive spices and dried fruits saved for special occasions. One early version was known as frumenty, a boiled grain pudding sometimes enriched with eggs, almonds, currants or wine. The idea of combining meat with sweet ingredients might seem a bit strange to modern palates,3 but in the Middle Ages the line between sweet and savoury was a lot more blurry. A 15th-century Christmas dish could easily mix beef, spices, bread and raisins into one massive stew.

By the 1500s, such festive broths had earned the nickname ‘plum pottage’ or ‘plum porridge’ – ‘plum’ in older English meaning any dried fruit (usually raisins) rather than fresh plums. The first record of plum pottage comes from 1573,4 defining it as “pottage made thick with meat or crummes of bread” – it was a meat-based broth bulked out with bread and fortified with dried fruits and spices.

For medieval and early modern celebrants, this plum porridge was typically served as a first course on Christmas Day or Twelfth Night. The ingredients for the dish were not cheap, and so the provision of a pudding by the lord of the manor to his tenants, or a master to his servants became a traditional way of demonstrating their munificence. This is clearly described (along with a stern instruction not to get drunk!) in the carol ‘All You That Are Good Fellows’ first recorded in the chapbook Good and true, fresh and new, Christmas Carols printed in 1642, by “E. P. for Francis Coles, dwelling in the Old Bailey”:

All you that are good fellows,
Come hearken to my song;
I know you do not hate good cheer,
Nor liquor that is strong.
I hope there is none here
But soon will take my part,
Seeing my master and my dame
Say welcome with their heart.

This is a time of joyfulness
And merry time of year,
When as the rich with plenty stor’d
Do make the poor good cheer.
Plum porridge, roast beef, and mince pies
Stand smoking on the board,
With other brave varieties
Our master doth afford.5

Only five short years later things took a turn for the worse in England as far as Christmas was concerned. On Tuesday 8 June 1647, the Long Parliament (Lords and Commons) issued ‘An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals’ – a parliamentary measure made without royal assent during the Civil War period. Now this wasn’t exactly, as you may have been told, ‘Cromwell banning Christmas’. Church Christmas services were banned, as were other forms of public celebration, but private celebration persisted in some places, though these were discouraged and sometimes policed. This didn’t stop the opponents of puritanism claiming that the dear old Christmas pud was off limits as a pamphlet of 1652, The Vindication of Christmas, details:

The Puritanical party did their utmost to “keep Christmas Day out of England,” as Taylor, the water-poet, quaintly expressed it. Their efforts were unattended with success, so far as the rural districts were concerned. He brings forward old Father Christmas, who informs us that certain “hot, zealous brethren were of opinion, that from the 24th of December at night, till the 7th of January following, plum pottage was mere Popery, that a collar of brawn was an abomination, that roast beef was anti-christian, that mince pies were relics of the Woman of Babylon, and a goose, a turkey, or a capon were marks of the beast.”

Christmas traditions returned with the restoration of Charles II, but it seems that they, and the provision of plumb pudding were still somewhat subdued as this 1687 pamphlet Poor Robin6 describes in a somewhat poetical manner:

Whereas an Ancient, Reverend, Late Worshipful Gentleman, formerly a great retainer to Noblemen, Knights, and Gentlemen, and much respected amongst the Honest Yeomen and wealthy Farmers of the whole Country, known by the Name or Appellation of Good-Housekeeping: hath by the sly insinuations and bewitched persuasious [sic] of an upstart Skip Jack called by his true name Pride, but by his Friends and Adorers by the name of Decency and Handsomeness: Most unjustly and unworthily hath justled, persecuted, and made to fly the said Good-Housekeeping from his Ancient Habitations, and Places of residence, together with his old friend Christmas, with his four Pages, Roast-Beef, Minc’d-Pies, Plumb-Pudding, and Furmity, who used to be his constant Attendants, but now are grown so invisible they cannot be seen by poor People, nor good Fellows as formerly they used to be. These are therefore to desire, will, and require you, if any Person can tell where this Good-Housekeeping doth reside, that he will desire him personally to appear this Christmas in Noblemens, Knights, Gentlemens, and Yeomens Houses as formerly he used to do, whereby he will gain great Cre∣dit to all the aforesaid Persons, and shall be Entertained with the Ringing of Bells, Sounding of Trumpets, Beating of Drums, and Acclamations of all Good People.

Thankfully the pud came back into fashion in the late 1600s and early 1700s as British cooks gradually transformed the old plum pottage. They reduced the meat content, bumped up the flour, suet and sugar, and began boiling the mixture in a cloth, yielding a firm, dome-shaped, pudding that could be sliced. The invention of the pudding cloth (a linen bag for boiling puddings) in the 17th century was a game-changer. No longer did one need animal guts or stomach linings7 to encase a pudding (as in a sausage or haggis). A floured cloth would do the job, freeing the pudding from dependence on an animal casing and allowing a smoother, rounder shape. With more flour and suet in the mix, the pudding became less a soup and more a cake.

By the early 18th century, recipes for plum pudding (sometimes also called ‘plum duff’ or just ‘Christmas pottage’) proliferated in cookbooks. They still often included meat fat – beef suet remained a key ingredient – but the actual meat and stock of the old porridge were usually left out. As in this recipe from the popular cookery writer Hannah Glasse (1708-1770):

Take a pound of suet cut in little pieces not too fine a pound of currants and a pound of raisins storied eight eggs half the whites half a nutmeg grated and a tea spoonful of beaten ginger a pound of flour a pint of milk beat the eggs first then half the milk beat them together and by degrees stir in the flour then the suet spice and fruit and as much milk as will mix it well together very thick. Boil it five hours.

Before I go any further I’d just like to dispel some Christmas pudding myths. It is often said that King George I was ‘The Pudding King’. The story claims that King George I (who came from Hanover to rule Britain in 1714) loved plum pudding so much that he insisted it be served at his first English Christmas banquet, thereby ‘restoring’ it to fashion after Puritan neglect. In this telling, George I’s pudding at Christmas 1714 earned him the nickname ‘Pudding King’ and solidified the dish’s place in holiday tradition. It’s a lovely story – but unfortunately there is no contemporary evidence for it. As food historian Ivan Day uncovered, “the eighteenth century archival record is curiously silent on this matter… It is not until the twentieth century that the story surfaces”.

