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It is often the case when I write these pieces that I discover that incredibly familiar things are either much older than I expected (for instance, drinking straws) or much younger (French fries). Coffee falls into that latter category, somewhat to my surprise, as it has basically always been potentially available in the West, and didn’t need the Colombian Exchange to happen before we could start pouring it down our throats.

Coffee was, it seems, wholly unknown to the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. Or was it? We have this line from Plutarch, writing about the Spartans:

τῶν δὲ σιτίων ἐνδοξότατος ἦν ὁ μέλας ζωμός

Among their foods, the black broth was the most renowned

The English traveller and writer Sir Henry Blount (1602 - 1682) suggested that this broth could indeed be coffee:

They have another drink not good at meat,2 called Cauphe, made of a Berry as big as a small Bean, dried in a Furnace, and beat to Pouder [sic], of a Soot-colour, in taste a little bitterish, that they seeth and drink as hot as may be endured … it is thought to be the old black broth used so much by the Lacedemonians…

I have to say I find Sir Henry’s suggestion wholly fanciful. I can’t believe that the Spartans started their day with a cup of Joe and there aren’t more obvious, tangible, records of them doing so. Similarly given how coffee tends to enmesh itself into every society it encounters then why were the Greeks and Romans not sipping on Java? The general consensus is that this “black broth” was probably some kind of concoction made from pig’s blood, not the kind of thing that I would like to face first thing in the morning.

Besides (handily for me) we know exactly how coffee was discovered and it took place nearly a thousand years after Plutarch was writing. The story takes place in Ethiopia in the 9th century and brilliantly it involves dancing goats:

A young goatherd named Kaldi noticed one day that his goats, whose deportment up to that time had been irreproachable, were abandoning themselves to the most extravagant prancings. The venerable buck, ordinarily so dignified and solemn, bounded about like a young kid. Kaldi attributed this foolish gaiety to certain fruits of which the goats had been eating with delight.

The story goes that the poor fellow had a heavy heart; and in the hope of cheering himself up a little, he thought he would pick and eat of the fruit. The experiment succeeded marvelously. He forgot his troubles and became the happiest herder in happy Arabia. When the goats danced, he gaily made himself one of the party, and entered into their fun with admirable spirit.

One day, a monk chanced to pass by and stopped in surprise to find a ball going on. A score of goats were executing lively pirouettes like a ladies’ chain,3 while the buck solemnly balanced, and the herder went through the figures of an eccentric pastoral dance.

The astonished monk inquired the cause of this saltatorial madness; and Kaldi told him of his precious discovery.

Now, this poor monk had a great sorrow; he always went to sleep in the middle of his prayers; and he reasoned that Mohammed without doubt was revealing this marvelous fruit to him to overcome his sleepiness.

Piety does not exclude gastronomic instincts. Those of our good monk were more than ordinary; because he thought of drying and boiling the fruit of the herder. This ingenious concoction gave us coffee. Immediately all the monks of the realm made use of the drink, because it encouraged them to pray and, perhaps, also because it was not disagreeable.

I read a version of this story more than 45 years ago as a kid and I absolutely loved it4 – people drink coffee today because of a bunch of dancing goats! The younger me would have been saddened to learn, however, that it is not true at all. The first mention of Kaldi’s name occurs in the passage that I quoted above, which comes from William H. Ukers’s 1922 book All About Coffee which claims that it has been taken from an earlier French source (though I have not been able to track that down, and fear that he might simply have made this up).

It seems that this is a late 19th or early 20th century version of a similar story from 1671 in the book Discorso della salutifera beuanda cahue, ò vero Cafe’ del sig. D. Fausto Nairone Banesio maronita trasportato dalla latina, alla lingua italiana da Er. Frederic. Vegilin di Claerbergen Leouardiense Frisone (Discourse on the healthy drink of the Cahue, or true Cafe, by Mr. D. Fausto Nairone Banesio, Maronite, translated from Latin into Italian by Er. Frederic. Vegilin of Claerbergen, Leouardiense Frisian.):

…it must be said that this drink called Cahue, or Cafè, was discovered by accidental experience, as will be clear from what is about to be narrated.

For, according to the common tradition of the Orientals, a certain keeper of camels — or, as others say, of goats — complained to the monks of a certain monastery in the region of Ayaman, which is Arabia Felix, that his herds, not merely once in the week but throughout the whole night, were staying awake and leaping about beyond their usual habit. The prior of that monastery, led by curiosity, judged that this must come from the pastures. Carefully examining, together with his companion, the place where the goats or camels had been feeding on the night when they were leaping about, he found there certain little shrubs, on whose fruits, or rather berries, they had been feeding.

He wished to test for himself the powers of this fruit, and so, boiling them in water, he soon found by experience that the drink made from them aroused wakefulness at night. From this it came about that he ordered it to be used daily by the monks for their night vigils, so that they might be readier to attend the prayers of the night. And because, from this daily drink, they experienced day by day various and very healthful effects for human well-being and good bodily condition, this new kind of drink, by chance and by the marvelous providence of God, gradually spread through that whole region, then in the course of time through other provinces and kingdoms of the East, with such wholesomeness that it reached even western regions, and especially European lands.

Therefore they say that the first discoverers of this drink were the aforementioned Christian monks, having learned it from the keepers — so to speak, the nurses — of goats or camels. The Turks themselves, as they are generally accustomed to do, admit this; and in gratitude to them, and from devotion of spirit, they pour out prayers for them, especially those Turks who are the preparers and distributors of this drink. For these men have their own daily prayers for Sciadli and Aidhrous, because they assert that these were the names of the aforementioned monks.