Then there is the oft-repeated story that the Christmas pudding ritual was established in medieval times with deep religious symbolism: supposedly, the pudding should be made with 13 ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles, While again lovely, this story is entirely unsubstantiated. There is no evidence in medieval or Renaissance records of such a specific practice. Food historians believe this ‘just-so’ story was a later invention – likely Victorian or early 20th-century in origin – projecting Christian symbolism onto an older folk practice.

During the Georgian era, Britons fancied that plum pudding, along with roast beef, was a national dish unique to England (contrasted with the “frogs and ragouts” of the French). This pride appears in popular culture and satire. In 1805, caricaturist James Gillray published a famous cartoon, The Plumb-Pudding in Danger, depicting British Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up a globe-shaped plum pudding that represents the world:

By 1800, the transformation from medieval porridge to pudding was complete. Food writer John Mollard, in The Art of Cookery (1801), even introduced candied citrus peel into the dish – an ingredient unknown to earlier versions,8 but indicative of the growing range of imported sweet ingredients available. As techniques of meat preservation improved, people felt less need to eat meat in their holiday puddings, and more inclination to steadily increase the sweet elements (dried fruits, sugar, spices). What had once been a beef stew with hints of fruit evolved into a rich fruitcake-like batter barely held together by flour and eggs.

In the early 19th century, ‘plum pudding’ truly became ‘Christmas pudding’. It was in the 1830s and 1840s – the reign of Victoria – that the plum pudding was firmly fixed as the traditional end to a Christmas dinner. The English celebration of Christmas itself was undergoing a revival and reinvention, with Victorians enthusiastically embracing decorations, carols, gift-giving, and family feasts. In this festive renaissance, the plum pudding took centre stage. The first published use of the name ‘Christmas pudding’9 is often credited to Eliza Acton, who included a recipe by that title in her cookbook Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845):

Mix very thoroughly one pound of finely-grated bread with the same quantity of flour, two pounds of raisins stoned, two of currants, two of suet minced small, one of sugar, half a pound of candied peel, one nutmeg, half an ounce of mixed spice, and the grated rinds of two lemons; mix the whole with sixteen eggs10 well beaten and strained, and add four glasses of brandy. These proportions will make three puddings of good size, each of which should be boiled six hours.

By the late 19th century, the customary day to mix the pudding was ‘Stir-up Sunday’, the last Sunday before Advent. This little ritual was prompted by a pun on the Anglican prayer for that day, which begins “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…”. Parishioners joked that it was a divine reminder to ‘stir up’ the Christmas pudding in time for it to mature by December 25th. The whole family took turns stirring the bowl, traditionally stirring east to west in honour of the Magi’s journey, and each member would make a secret wish during their stir.11

Another Victorian custom was the inclusion of tokens or charms in the pudding. In earlier times, a coin had sometimes been baked into Twelfth Night cakes as a token of luck. This morphed into the Christmas pudding tradition of hiding a silver sixpence in the mixture for one lucky diner to find. Queen Victoria herself reportedly added sovereign coins12 to her puddings as a thank-you gift to her servants. Finding the sixpence, as I longed to do as a child, meant you’d enjoy wealth and good fortune in the coming year. Other trinkets like tiny brass charms (a thimble, a ring, an anchor, etc.) were sometimes included, each said to predict the finder’s fate (spinsterhood, marriage, travel and so on).13

The symbolism of Christmas pudding as being an inherent part of the British soul was sometimes made explicit in popular media. An 1848 political cartoon in Punch magazine titled John Bull Showing the Foreign Powers How to Make a Constitutional Plum-Pudding encapsulated the Victorian pride in the pudding. It depicted John Bull (the personification of Britain) confidently surveying a huge plum pudding labeled with British ideals – “Liberty of the Press, “Trial by Jury”, “Common Sense”, “Order” – essentially cooking up a recipe for a free, orderly society. Meanwhile, figures representing other nations look on, presumably to learn the secret.

Alas this noble pud faced significant challenges in the 20th century as rationing during the two World Wars made it difficult for households to acquire the ingredients needed to make this cherished dish. One 1917 recipe proposed this, far from enticing, ingredient list:

• 1 lb stale War Bread14 bread, torn small, hard crust removed

• 4 oz suet

• 8 oz mixed dried fruit (or raisins + sultanas)

• 8 oz grated raw carrot

• 1 pint cold tea (or tea + milk mixed)

• 1 egg, beaten

• 4 oz sugar

• 1 tsp mixed spice

You might think that such denuded puddings may have dented my countryfolk’s resolve. But no. No! As Britain faced its darkest hour under the onslaught of Nazi Germany, the very act of having some kind of pudding on December 25th – no matter how small or ersatz – was a morale booster, a symbol that Christmas endures. Wartime diaries and letters frequently mention efforts to secure a bit of pudding for the day, a touchstone for the very way of life that was under threat. One 1940 newspaper encouraged readers: “No eggs? No suet? – Try the Ministry’s ‘National Wheatmeal Pudding’ with grated carrot and a jam sauce; the old Christmas spirit is in the effort, not the ingredients”.15

As rationing eased after the war the Christmas pudding returned to its glorious self, and has remained a staple of British Yuletide celebrations, including that of my family, to this day…

UK History News

Short, regular bulletins about the latest British history news, curated and summarised for you.

By Andrew Chapman

Planning to stay, 1606

In 1606, the newly formed Virginia Company of London received a royal charter from James I to plant a colony in North America: what would become Jamestown. The company organised an expedition in three small ships – Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery – which finally left London on December 19 with around 100–140 colonists aboard.