A great abundance of these little shrubs is found in Arabia Felix. They bear fruits like cacao, but split lengthwise like the stone of a date, and they are divided two by two within the same husk.

Interestingly this version changes the monks from being Muslims to Christians (possibly due to the biases of the author) however it seems that this tale is a version of an even older one. عمدة الصفوة في حل القهوة (which transliterates to ʿUmdat al-ṣafwa fī ḥill al-qahwa and roughly means “The mainstay of the elite concerning the permissibility of coffee.”) was written by Zayn al-Dīn al-Jazīrī (also Abd al-Qādir al-Jazīrī) around 1558 (but likely drawing on earlier works) and here the story is as follows:

Other accounts of coffee’s origin exist, but they are not equally reliable. One such account, reported by Nairon, says that a camel driver - or, according to others, a goatherd - complained to monks in Arabia that his camels or goats remained awake all night on certain days of the week and leaped about contrary to their usual behaviour.5 The prior or abbot of the monastery, curious to know why these animals were so wakeful and lively, observed them with a companion at the place where this happened. Finding that they had been eating the fruit of certain shrubs, he boiled the fruit in water and discovered that the drink excited wakefulness. He ordered his monks to drink it so that they might more easily attend the divine office at night. Then, when the monks found from daily use that the beverage had several good effects on health, it spread gradually through the country and then through the provinces of the East.

al-Jazīrī is very skeptical of this story (and also notes that it has been appropriated by the Christians):

The author gives little credit to this story. Nairon cites no authority for it; he merely calls it the common tradition of the Orientals. In plain terms, that means that it is a tale current among common people, not a report on which sensible persons should rely. Moreover, it is easy to see that the tale is a fable based on the true origin already reported by Abd al-Qadir from earlier authorities. Eastern Christians appear to have been pleased to claim honor from it. The prior or abbot and his companion are, in this interpretation, Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani and Muhammad al-Hadrami; the monks are the dervishes who spent the night in prayer with them.

There is another reason to reject the monastery version. Nairon cannot sustain the claim that such monks existed in Arabia Felix at the relevant time. There may have been monks there before Muhammad, for history teaches that there were Christians as well as idolaters in Arabia in that earlier period. But after Muhammad, Arabia Felix became Muslim. Nor can the monks in question be the monks of Mount Sinai, for Mount Sinai lies in Arabia Petraea, not in Arabia Felix. If coffee had been introduced in the age of such monks, ancient Arab and Persian historians and poets would surely have mentioned it.

So where does coffee come from? The beans that are ground for us each day come from two species of plant – Coffea arabica (better known as arabica) and Coffea canephora, (aka robusta). Recent genomic work has found that arabica is the result of an ancient (between 350,000 and 610,000 years ago), natural, hybridisation between C. canephora and C. eugenioides in or near Ethiopian forests and it seems likely that the first humans to consume coffee dwelt in the same woods. Due to a lack of written records it seems likely that people were partaking of the black stuff (or, more likely, chewing on the berries) for hundreds or even thousands of years before the first accounts that we can find today.

For the earliest history of coffee embedding itself in society we turn once again to al-Jazīrī who in the following passages is talking about the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s:

The first great spread of coffee, according to the report the author transmits, took place in Yemen. Its early appearance is connected with the shaykh, the imam, the learned and saintly man Jamal al-Din Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Said, known as al-Dhabhani [died around 1470], so called from Dhabhan, a town in Yemen. He was attached to Aden, where he held a significant legal office and gave fatwas. At some point he travelled to Persia. There he saw men from his own country drinking coffee. At first he did not inquire closely into the reason for their practice or the benefit they drew from it.

When he returned to Aden, his health was disturbed. Remembering what he had seen, he tried coffee and found benefit in it. Beyond the restoration of health, he noticed certain special properties: it dispelled heaviness caused by vapors rising to the head; it gladdened and enlivened the spirit; it brought joy; it helped loosen the bowels; and above all it prevented sleep without causing the discomfort that often accompanies sleeplessness. This last property was of special importance to him. He had turned to devotion, and he associated with Sufis or dervishes. He and they took coffee together at the beginning of the night and spent the night until morning in prayer, remembrance, and other exercises of strict devotion. It gave them freedom of mind and alertness of spirit in exercises that others had not been able to sustain in the same way.

Because Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani was a man of position and reputation, his example gave coffee credit in Aden. Soon he and his dervishes were not the only ones who used it. Men of the law who loved reading adopted it; artisans who needed to gain time for their work adopted it; travellers who had to journey by night in order to avoid the heat of the day adopted it; and finally the whole city of Aden adopted it. Those who did not need to keep vigil, or who did not seek wakefulness, drank it by day in order to profit from its other benefits.

If this account is accurate, then we can date the start of the spread of coffee in the Yemen (from where it would then expand across the Islamic world, into Western Europe and across the globe) fairly accurately, as the accounts relating to Jamāl al-Dīn al-Dhabḥānī are generally agreed to be relating to the 1450s, and it would seem that he was pivotal in the development of the drink:

This, then, is the first origin of the widespread public use of coffee. It had existed before, for there were people who drank it without ill effect, and perhaps without clearly understanding its advantages. But it remained obscure until Jamal al-Din al-Dhabhani - a discerning man capable of recognising the excellence of a precious drink - brought it into public favour. He was joined in this by Muhammad al-Hadrami, another weighty doctor from Hadramawt, who drank it and supported its use.