Just before and during their departure window, the company’s London council drafted and added a set of detailed directions, usually called ‘Instructions given by way of advice … for the intended voyage to Virginia’, to guide the leaders once they made landfall. These instructions give us an idea about what the planners thought, said and feared in the days before they set off. Here are a few extracts:

When it shall please God to send you on the coast of Virginia, you shall do your best endeavour to find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river, making choice of such a one as runneth farthest into the land, and if you happen to discover diverse portable rivers, and amongst them any one that hath two main branches, if the difference be not great, make choice of that which bendeth most toward the North-west for that way you shall soonest find the other sea…

When you have discovered as far up the river as you mean to plant yourselves, and landed your victuals and munitions; to the end that every man may know know his charge, you shall do well to divide your six score men into three parts: whereof one party of them you may appoint to fortify and build, of which your first work must be your storehouse for victuals; the other[s] you may employ in preparing your ground and sowing your corn and roots; the other ten of these forty you must leave as sentinel at the haven’s mouth.

The other forty you may employ for two months in discovery of the river above you, and on the country about you…

In all your passages you must have great care not to offend the naturals, if you can eschew it; and imploy some few of your company to trade with them for corn and all other lasting victuals if [they] have any: and this you must do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them; for not being sure how your own seed corn will prosper the first year, to avoid the danger of famine, use and endeavour to store yourselves of the country corn…

You must take especial care that you choose a seat for habitation that shall not be over burdened with woods near your town: for all the men you have, shall not be able to cleanse twenty acres a year; besides that it may serve for a covert for your enemies round about.

Neither must you plant in a low or moist place, because it will prove unhealthful. You shall judge of the good air by the people; for some part of that coast where the lands are low, have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs: but if the naturals be strong and clean made, it is a true sign of a wholesome soil.

Later, Captain John Smith (who was actually charged with mutiny on the voyage but later went on to become one of the leaders of the colony) recalled in his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia:

On the 19 of December, 1606. we set sail from Blackwall, but by unprosperous winds, were kept six weeks in the sight of England; all which time, Mr. Hunt our Preacher, was so weak and sick, that few expected his recovery…

The three ships eventually cleared England and struggled through winter storms across the Atlantic. After months at sea, they finally reached the Chesapeake in April 1607 and chose Jamestown Island as the settlement site in May.

The Instructions shaped their early choices – in some ways for the worse. The insistence on a defensible, river-island location contributed to Jamestown’s unhealthy, brackish-water site; admonitions to keep settlers armed and wary helped frame relations with Powhatan peoples in a wary, militarised way from the start. But over the longer term, this tiny flotilla of December 1606 became the seed of English North America.

Subscribe now

Planning to attack, 1675

Nearly 70 years later, those relations with “the naturals” were fraught at times. King Philip’s War (1675–76), named after the Wampanoag leader Metacom (called “Philip” by the English), was one of the bloodiest conflicts in 17th-century New England. By late 1675, after a devastating campaign of raids and counter-raids, colonial leaders believed the Narragansett people were secretly aiding Philip.

On December 19, 1675 – 350 years ago today – a force of roughly 1,000 colonial militia from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Plymouth, plus Native allies, attacked a large Narragansett fort in a frozen swamp in what is now South County, Rhode Island. The battle – or massacre – left hundreds of Narragansett people, including many non-combatants, dead, and heavy losses among the colonial troops as well.

Written only days after the battle, the anonymous pamphlet ‘A Farther Brief and True Narration of the Great Swamp Fight in the Narragansett Country December 19, 1675’ (probably written by a colonial officer or minister) gives a blow-by-blow account of the brutal assault.

On the 19th, although it was Sunday, our Men thought they could not serve God Better then to require Justice of the Indians for the Innocent Blood which had been so oft by those Truc[ul]ent Savages shed; and we were cheerfully ready (as so many Sampsons) to forgo our own lives to be revenged of these Philistines, that had made Sport with our miseries; we marched through the Snow and came to a thick Swamp... wherein were encamped 3500 Indians. We first demanded to have Philip and his Adherents to be delivered Prisoners to us, according to Articles: And had no other Answer but shot; then we fired about 500 Wigwams... and killed all that we met with of them, as well Squaws and Papooses, (i.e. Women and Children) as Sanups (i.e Men.). In the midst of the wood was a plain piece of Ground on which the Indians had built a Fort…

We were no sooner entered the fort, but our enemies began to fly; and ours had now a carnage rather than a fight, for everyone had their fill of blood. It did greatly rejoice our men to see their enemies, who had formerly skulked behind shrubs and trees, now to be engaged in a fair field, where they had no defence but in their arms, or rather their heels. But our chiefest joy was to see they were mortal, as hoping their death will revive our tranquillity, and once more restore us to a settled peace…

This fight and execution continued from three o’clock in the afternoon till night, and then we left the flying enemy to take care of our wounded, and to carry off our dead.

We have slain of the enemy about 500 fighting men, besides some that were burnt in their wigwams, and women and children the number of which we took no account of…

The Great Swamp Fight shattered Narragansett power, but it also radicalised the conflict. Survivors joined Metacom’s forces, intensifying raids in 1676. For the English colonists, the battle became a foundational story of sacrifice and providential victory; for Native communities, it is remembered as a massacre. The site is now marked by a monument.

Planning to get away with it, 1956

Dr John Bodkin Adams was an Irish-born GP practising in Eastbourne on the English south coast. By the mid-1950s, local officials and some colleagues had become suspicious about the high number of deaths among his wealthy, often elderly patients – and the fact that many left him legacies in their wills.

After a lengthy, discreet investigation, the police first arrested him in November 1956 on charges relating to forged prescriptions and cremation forms. On 19 December 1956, they arrested him again and formally charged him with the murder of one of his patients, Edith Morrell, who had died in 1950 after heavy sedation with heroin and morphine.

When told of the murder charge on 19 December, Adams reportedly responded with a remark that would haunt all later discussions of the case:

Murder? Murder? Can you prove it was murder? I did not think you could prove it was murder. She was dying in any event.

This statement is recorded in contemporary police notes and quoted in several later accounts, including the newspapers the next day, reporting on a “17-minute hearing in a crowded but hushed court” (London Evening News). As he was taken away, Adams (“balding and heavily built”) allegedly “walked into the hall of his house and, grasping the hand of his receptionist, said, ‘I will see you in Heaven.’”

Adams’s 1957 trial for the murder of Edith Morrell became one of the most sensational British criminal trials of the 20th century, raising troubling questions about end-of-life care, intent and medical privilege. During the trial, Adams commented: “Easing the passing of a dying person isn’t all that wicked. She wanted to die. That can’t be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor.” He was acquitted of murder, and later charges were quietly dropped, but he was convicted of lesser offences (including prescription fraud).

Despite being struck off the Medical Register, Adams continued to help his loyal (surviving) patients, and was even reinstated in 1961. He died in 1983.

The case influenced debates about assisted dying and palliative care for decades afterwards. His remark on 19 December – “She was dying in any event” – crystallised anxieties about whether doctors might, deliberately or otherwise, hasten death under the guise of relieving suffering, and what the law should say about it. And inevitable parallels were drawn years later, in 2000, when Dr Harold Shipman was found guilty of murdering 15 patients (he was suspected of as many as 250), the first doctor to be successfully prosecuted for this crime. So it goes.

That such accommodations could be found was due in no small part to the work of Saint Benedict (480-547) whose ‘Rule for Monasteries’ (written in about 530) took great pains to ensure that these places could be sanctuaries in the increasingly lawless Italy of the sixth century. Rule 53 took particular inspiration from Matthew 25:35: “For I hungered, and ye gave Me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me in” and explains in detail how visitors should be treated:

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, “I came as a guest, and you received Me.” And to all let due honour be shown, especially to the domestics of the faith and to pilgrims.

As soon as a guest is announced, therefore, let the Superior or the brethren meet him with all charitable service. And first of all let them pray together, and then exchange the kiss of peace. For the kiss of peace should not be offered until after the prayers have been said, on account of the devil’s deceptions.

In the salutation of all guests, whether arriving or departing, let all humility be shown. Let the head be bowed or the whole body prostrated on the ground in adoration of Christ, who indeed is received in their persons.

After the guests have been received and taken to prayer, let the Superior or someone appointed by him sit with them. Let the divine law be read before the guest for his edification, and then let all kindness be shown him. The Superior shall break his fast for the sake of a guest, unless it happens to be a principal fast day which may not be violated. The brethren, however, shall observe the customary fasts. Let the Abbot give the guests water for their hands; and let both Abbot and community wash the feet of all guests. After the washing of the feet let them say this verse: “We have received Your mercy, O God, in the midst of Your temple.”

In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims the greatest care and solicitude should be shown, because it is especially in them that Christ is received; for as far as the rich are concerned, the very fear which they inspire wins respect for them.

Saint Benedict also understood of having a competent person on the medieval equivalent of the hotel reception desk:

At the gate of the monastery let there be placed a wise old man, who knows how to receive and to give a message, and whose maturity will prevent him from straying about.2 This porter should have a room near the gate, so that those who come may always find someone at hand to attend to their business. And as soon as anyone knocks or a poor man hails him, let him answer “Thanks be to God” or “A blessing!” Then let him attend to them promptly, with all the meekness inspired by the fear of God and with the warmth of charity.

Some of us have doubtless encountered guests who have overstayed their welcome and this was a concern in medieval times as well – monasteries didn’t have unlimited resources and feeding and housing visitors placed demands upon their supplies. There soon developed an informal ‘three-day rule’: you could stay for that long and be given everything that you needed, but then you really had to be on your way. Among the Franciscans, for example:

The usual period was apparently two days and nights, and in ordinary cases after dinner on the third day the guest was expected to take his departure. If for any reason a visitor desired to prolong his stay, permission had to be obtained from the superior by the guest-master. Unless prevented by sickness, after that time the guest had to rise for Matins, and otherwise follow the exercises of the community. With the Franciscans, a visitor who asked for hospitality from the convent beyond three days, had to beg pardon in the conventual chapter before he departed for his excessive demand upon the hospitality of the house.

Where no religious institution existed, it was customary for people to seek accommodation in houses of strangers, but again three days was generally considered to be the limit on how long you could stay there for free. After that point the person would then be considered to be part of the household, and the host would have legal responsibility for them, a strong inventive for getting them out the door! This was even codified in the Kentish Laws of Hlothere and Eadri (c.673-c.686):

If anyone provides for a stranger in his own home for three nights – a merchant or another who has come across the border – and he feeds him his food, and he [the guest] then does harm to any person, the man [the host] should bring the other to justice otherwise make forfeiture.

The same laws also called for strict punishments if you were rude in someone else’s house:

If anyone in another’s dwelling calls a person a perjurer or addresses him with shameful insults, he must pay a shilling to him who owns that dwelling, and 6 shillings to the one to whom he spoke that utterance, and he should pay to the king 12 shillings.3

As Europe moved into the second millennium there was a resurgence of trade which created a demand for lodgings that religious institutions and private homes alone were unable to meet. To accommodate them we see commercial inns being set up, such as the one in Bergen, Norway established by King Eystein Magnusson (reigned 1103-1123), while in Venice a century later we have what could be considered a proto-hotel. The Fontego dei Tedeschi was established in the 1220s as a trading hub, warehouse and accommodation for German merchant visitors to the city. Over time it expanded to house over 100 travellers and while not a hotel per se (it was limited to a specific class of guest) it was certainly a form of commercial mass accommodation for visitors.

Meanwhile a network of somewhat more modest, but no less significant, coaching inns sprang up across the continent. The Tabard Inn was founded in Southwark in 1307 on what is now Borough High Street where it was crossed by the ancient road to Canterbury and Dover (and hence on a major pilgrimage route). It is particularly notable because this is where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered before setting off on their journey as recorded in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400):

Bifel that in that season on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And well we weren esed atte beste;

Subscribe now

Sadly the inn was demolished in 1873;4 however, on the site next door you can find one of my favourite London pubs, the George Inn.5 It is of similar medieval foundation, with the current building dating from 1677 (Dickens used to drink there and it is mentioned in Little Dorrit). In my home town of Oxford there is the even older Golden Cross which was first established as an inn in 11936 by a vintner named Mauger. The current buildings date from the late 15th century and the courtyard is probably where Shakespeare’s King’s Men performed in 1610.7

The quality of one’s inn experience varied from country to country as the writer Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, 1466-1536) describes in his Colloquia familiaria (1518-1533). Firstly the experience in France:

There’s a Woman always waiting at Table, which makes the Entertainment pleasant with Railleries, and pleasant Jests. And the Women are very handsome there. First the Mistress of the House came and bad us Welcome, and to accept kindly what Fare we should have; after her, comes her Daughter, a very fine Woman, of so handsome a Carriage, and so pleasant in Discourse, that she would make even Cato himself merry, were he there: And they don’t talk to you as if you were perfect Strangers, but as those they have been a long Time acquainted with, and familiar Friends.