Coffee then spread to Mecca, but it wasn’t long before it ran into a few problems as (once again)6 al-Jazīrī recounts:

In the year 917 AH, corresponding to 1511 CE, coffee suffered a fierce blow at Mecca. Khayr Beg, governor of Mecca under Qansuh, the sultan of Egypt, was leaving the sanctuary after evening prayer when he saw a circle of men seated there with a lantern, drinking coffee in preparation for keeping vigil through the night and reciting praises connected with the birth of Muhammad. He was surprised to see people drinking in that form in the very sanctuary, which Muslims so greatly venerate. Since he had not yet heard of coffee or of the way it was taken, he first believed that they were drinking wine.

When the coffee-drinkers noticed that the governor was observing them, they put out their light, which increased his curiosity. He sent some of his men to them and had them brought before him to account for their action. His astonishment grew when he saw that they had a pot and cups. What they told him - that the drink was common in Mecca and publicly sold in places where people gathered to take it - did not satisfy him, especially when he learned that in such places people also played, sang, and danced. All this led him to suspect that coffee intoxicated; and even if it did not intoxicate, he judged that it gave occasion for actions intolerable in Islam. He therefore forbade the men to drink it further, ordered them to disperse to their homes, and commanded that such assemblies should not be held again.

Khayr Beg didn’t want to be seen to be banning the drink simply on a whim, so he took steps to ensure that there was a formal basis for its prohibition:

Early the next morning Khayr Beg summoned the officers of justice, the most famous doctors of the law from the orthodox schools, several devout men, and many notables of Mecca. When they had assembled, he related what he had seen and the disorder that he had learned coffee was causing in the city. He added that he was resolved to interrupt its course, but that he did not wish to act without consulting them. He had called them in order to communicate his design and ask their opinion.

In order for the drink to be banned, it had to be proved harmful to health. Luckily there were some people on hand willing to make that case:

There were then at Mecca two Persian brothers, both doctors, learned in logic and Muslim scholastic theology, and also practicing medicine. They were not, however, very skilled in medicine, and one of them had already written against coffee, perhaps because it took away from them many patients. Since they were considered the leading physicians of Mecca, Khayr Beg, urged also by his imam and disposed to suppress coffee entirely, called them and explained the matter.

The two physicians gave the same opinion. They asserted that the bunn of the husks, from which the Meccans prepared coffee, was cold and dry, and that by these two qualities it was very harmful to health.

Most of the doctors, through weakness or complaisance toward the governor, gave their opinion orally in conformity with that of the two physicians and their supporters. Only one defended coffee with warmth. Although he was a professor of theology and jurisprudence and had the authority of mufti, the false zealots, unable to answer his arguments, heaped insults upon him and treated him as unfaithful to his religion because of his firmness.

The condemnation of coffee therefore passed. It was declared a drink forbidden by the law. The sentence was drawn up at length, in emphatic terms, to express the triumph supposedly won by extirpating the abuse that had slipped in. It was signed by several doctors, and the governor made it into a dispatch and sent it to Sultan Qansuh. At the same time, Khayr Beg had proclaimed in the public squares and crossroads of Mecca not only the prohibition of selling coffee, but the prohibition of drinking it, whether in public or in private, under penalty of the punishment incurred by those who violate the Muslim religion.

The crackdown then began:

In execution of this prohibition, the officers of justice forced the coffeehouses to close and searched out all the coffee they could find - especially the husk coffee used there - both in the coffeehouses and in the merchants’ stores, and burned it. Authority prevented coffee from being taken in public, and some were punished for contravening the ban. But Khayr Beg could not prevent private use. Many who drank it did not believe they were violating the law, because the condemnation had not passed unanimously in the assembly. They said that the doctor who opposed the condemnation had no weaker reasons for approving coffee than the others had for condemning it. Nevertheless, when one Muslim was caught drinking it at home, he was severely punished and paraded through the public squares on an ass as an ignominious example.

Luckily for morning routines of billions of people today, it didn’t hold:7

The governor’s rigorous prohibition did not last long. Sultan Qansuh received his dispatch and did not approve his indiscreet zeal. On the contrary, he was astonished that Khayr Beg had dared to have coffee condemned in Mecca while people in Cairo found it beneficial and while Cairo had doctors more capable than those of Mecca of deciding whether Muslims might use it. He therefore ordered him to revoke the ban. As for the disorders, he should use his authority to prevent them. The sultan added that if a thing were to be forbidden merely because it was used in a manner offensive to religion, then one would have to include among forbidden things even the water of the well of Zamzam if someone drank it in an irreligious way.

And things didn’t end well for the governor either:

Khayr Beg had the displeasure of seeing his high-handed undertaking fail. The people of Mecca even believed themselves avenged, for the following year his successor arrived with orders to make him account for his extortions. He was beaten to death while being forced to reveal where his money was; and his brother, to avoid the torture, killed him himself.

Nor for those two doctors:

The two Persian physicians who had contributed most to the prohibition of coffee also came to a bad end. Seeing that they had lost their credit in Mecca and were regarded only with contempt and indignation, they banished themselves and withdrew to Cairo. Some time afterward Sultan Selim I, emperor of the Turks, entered Cairo after the conquest of Egypt. The two men were convicted of making imprecations against him and were put to death.

Coffee was now firmly established in the Islamic world, and in my next piece I’ll explore how it spread into Europe, and what happened when it did.

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The history of…

Paul began this series two years ago. Here are the first five that you might have missed…

• A history of… shampoo – from saponification to antimacassars!

• A history of… drinking straws – 6,000 years of, well, sucking

• A history of… the gin and tonic (plus Part 2) – jenever, malaria and more

• A history of… crisps (potato chips) – at last! Something with a precise origin story. Or not.

• A history of… ancient elections – the origins of democracy (of a kind)

In their own words…

Andrew’s pieces began in 2020, closely based around first-hand sources. Here are some of the very earliest…

• A Night in an Opium Den, 1891 – an original Victorian account. Who was its writer?

• The dread of the Thames Police, 1841 – an early account of mudlarking

• Nights out in New York, 1744 – an engaging travel diarist visits this small town!

• Frolics on the frozen river, 1684 – back to the Thames for some frosty fun

• The British burn Washington, 1814 – a previous assault on the Capitol

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The answer may surprise you – it could be argued that, astonishingly, we had the fax machine1 before we had the French fry – but let’s start by delving into some of the myths about their origin, before trying to get to the truth of the matter. It is often said that Thomas Jefferson, who lived in Paris between 1784 and 1789, introduced the fry to the Americas sometime around the start of the 19th century. Indeed some people claim that he actually invented this famous dish.2 Jefferson loved his food, and brought back many French recipes upon his return to the USA, written in that language, some in his own hand. It is believed that some, or possibly all, of these recipes were dictated by Adrien Petit, Jefferson’s maître d’hôtel (which negates the idea that Jefferson was the inventor of them). The one that is of significance to us refers to “pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches” – definitely fried potatoes, but, crucially “en petites tranches”, in little slices. These were not fries, but rather the earlier form of fried potato which could be cooked more quickly and in less oil (but also had a greater tendency to both stick to themselves and the surface of the pan).

There is stronger evidence that this is how Jefferson ate his fried potatoes from The Virginia House-wife, a recipe book published in 1824 by Mary Randolph, kinswoman to the great man:

Peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peal a lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping. Take care that your fat and frying-pan are quite clean; put it on a quick fire, watch it, and as soon as the lard boils and is still, put in the slices of potatoes, and keep moving them till they are crisp; take them up and lay them to drain on a sieve; send them up with very little salt sprinkled on them.

Where then can we find the first reference to fries being served in England or America? Some might suggest that the answer might lie with great friend of Histories Charles Dickens! In The Tale of Two Cities (1859) we have the following line:

Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil…

Given that ‘chips’ is the British word for ‘fries’ this seems pretty compelling perhaps, but the words that follow it belie this theory. These potatoes were cooked in “...some reluctant drops of oil” – this was not a vat of fat in which batons were cooked, rather a shallow pan where slices could be fried in the bare minimum of that expensive oil. There is further evidence that chips at this time didn’t mean fries, but rather something more akin to crisps (aka potato chips) from a recipe entitled ‘Potato Chips’ in The English Cookery Book: uniting a good style with economy...,3 edited by J.H. Walsh and published in the same year:

Wash and peel some potatoes, then pare them, ribbon-like, into long lengths; put them into cold water to remove the strong potatoe [sic] flavour; drain them, and throw them into a pan with a little butter, and fry them a light brown. Take them out of the pan, and place them close to the fire on a sieve lined with clean writing paper to dry, before they are served up. A little salt may be sprinkled over them.

Trying to find the first reference to proper baton fries in English has been a surprisingly lengthy task, and I do not claim that my findings are wholly robust, but nonetheless, here we go. I started by going back further in time, to The Cook’s Oracle4 published in 1817, where there are numerous fried potato recipes, but, sadly, none that are fry-like:

Cold Potatoes fried.—(No. 102.)

Put a bit of clean dripping into a frying-pan: when it is melted, slice in your potatoes with a little pepper and salt; put them on the fire; keep stirring them: when they are quite hot, they are ready.

Obs.—This is a very good way of re-dressing potatoes

Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings.—(No. 104.)

Peel large potatoes; slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping. Take care that your fat and frying-pan are quite clean; put it on a quick fire, watch it, and as soon as the lard boils, and is still, put in the slices of potato, and keep moving them till they are crisp. Take them up, and lay them to drain on a sieve: send them up with a very little salt sprinkled over them.

There is even a recipe for whole fried potatoes:

Potatoes fried whole.—(No. 105.)

When nearly boiled enough, as directed in No. 102, put them into a stew-pan with a bit of butter, or some nice clean beef-drippings; shake them about often (for fear of burning them), till they are brown and crisp; drain them from the fat.

Obs.—It will be an elegant improvement to the last three receipts, previous to frying or broiling the potatoes, to flour them and dip them in the yelk [sic] of an egg, and then roll them in fine-sifted bread-crumbs; they will then deserve to be called POTATOES FULL DRESSED.5

As a bit of a change from all of those fried slices of potato, I also found an early recipe for what I think is best described as a potato hash:6

To Fry Potatoes for Breakfast or Supper.—No meat or bacon is required to be eaten with these; in Somersetshire it forms the only breakfast dish of the peasantry, many of the middle classes, and is frequently seen at the tables of the wealthy, throughout the year. If potatoes are left from dinner, these will do; if not, boil some the day before frying, but if overboiled [sic] they will not be good; when cold, chop them very fine, as fine as for suet, but not mash them; sprinkle a little salt over; for a vegetable-dish full of potatoes, have in a frying-pan about two tablespoonfuls of dripping or bacon-fat, made boiling hot; put in the potatoes, stir them about well; when hot through, put them together with the knife or spoon (but not press them) into about the size of the dish they are to be served on; now let them brown for ten minutes; then, when brown, place the dish on the top, and turn them over; serve them hot, with hot plates.