And because they can’t be always with you, by Reason of the other Affairs of the House, and the welcoming of other Guests, there comes a Lass, that supplies the Place of the Daughter, till she is at Leisure to return again. This Lass is so well instructed in the Knack of Repartees, that she has a Word ready for every Body, and no Conceit comes amiss to her. The Mother, you must know, was somewhat in Years.

But what was your Table furnish’d with? For Stories fill no Bellies.

Truly, so splendid, that I was amaz’d that they could afford to entertain their Guests so, for so small a Price. And then after Dinner, they entertain a Man with such facetious Discourse, that one cannot be tired; that I seemed to be at my own House, and not in a strange Place.

This is sharp contrast to what happens in Germany:

I can’t tell whether the Method of entertaining be the same every where; but I’ll tell you what I saw there. No Body bids a Guest welcome, lest he should seem to court his Guests to come to him, for that they look upon to be sordid and mean, and not becoming the German Gravity. When you have called a good While at the Gate, at Length one puts his Head out of the Stove8 Window (for they commonly live in Stoves till Midsummer) like a Tortoise from under his Shell: Him you must ask if you can have any Lodging there; if he does not say no, you may take it for granted, that there is Room for you. When you ask where the Stable is, he points to it; there you may curry your Horse as you please yourself, for there is no Servant will put a Hand to it.

You might be wondering if the female staff/patrons at inns of this time provided more than witty repartee to customers and the answer to this was often ‘yes’. Inns of this era were bawdy places: in addition to the obvious alcohol there were gambling, prostitution and other vices on offer. I’ll end this week by talking about a strange piece of stunt marketing9 for an inn which made a knowing wink at this reputation for licentiousness. In around 1590 the White Hart Inn in Ware, Hertfordshire commissioned a carpenter named Jonas Bosbrooke to build a massive bed – 3.38 metres long by 3.26m wide (about 11 feet by 10). Advertised as being able to accommodate four couples what soon became known as ‘The Great Bed of Ware’ drew people to both gawp at it and spend the night in it. Prince Ludwig of Anholt-Kohten stayed there in July 1596 and wrote:

At Ware was a bed of dimensions so wide,
Four couples might cosily lie side by side,
and thus without touching each other abide

While it might have been possible for multiple couples to spend the night in the bed “without touching” its notoriety was based more upon the bawdy opportunities that it offered. One legend claimed that, in 1689, 26 butchers and their wives spent the night frolicking in it!10

Now you might be doubting quite how famous a big bed might be. I mean, for sure, it was a really big bed but is that something people are really going to talk about? Let me put it this way: in 1601, just 11 years after it had been made, Shakespeare considered it famous enough to mention in Twelfth Night11 where Sir Toby Belch tells Sir Andrew to write a furious challenge:

…as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England

Eight years later Ben Jonson mentions it in his play Epicoene and centuries later Byron references it in Don Juan!

In my next piece12 I’ll bring the story of hotels finally up to the modern day with the development of chains, luxury hotels and the like.

Into the ice, 1914

In August 1914, as Europe slid into war, Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton sailed from Plymouth with Endurance and 27 men, aiming to make the first land crossing of Antarctica. By early December, the Endurance lay at the whaling station of Grytviken, South Georgia, the last outpost of civilisation before the Antarctic ice. Shackleton had brought his ship down from Buenos Aires and spent about a month refitting, training the dogs and taking in coal, while whaling captains warned him that the pack ice that season lay unusually far north and would be hard to penetrate.

His original plan had been to try the trans-Antarctic crossing in the first summer (1914–15), but by the time he was ready to sail from South Georgia he had already decided this was unrealistic. In his later account South (1919, based heavily on his diaries), he wrote: “It seemed to me hopeless now to think of making the journey across the continent in the first summer, as the season was far advanced and the ice conditions were likely to prove unfavourable.”

South goes on to capture the moment Endurance cut her last tie to land and headed into what they all hoped would be just another hard polar season – and what would in fact become a 20-month survival epic. Shackleton recalled:

The day of departure arrived. I gave the order to heave anchor at 8.45 a.m. on December 5, 1914, and the clanking of the windlass broke for us the last link with civilization. The morning was dull and overcast, with occasional gusts of snow and sleet, but hearts were light aboard the Endurance. The long days of preparation were over and the adventure lay ahead.

We had hoped that some steamer from the north would bring news of war and perhaps letters from home before our departure. A ship did arrive on the evening of the 4th, but she carried no letters, and nothing useful in the way of information could be gleaned from her. The captain and crew were all stoutly pro-German, and the “news” they had to give took the unsatisfying form of accounts of British and French reverses. We would have been glad to have had the latest tidings from a friendlier source. A year and a half later we were to learn that the Harpoon, the steamer which tends the Grytviken station, had arrived with mail for us not more than two hours after the Endurance had proceeded down the coast.

The bows of the Endurance were turned to the south, and the good ship dipped to the south-westerly swell. Misty rain fell during the forenoon, but the weather cleared later in the day, and we had a good view of the coast of South Georgia as we moved under steam and sail to the south-east. The course was laid to carry us clear of the island and then south of South Thule, Sandwich Group. The wind freshened during the day, and all square sail was set, with the foresail reefed in order to give the look-out a clear view ahead; for we did not wish to risk contact with a “growler,” one of those treacherous fragments of ice that float with surface awash. The ship was very steady in the quarterly sea, but certainly did not look as neat and trim as she had done when leaving the shores of England four months earlier. We had filled up with coal at Grytviken, and this extra fuel was stored on deck, where it impeded movement considerably. The carpenter had built a false deck, extending from the poop-deck to the chart-room. We had also taken aboard a ton of whale-meat for the dogs. The big chunks of meat were hung up in the rigging, out of reach but not out of sight of the dogs, and as the Endurance rolled and pitched, they watched with wolfish eyes for a windfall.