Eventually I found this in an 1883 recipe book published by the Chicago Herald Cooking School:

Could these be modern French fries? The description is a bit unclear, it may be that these are simply another iteration of the thin sliced strips previously described. Not good enough, I fear. A bit later, in 1894’s Practical Gastronomy7 by Charles Herman Senn we get a recipe for straw fries:

Very thin strips of potato, shape and size of matches, fried a light brown colour in clarified butter

At last, in Auguste Mario’s 1910 book Easy French Cookery: Containing over 300 Economical and Attractive Recipes from a Celebrated Chef’s Note-Book we have the following which is unequivocally a description of fries as we know them!

234. FRENCH FRIED POTATOES (Pommes frites). Cut some potatoes in strips of about 1½ inch long and ½ inch thick, and cook as for Straw Potatoes.

But this does seem shockingly late; could we go earlier?8 We could, and we can, and we shall, because in Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book from 18809 we have this:

Pare small uncooked potatoes. Divide them in halves, and each half in three pieces. Put in the frying basket and cook in boiling fat for ten minutes. Drain, and dredge with salt. Serve hot with chops or beefsteak. Two dozen pieces can be fried at one time.

Finally, definitively French fries in an 19th-century English-language source! There may well be earlier references that I have been unable to track down, and, of course, people were certainly eating fries in the Anglophone world before anyone thought to capture that fact in writing, but it seems pretty certain that they are something that has only been around there for less than 200 years. Today global consumption is in the ranges of 20-30 million tonnes of the things with the average American eating around 58 pounds (26 kilos) of fries. You may expect me to say that I will be having chips for tea tonight, but honestly, after all this research, I think that I am going to take a break from them for a while…

This week we begin at an ending – which would become a strange new beginning:

His head reposed on my bosom. It was an imperceptible dying. He became gradually colder, and his muscular powers were deprived of action. After he had ceased to speak, he smiled, and grasped my hand. He looked at me affectionately, and closed his eyes. There was no struggle,—no suffering,—life faded into death—as the twilight blends the day with darkness.

Those are the words of John Bowring (1792–1872), who we met recently as the interviewer of arsonist Jonathan Martin. He was a man of many parts: acquaintance of Charles Dickens, Lord Byron and many other luminaries of the age; herring merchant, wine trader and journalist; governor of Hong Kong; polyglot, hymn-writer and industrialist; and survivor of a shipwreck. And the man whose death he describes up close is the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

The two men were first introduced by Edward Blaquiere – an Irishman with Huguenot roots, officer under Nelson, fan of progressive politics and another friend of Byron – in August 1820. At this point Bentham was 72 and Bowring 27. Bowring rapidly became Bentham’s disciple, and the two men would remain intimate (“He and I are son and father”, wrote the unmarried Bentham) for the last decade of Bentham’s life. In 1823 Bentham founded the political and philosophical journal The Westminster Review, soon appointing Bowring its editor and his own literary executor.1

Here’s how Bowring described his hero:

Though closely resembling Franklin, his face expresses a profounder wisdom and a more marked benevolence than the bust of the American printer. Mingled with a serene contemplative cast, there is something of playful humour in the countenance. The high forehead is wrinkled, but is without sternness, and is contemplative but complacent. The neatly-combed long white hair hangs over the neck, but moves at every breath…

But look, interesting as Bentham’s life was – yes, he was the ground-breaking philosopher of utilitarianism;2 yes, he was a pioneer of animal rights;3 and yes, he did have a pet cat which he liked to call ‘The Reverend Sir John Langbourne D.D.’4 – we’re really here to talk about his death and ‘afterlife’. Some of you will no doubt know about this, but many won’t, and it’s a story worth the telling.

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Even back in 1769, when he was only 21, Bentham had made a will which left his body to a doctor friend so it could be dissected for science. In 1824, his friend Thomas Southwood Smith, a physician and public health campaigner, wrote an article in the Westminster Review on ‘Use of the Dead to the Living’5 which prompted Bentham to ponder a future public dissection of his own body (after his death, obviously). Bowring noted that Bentham was also…

…full of the notion of having his head preserved in the style of the New Zealanders… Experiments are to be made, and Armstrong is to get a human head from Grainger, the anatomist, which is to be slowly dried in a stove in Bentham’s house.6

Sometime in 1831, Bentham wrote his own paper: ‘Auto-Icon or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’, expanding on all this.7 By ‘Auto-Icon’ he meant “a man who is his own image”. He was definitely very keen on these:

Our churches are ready-provided receptacles for Auto-Icons,—provided for all classes,—for rich and poor. There would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble,—there would be no danger to health from the accumulating of corpses,—and the use of churchyards would gradually be done away.

There’s a lot more in this vein. Sounds like a recipe for the zombie apocalypse!

On 30th May 1832 – just a week before he died – Bentham wrote the final version of his will, and fully committed to the idea. In it we read…

I appoint John Bowring Doctor of Laws who for these twelve years or thereabouts has been my most intimate and confidential friend my Executor…

my body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in manner hereinafter mentioned and I direct that as soon as it appears to any one that my life is at an end my executor or any other person by whom on the opening of this paper the contents thereof shall have been observed shall send an express with information of my decease to Doctor Southwood Smith requesting [him] to repair to the place where my body is lying and after ascertaining by appropriate experiment that no life remains it is my request that he will take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal & preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame in the manner expressed in the paper annexed to this my will and at the top of which I have written ‘Auto Icon’—the Skeleton he will cause to be put together in such manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of the time employed in writing.

I direct that the body thus prepared shall be transferred to my executor – he will cause the Skeleton to be clad in one of the Suits of Black occasionally worn by me – the body so clothed together with the Chair and the Staff in my later years borne by me he will take charge of and for containing the whole apparatus he will cause to be prepared an appropriate box or case and will cause to be engraved in Conspicuous Characters on a plate to be affixed thereon and also on the labels on the Glass cases in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained as for example as in the manner used in the case of wine decanters my name at length with the letters ob: [i.e. ‘obiit’, Latin for ‘he died’] followed by the day of my decease.

If it should so happen that my personal friends and other disciples should be disposed to meet together on some day or days of the year for the purpose of Commemorating the founder of the Greatest happiness System of Morals and legislation my [executor] will from time to time cause to be conveyed to the room in which they meet the said box or case with the contents there to be stationed in some part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet…8

His will also lists several people9 to whom a ring and a lock of his hair should be given, including Bowring. A note entitled ‘Auto-Icon’ – written a few weeks earlier – was indeed annexed to this, giving further details such as “the body is to be used as the means of illustrating a series of lectures to which scientific & literary men are to be invited”.

Three days after Bentham’s death, at the Webb Street School of Anatomy and Medicine in London, Southwood Smith gave a lecture (more a eulogy, really) to a packed room of 300 people “delivered over the remains of Jeremy Bentham, Esq.”, the text of which was soon published:

There lie before us the mortal remains of one of the most illustrious men of our country and of our age. And that body, once animated by the master-spirit that now animates it no more, why is it here? Why, instead of being committed to the tomb, is it in this school of science?

Rather pleasingly, this was interrupted by a violent thunderstorm. The Dictionary of National Biography provides us with the grisly details that followed: “Following dissection, the skeleton was wired together, and the head was preserved by placing it under an air pump over sulphuric acid and simply drawing off the fluids.”

Unfortunately his “face had lost all expression and was deemed unsuitable for display”. A wax replacement head was then made and attached via an iron spike. It had some of Bentham’s real hair stuck onto it, and the skeleton was padded out with straw before being clothed and seated in a glass and mahogany case pretty much as Bentham had directed.

The Auto-Icon’s whereabouts go a bit vague for a while. It stayed in Southwood Smith’s possession for some time, primarily at his consulting rooms in Finsbury Square. One of Charles Dickens’ biographers, Una Pope-Hennessy, noted “everyone who dined with the doctor had to face this memento mori. Dickens used to dine with him…”.

But when Southwood Smith offered it to University College London (UCL) around 1850, it seems to have been at 36 Percy Street, the home of his lover, the artist Margaret Gillies. Let’s hope Bentham’s corpse didn’t have to witness any… shenanigans.

The Auto-Icon was tucked away in UCL for many years.10 During the Second World War it was sent to Stanstead Bury in Hertfordshire for safe keeping, and then placed in UCL’s South Cloister, where it remained until 2020 (though it went on a trip to Germany in 2002).

His shrunken real head was placed at the feet of the Auto-Icon, then later in a box on top of the main case. The head was briefly stolen (and ransomed) by students in 1975.11 I’m not sure when it moved but the head is now in a safe at London’s Institute of Archaeology, though it did reappear at UCL for an exhibition in 2017:12

After 2020, the Auto-Icon was put in a shiny new glass box to replace the old wooden one, and it sits there today at the main entrance of the UCL Student Centre in Gordon Square.

PS

Strangely enough, John Bowring was – possibly – involved with the body of another great figure of the 19th century. In his autobiographical recollections, he notes of Byron, “After his death, his body was consigned to me in a puncheon of rum, which came from Missolonghi, whence it was transferred to a leaden coffin…” (though elsewhere he said it was brandy).

I say ‘possibly’ because another account says it was packed in a case and sent to Byron’s executors, John Hobhouse and John Hanson, then exhibited for a while at Sir Edward Knatchbull’s house in Great George Street, which 1824 newspaper accounts confirm.13 But surely Bowring would know, wouldn’t he? And we can trust these narrations of his that we’ve been following…

…can’t we?

I had been haunted by strange visions during my unquiet slumbers on the reef. On one occasion a handsome Italian lady—a companion of our misfortune—appeared, in my dreams,—her face was close to mine; its beauty was gradually changed into deformity; the hair was loosened from its roots; the features were extinguished; it became a naked skull, and then slowly moved away. It was followed by the visage of a bearded man, which looked searchingly upon and into me. Then the beard fell off; the eyes dropped from their sockets; the countenance became a hideous and offensive mass—which was also slowly transformed to a skull and disappeared; to be followed by another head, which, after glaring at me, became discoloured by pustules and tumours which rent the skin; the flesh was loosened, it detached itself from the bones, leaving nothing but a skull, which, like its predecessors, then departed. There were, at least, twenty such visitations—unlike one another—each looking intensely into my face; and, after undergoing frightful transformations, all assumed the appearance of crania, and like Banquo’s ghost, glided away from sight.

Two weeks ago, we met the arsonist Jonathan Martin, who had previously tried to assassinate the Bishop of Oxford. In an interview he shared his feverish imaginings of angelic commandments to do this. Perhaps the above words were another of these visions? But no: they are almost certainly the words of his anonymous interviewer, written nearly 30 years after Martin’s death. This week we’ll unveil their identity.