Subscribe now

After a good start, the next night “the situation became dangerous”. By December 7–11 the ship was edging through gaps in a belt of ice. This early “tussle with the pack” was only a foretaste. Through late December and into January 1915, the ice closed in; by mid-January the Endurance was firmly beset in the Weddell Sea pack, unable to break free, and drifted helplessly for months before the pressure finally destroyed her on 27 October 1915. The open-boat journey to Elephant Island and Shackleton’s dash to South Georgia to bring rescue are stories for another time.

Into the unknown, 1945

On December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers – Flight 19 – took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine over-water navigation exercise. They became disoriented, reported compass problems… and vanished over the Atlantic with 14 airmen aboard. A PBM Mariner sent to search for them also disappeared with 13 men, helping to seed later legends of the ‘Bermuda Triangle’.

Radio transcripts from Flight 19 survive, and capture the growing confusion. For example, less than two hours after departure, bomber FT28 reported:

Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.

A couple of hours on, at 18.06, they said:

I suggest we fly due east until we run out of gas. We have a better chance of being picked up close to shore. If we were near land we should be able to see a light or something. Are you listening? We may just as well turn around and go east again.

The last brief message came half an hour later… and then silence.

In the immediate aftermath, the US Navy convened a Board of Investigation at NAS Jacksonville. One of the most vivid sections of its findings records a report from the tanker SS Gaines Mills, which saw what was almost certainly the mid-air explosion of the PBM search plane:

At 0050 G. M. T. observed burst of flames, apparently explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high burning ten minutes. Position 28 degrees, 59 minutes north, 80 degrees 25 minutes west. At present, passing through big pool of oil at 0119 G. M. T. Stopped, circled area using search lights, looking for survivors. None found.

The report ended forlornly: “search operations… by surface and aircraft in the area of the reported explosion failed to reveal any debris of the missing PBM or evidence of its crew.”

The Board originally leaned toward pilot error by the instructor, Lt. Charles Taylor, who likely mistook the Bahamas for the Florida Keys and repeatedly turned his flight back out to sea. Later, to avoid explicitly blaming him with no wreckage recovered, the official conclusion was amended to “cause unknown”.

In the 1960s and 1970s, writers folded Flight 19 into the emerging Bermuda Triangle mythology. But when you read the investigation report and radio transcripts, the story feels less paranormal and more like an intensely human tragedy of navigation training, fading daylight, messy radio procedures and deteriorating weather.

Into the fog, 1952

For a few days from December 5, 1952, a dense, yellowish smog – caused by a temperature inversion, increased winter coal burning and industrial emissions – settled over London. Visibility in some areas dropped to a few metres; buses crawled with conductors walking in front carrying lamps; some theatres and cinemas had smog drifting inside. Within days, deaths from respiratory failure and heart problems soared.

Only a few weeks after the ‘Great Smog’, Dr John A. Scott, medical officer of health to the London County Council issued a report to the Public Health Committee, recording the dry facts:

During the first half of December 1952. the London area experienced periods of fog, one of which was of an intensity rarely reached in recent times. This fog was widespread and persisted for a considerable continuous period, from December 5 through December 8.

Its onset was determined by the meteorological factors of almost complete absence of wind or air movement and low temperature, which produced what is technically described as an ‘inversion’ whereby the normal upward air circulation by convection currents was arrested. Hence at ground level and for many feet above, there was no air movement, and smoke, sulfur oxides, and other air contaminants increased to concentrations much above those normal for the winter season…

Of course, many people experienced these events. Here’s one eyewitness reminiscence from Sir Donald Acheson, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer 1983–91, who at the time was a resident medical officer at the Middlesex Hospital in Central London:

…at its worst it had the effect of completely disorientating me in a part of London I knew well, so that I lost my way on a minor errand from the Middlesex Hospital to Oxford Street, 400 yards away. To get my bearings and to discover where I was, I had to creep on the pavement along the walls of the buildings, to the next corner, to read the name of the street. I do not recall any smell, but I do remember an eerie silence as there was little or no traffic. Visibility was less than three metres, and it was bitterly cold.

As far as the hospital itself was concerned, somehow, although I find this difficult to understand, sufficient ambulances got to us to deliver patients to take up every available bed. The fog itself swirled into the wards, and seemed to consist principally of smuts, so that the wash basins and baths turned darker and darker grey, until it was possible literally to write one’s name on them which I actually did. I don’t recall a smell of SO₂… As I remember the patients themselves, the clinical picture I have in my mind’s eye is of middle-aged and elderly people, principally men, gasping for breath…

Within a few days patients with acute respiratory distress spilled over into all wards, regardless of the specialty or gender. In other words, they were in the surgical wards, and even in the obstetric wards, and as the majority were men, room had to be found in some of the women’s wards. I remember also that the supply of oxygen was stretched to the limit.1

Initial official estimates suggested about 4,000 “excess deaths” from the smog; later analyses have pushed that figure to 10,000–12,000. Public pressure, scientific investigations like Scott’s and a Ministry of Health committee report fed into debates in Parliament that culminated in the Clean Air Act 1956, which introduced smokeless zones and restrictions on domestic coal burning.

Subscribe now

The earliest glimpses of paid lodging appear in ancient Mesopotamia’s written records. By the late Bronze Age, towns in Sumer and Babylonia hosted tavern-keepers (often female) who provided drink, food, and perhaps a cot for wayfaring strangers. These establishments straddled a fine line between freely given hospitality and commerce. The significance of taverns, and the extent to which they were clearly well-established can be seen from the fact that they are mentioned in a set of laws called Code of Hammurabi which dates from around 1750 BCE. One law ensures that customers (typically grain-traders for whom currency and product were one in the same) didn’t get ripped off:

If a woman wine merchant (tavern-keeper) does not accept grain according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money so that the price of the drink is less than that of the grain, she shall be convicted and drowned.