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The full report of the interview opens with these words…

Accident brought before me, the other day, an extraordinary picture, which I received from the hands of Jonathan Martin, at the time of his confinement in York City Jail. It represents the vision which he assured me had induced him to set fire to the Minster, and has recalled to my mind—what may not be unworthy of record—some of the extraordinary hallucinations associated with Jonathan Martin’s history. He died in Bedlam, where, as also during his incarceration in the Castle at York, I had opportunities of conversing with him.

And the writer returns to this “extraordinary picture” at the end…

In a moment of confidence Jonathan told me he would paint for me a picture of the vision which had induced him to set fire to the Minster—which he did, and presented it to me. It is drawn in Indian ink, and, though rude, it is a “fine imagining.” The base is a dark rolling cloud, pierced through by a fiery sword; on the sword a sort of circular shield is placed, in whose centre is the head of God the Father. The expression is of terrible majesty; the eyes are fierce, the mouth is open, as if issuing a divine command. Beneath it is the inscription:

That’s the Sord I am the Hand,
That’s the Clud that God command;
This is the Sord I saw in a vishion at nounday,
This is the Clud I saw on the Minestra.
– Jonathan Martin. York, C.G., Aper the 15, 1829, his two vishons.

The original has lost much of its distinctness. In the wreck of the Alma it lay for some days in the bituminous waters of the Red Sea; but I have a copy, made at the time, which is a tolerably fair reproduction of the drawing.

And this passing reference to “wreck of the Alma” is what unlocked the interviewer’s identity. The story of the wreck itself is dramatic enough to be worth telling in its own right.

A quick bit of research established that the Alma was a steam-powered passenger liner owned by P&O which plied the waters between Suez and Calcutta (Kolkata), originally launched under a different name in 1854. Before its commercial service it had taken troops to the Crimean War, hence being renamed after one of the war’s chief battles.

It was not the luckiest of vessels – in 1857 it suffered a broken propeller shaft en route to Suez, but managed to limp to Aden. But the real disaster came on 12th June 1859, when it struck a reef off the island of Haruish in the Red Sea. A contemporary report in the Annual Register noted: “There were about 140 passengers…The India and China mails were also on board, and a cargo worth £200,000.”

The ship’s captain had been bedridden with illness, and the blame was therefore laid at the door of his chief officer W H Davis (or Davies). The ship filled with water rapidly and “All the females and many of the male passengers were in bed, and the suddenness of the accident and the position of the vessel, placed them in the greatest jeopardy.”1 As it happens, a first-hand account of the events survives, published in a new magazine called Once a Week in December of the same year, ‘The Wreck of the Alma’, by ‘A Passenger’, signing themselves ‘J.B.’ at the end of the piece.

J.B. gives us a very detailed report. Here’s how the incident began:

The moon had just gone down, the night was perfectly serene, and the waves of the Arabian gulf tranquil as a lake in summer. It was three o’clock a.m., and except a few who remained on deck to escape from the intolerable heat below, we had retired to our cabins to seek that repose which is not easily found when the thermometer ranges at or above 90 degrees of Fahrenheit. No dream of danger molested us for a moment…

There were three fearful crashes, and in a few seconds the vessel heeled over, and floods of water rushed in at the port-holes. We heard the orders given to drive on—to go a-head—in the hope, no doubt, that the reef might be got over, but with fear that if a hole had been made in her bottom, her backing would have taken us into deep water, when she would have gone down perpendicularly, and all must have perished. Everybody rushed forth from their cabins. There were many screams and cries, especially from mothers who were seeking their children,—many supplications for deliverance, many prayers for forgiveness of sins, many commendations of souls to God. Those who were able, made their way to the door of the saloon and up the staircase to the sloping deck. But the rising of the waters soon closed that means of retreat. From the cabins on the port-side, which was under water, the passengers were rescued by those who were on the starboard side, which was high and nearly dry; but the slope of the deck made it difficult to maintain a footing. Planting our heels against anything that offered resistance, and holding on by whatever we could seize as a means of support, we watched the waters rising, rising, rising—extinguishing the lights as they rose, till we were left in utter darkness, waiting the moment when we should be overwhelmed, or, wholly exhausted, drop into the engulfing waves…

Our little group consisted of six persons—three males, three females. We discussed our chances of redemption, and abandoned hope.

Rescue from their immediate situation came quickly, though:

Ropes and friendly hands came down through the skylight… Every energy was exerted for our rescue, and rescued we all were, though many were wounded and bruised while dragged over the waters amidst the floating furniture, the broken planks, and through the apertures of escape. We had no garments on but our night dresses; we were nearly naked and barefooted… One by one we were pulled out of our watery prison, and lowered over the side of the Alma into boats below.

There are touching scenes, too:

Among those who had been aided down into the boat was an old lady who had lived more than fifty married years in India, and was returning with her husband, whose age exceeded fourscore, to end their long pilgrimage in their native land. Most touching was the anxiety they exhibited not to be “separated,” whether for life or death. “O! let us two be preserved together, or together die.”

This was far from the end of their ordeal, however – the lifeboats were insufficient to take them to the mainland, and thus began several days marooned on the reef. “Having neither shoes nor stockings, our feet were cruelly cut by the sharp and jagged coral, and we often fell on our hands, elbows and knees from the extreme pain of the wounds,” the narrator explains, using a nightcap to protect one foot at least.

In the main, the account reports on great cooperation and mutual kindness in their plight – other than some of the crew who looted the passengers’ baggage. And almost everyone survived, though not without many suffering sun exposure from four days on the reef (from which the poor ship’s purser died).