Another firmly puts the onus on the inn-keeper to ensure that people didn’t get up to mischief in her establishment:

If a wine merchant (tavern-keeper) has collected a riotous assembly in her house and has not seized those rioters and driven them to the palace, that wine merchant shall be put to death.3

And a third makes it clear that certain customers were just not allowed:

If a holy woman opens a tavern door or enters a tavern for a drink, she shall be burned to death.4

While there is little direct evidence of the amenities, the Code’s attention implies that these proto-inns were viewed as potential hotbeds of disorder as much as places of rest. It seems likely that the term for tavern was also used for venues that combined drink, the sex trade, and lodging. Travellers in Mesopotamia probably slept in the same room that the locals gathered to drink beer and wine in – a far cry from the private hotel rooms of today.

In pharaonic Egypt, formal inns as we know them were rare. Travel was common – along Nile canals, desert roads to mines, or overland routes for trade and pilgrimage – but lodging relied on a patchwork of hospitality and state provisioning. Egyptian sources don’t mention commercial inns, but they do speak of royal travel stations. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BCE, describes an ancient relay system between Memphis and Thebes:

Yet twenty thousand chariots did in truth, we are told, pass out from it to war; for there were once scattered along the river from Memphis to the Thebes which is over against Libya one hundred post-stations,⁠ each one having accommodation for two hundred horses, whose foundations are pointed out even to this day.

If this account is accurate, pharaohs maintained way-stations with stables and lodgings for couriers and officials – essentially government inns. For the ordinary wayfarer, however, lodging depended on hospitality rather than payment. The concept of hospitality (hotep) was deeply ingrained; offering bread, beer, and shelter to a traveller earned religious merit.

Unlike their Near Eastern neighbors, the classical Greeks did not develop a robust system of inns in the Archaic and Classical periods. Instead, they exalted xenia, the sacred law of hospitality. To the Greeks, every stranger was potentially a guest sent by Zeus Xenios (Zeus the Hospitable). Paid lodging houses (pandocheia, “all-receiving places”) existed by the classical era, especially at seaports or along highways, but they had a dubious reputation. Far more esteemed was the ritual of guest-friendship. In Homer’s Odyssey, the code of hospitality is inviolable: even a ragged stranger must be bathed, fed, and given a bed before anyone asks his name. Odysseus reminds the Cyclops that:

Jove [Zeus] takes all respectable travellers under his protection, for he is the avenger of all suppliants and foreigners in distress5

Throughout the Greek world, people forged long-term guest-friendships (xenía), extending hospitality to each other’s family members across generations. A traveller from Athens bound for Syracuse, or from Corinth to Olympia, would carry letters of introduction to a proxenos or guest-friend who would host him for free. Such private hospitality networks reduced the need for commercial inns. Greek literature actually disdains innkeepers: they appear as innuendo in plays and fables, often as cheats or brothel-keepers. In one Greek proverb, “Trusting an innkeeper” was likened to trusting a thief. Nonetheless, by the 4th century BCE, the increase in travel (for festivals, athletic games, or commerce) led to more public inns. These were usually simple establishments – a tavern with a few spare rooms upstairs – where one paid a few obols to sleep on a mat. Still, many travellers preferred to sleep under a temple portico or in a wealthy acquaintance’s villa than to risk the unknown at a pandocheion.

The Romans, pragmatic as always, developed a dual system of lodging: one for official travellers and another for the public. Under the imperial cursus publicus (state post), a network of mansiones6 (posting inns) and mutationes (horse-changing stations) spanned the Roman roads at regular intervals (approximately every 15–20 Roman miles). These facilities were state-run and meant to expedite government business – couriers, magistrates, and imperial messengers had priority. According to Roman accounts, a mansio typically offered stabling for dozens of horses and mules, storage for wagons, and a few rooms or at least sheltered porticoes where an official could rest. Meals could be obtained and fresh mounts hired. The 4th-century Antonine Itinerary lists hundreds of such stations dotted across Gaul, Italy, Africa, and Asia Minor. Private citizens were technically not allowed to use these post-houses unless they carried an imperial warrant. Thus, everyday travellers relied on cauponae (inns or taverns) and tabernae diversoriae (lodging houses) for accommodation. The poet Horace gives us some fairly robust reviews of such establishments, recounting in his Satire 1.5, a journey along the Appian Way:

…to Forum Appi, then, crammed with bargemen and stingy innkeepers. We took this lazily in two days, though keener travellers than us take only one: the Appian’s easier taken slow! Here because of the lousy water my stomach declares war on me, and I wait impatiently while the others dine.

The marsh frogs and damned mosquitoes keep away sleep, while the boatman, drowned in sour wine, sings of the girl left behind and a traveller joins in.

Later, reaching Beneventum, he relates how at their lodging-house the overzealous host nearly burned the place down while roasting some less than impressive thrushes for supper:

Our industrious host nearly set himself on fire while roasting some scrawny thrushes… the flame went wandering through the old kitchen, then rushed to lick at the roof. You should have seen all the hungry guests and frightened slaves trying to grab the food and put out the fire.

Roman innkeepers were generally considered to be an untrustworthy bunch, which is probably why the law made them strictly liable for the safety of guests’ property. As one legal commentary explains, “the caupo is paid for permitting travellers to stay in his inn, and yet they are bound for the security of the property also”. If a traveller’s goods were stolen or damaged at an inn, the innkeeper could be sued even without proof of fault – a sign of how often such thefts must have occurred. Many Roman wayfarers preferred to avoid these caupona altogether. The wealthy or well-connected arranged hospitality through letters (much as the Greeks did). Cicero, for instance, rarely stayed at inns when touring his province; he lodged with local dignitaries or in the villas of friends. Still, for the average trader or pilgrim on the roads to Rome, inns were a necessary refuge – noisy, malodorous, and risky perhaps, but offering wine, stew, and a roof over one’s head for a few sesterces. By late antiquity, some larger cities had public inns (xenodochia) run by charities or municipalities, foreshadowing the hostels of the medieval period.

Whilst the Romans built roads and inns across Europe and the Near East, another hospitality network was flowering along the trade routes of South and Central Asia – one centred on Buddhist monasteries. In the centuries after the Buddha (5th century BCE), monasteries (viharas) multiplied in India. While meant for monks, these institutions embraced the ancient Indian custom of welcoming travellers of all sorts. Many Buddhist monastic complexes explicitly maintained guest houses for itinerant monks, pilgrims, and lay visitors. The monastic code (Vinaya) enjoined hospitality to strangers, and powerful patrons endowed monasteries with extra provisions “for the guest monks arriving from afar.” Over time, this evolved into a continent-wide web of free lodging for travellers motivated by religious duty rather than profit. One of the earliest state endorsements of this ideal comes from the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (3rd century BCE) who proclaimed in an edict:

Along roads I have had banyan trees planted so that they can give shade to animals and men, and I have had mango-groves planted and I have had wells dug and rest-houses built at every half kos.7

With the advent of the Islamic era (7th century onward), a new chapter in travel lodging unfolded across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. The rapid expansion of trade routes – from the Silk Road caravans carrying silk and spices, to the pilgrimage roads converging on Mecca – created an urgent need for safe, reliable inns at regular intervals. The Islamic solution was the caravanserai (from Persian karvansara, literally “caravan palace”), also known in Arabic as khān or funduq. These were large roadside inns designed specifically to host caravans, including merchants, pilgrims, and their pack animals. Early Muslim rulers, following precedents of Persians and Byzantines, began to sponsor the construction of these hostel-fortresses. Many stood on the ruins of earlier Roman mansiones or Sasanian caravan posts, now adapted to the needs of camel caravans. By the 10th century, the caravanserai network was a defining feature of travel in the Islamic world. Each caravanserai was typically a walled rectangular compound built around a spacious courtyard. The standard plan included a single sturdy portal (often an imposing arched gateway) through which loaded camels could enter. Inside, the courtyard allowed animals to be unloaded; around it ran an arcade with dozens of vaulted rooms for travellers to sleep in, usually raised on a platform above ground level (to prevent intruding animals or thieves). Most caravanserais featured a well or cistern for water, and latrines in a corner and many had a small mosque or prayer room as well.

The scale and architecture varied by region: Persian caravanserais along the Silk Road (such as the 11th-century Ribat-i Sharaf in Khorasan) were elaborate brick structures with four-iwan courtyards and even gardens. In the Syrian and Anatolian deserts, caravanserais (often called qāsur or castles) took on a more fortress-like appearance with solid bastions – reflecting the need to repel bandits. Despite differences, their purpose was uniform: to shelter travellers and their goods securely overnight. Crucially, many caravanserais were not run for profit but were endowed by rulers or philanthropists as pious charities. For instance, the Ummayad caliphs and later Seljuk sultans invested in caravanserais to promote commerce and earn divine favor by aiding wayfarers. One famous benefactor was Zubayda, wife of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who around 800 CE built a string of inns and wells along the arduous Iraqi pilgrimage route to Mecca. According to Ibn Khallikan, “She established… rest stops and way stations along the route, as well as a number of water tanks.”

As the concept spread, different regions lent it local flavors. In the Persianate East (Iran, Central Asia), caravanserais often took ornate forms. The Safavid Persians (16th–17th centuries) built splendid caravanserais on the royal roads – high-walled inns with tiled mosaics and badgirs (windcatchers) to cool the guest rooms. Central Asian khans like those on the route between Bukhara and Samarkand sometimes included caravanserais within city gates that doubled as trading bazaars. Meanwhile, the Arab West and Maghreb developed the urban funduq (from Greek pandocheion). A funduq in a city like Fez or Cairo functioned as a combined warehouse and inn for foreign merchants. Typically a two-story khan in the suq (market), a funduq had storerooms on the ground floor for bales of goods and animals, and an upper gallery of small rooms where the merchants lodged. These were commercial enterprises, often administered by guilds or state officials, and they charged rent – but modest, and regulated

Even in Central Asia under the Mongols, the notion of spaced hostelries was maintained, as famously recorded by Marco Polo (1254–1324). He wrote that on the great highway of the Yuan Empire:

At every twenty-five miles… there is a posting station, called yām, with a spacious and palatial hostelry for lodging. These hostelries have splendid beds with silk coverlets… If a king came here, he would be well lodged. At each post, 400 horses are kept in readiness… And such posts are found along all the main highways of the Khan’s empire, each with three or four hundred horses and palatial lodgings.

Meanwhile in Japan, In the late 7th to 8th centuries, a network of roads was constructed across the country. Along these routes the government planted umaya (station stables), formal relay posts for officials on public business. The legal backbone came from the Taihō (701) and Yōrō (compiled 718; promulgated 757) codes; under this regime, posts were set at regular intervals — about every 30 ri (~16 km, 10 miles) — and stocked with five to twenty relay horses depending on a road’s grade. The posts offered stabling, fodder, duty staff, and simple quarters; their purpose was to keep state traffic moving, not to host private travellers. To gain access to the inns officials had to ring a bell, but not one at the post, rather one that they carried with them. Officials and couriers travelled with ekirei — bronze station bells issued by the centre or provincial offices as credentials. The bell’s notches governed how many horses one could requisition; on urgent dispatches the courier rode with the bell ringing, waking posts by sound alone.8

Outside the post roads, lodging relied upon institutions and kindness more than inns. Court-backed Buddhism in the Nara and early Heian eras fostered urban welfare houses and temple compounds that sometimes received travellers — especially monks, confraternities, and pilgrims. From this milieu grew shukubō (temple lodgings): guest halls inside temple precincts where religious visitors could sleep, eat simple fare, and join morning devotions.

In my next piece I’ll expose the evolution of coaching inns and hotels proper, but I’ll end today talking about arguably the oldest functioning hotels in the world, also to be found in Japan. Thermal hot springs, onsen, around which inns, now called ryokan, err, sprang up. One of these, Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in today’s Yamanashi, traces its founding to the year 705 and is probably the oldest independent company in the world. It was run for an astonishing 1,300 years by 52 generations (including adopted heirs) of the same family until 2017 when no family members were willing to take it on and the general manager was selected as the new president.