And presumably, somewhere among all the mail and effects lost… was Jonathan Martin’s visionary painting that had led to disaster at York Minster. Perhaps it was cursed?

‘J.B.’ was enough of a clue to track down the name of this author at last: Sir John Bowring, no less. Born in 1792, he was a serial traveller, writer and linguist who became the fourth Governor of Hong Kong, a role he held until the year of the shipwreck but one coloured by a series of scandals. (Also, two years before that he and his wife fell victim to arsenic poisoning during the Second Opium War,2 and she sadly died from it. So it goes.)

Further research revealed that Bowring was a friend of Charles Dickens, in whose journal All the Year Round the Martin interview had been published.3 Another anonymous piece in the same journal, ‘To China in a Gunboat’ (1865), is known to have been by Bowring.4 We also know that Bowring lost some of his work to the Alma wreck.5 All of this joins up to make it pretty certain that he was the interviewer of Martin early in his career – at a time when he was also editor of the Westminster Review, a publication created by Bowring’s great mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.6

So there we have it. But a few things certainly intrigue me. If Bowring owned the painting of the vision that inspired Jonathan Martin to arson, a painting which must have been made between 1829 and 1838, it seems surprising that it would be with him on this voyage more than 20 years later – why not leave it at home? Did it hold some ongoing fascination? Also, he says it “has lost much of its distinctness” from the shipwreck – suggesting he must have gone to some effort (or had some luck) in retrieving it from those “bituminous waters”. And why take the trouble to make a copy? (“Made at the time” – how?)

Part of me wants to imagine this painting somehow cast a curse on Bowring’s affairs – the loss of his wife to arsenic, the shipwreck… and more?7 But of course, I’m being fanciful. Though here’s another question: where is it now?8

As a final note, here’s Bowring’s sober rationale for those multiple dreams of skulls:

The dream was but the uncovering of the passing scene, on which the shadows of death were so adjacent to the business of life.

Edit: part 3 of this mini-series is here.

PS. If you’re anywhere near Oxford on Friday 22nd May, I’m compering this event at 7pm! Do say hello:

Last year, I went even deeper down the Dickensian rabbit hole for a long essay about the strange confluences between his life and that of the murderous artist Richard Dadd. (The essay was published in the always enjoyable Undefinable Boundary journal, available here.)1

Part of my research for that involved my trying to establish if and when Dickens had ever visited the famous Bethlem hospital for the insane (also known as Bedlam), and whether he could have met Dadd in person. That story is told in my essay – but my delvings led me to an intriguing article published in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round in December 1866, based around an interview with another famous Bedlam inmate, the arsonist Jonathan Martin.

Let’s backtrack a bit.

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Jonathan Martin was born in Northumberland in 1782, one of 13 children (only five surviving until adulthood). Like Richard Dadd, Jonathan was artistically talented, although he was somewhat overshadowed by his brothers John and William – John went on to become a very successful artist, William an inventor and philosopher. Jonathan’s life was more troubled from early on – as a child he had a speech impediment from being tongue-tied, and he witnessed his sister being murdered by a neighbour, who threw her down some stairs. After employment on his uncle’s farm and then at a tannery, he went to London in his early twenties, where he was seized by a press gang for the navy. This led to six tough years on board HMS Hercules.

Alongside these troubles, Jonathan was influenced by his aunt’s fiery Protestantism. In the navy he was renowned for his religious extremism (he also began having violent dreams), and in his thirties he became a Wesleyan preacher known for disrupting traditional church services.

All this came to a head in 1817 when Jonathan – now married and with a son of his own – threatened to kill the Bishop of Oxford. This saw him tried and committed to an asylum. There followed a series of escapes and committals. Meanwhile he had also returned to painting, and a witness at one of his trials described his works as “extraordinary marks of uninstructed talent, mixed with frenzy and wildness”. Jonathan even dictated his own autobiography, published in multiple editions between 1826 and 1830, and packed with lively incidents from his wayward life.

In 1828, he married his second wife2 – 20 years younger than him – and they moved to York. This was where his erratic life (preacher, tanner, writer) reached its climax. His focus became the magnificent York Minster, where he began by hanging threatening placards on the railings. On 1st February 1829, things escalated on a sudden whim – hiding inside the Minster, he was angered by a buzzing noise from the organ and late at night he set fire to woodwork in the choir area. It would take two days for the fire to be fully put out, by which time most of the woodwork inside, the bishop’s throne, the pulpit – and the offending organ – were destroyed. The Dictionary of National Biography notes: “It was one of the most spectacular consequences of arson in modern British history.”3

It didn’t take long for him to be caught, especially given that he had put his name and address on those placards. He was tried at York Castle – amid resulting media fame and the publication of an account of the trial – and initially declared guilty by the jury but then the judge reversed it to not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was then sent to Bethlem, where he stayed until he died in May 1838. So it goes. Like Dadd (but decades earlier), he continued to draw and paint during his confinement – one notable work being a picture of London being destroyed.

So now we march forward to 1866 again, where an anonymous writer in Dickens’s journal has penned a piece under the title ‘Jonathan Martin’. They set the scene with Jonathan’s religious obsession: “Not a shadow of doubt troubled Jonathan’s mind as to his right to denounce, and his mission to punish, ecclesiastical wickedness. If ever there were a reasoning lunatic, it was he.” Here’s part of the interview relating to Jonathan’s original fixation on the Bishop of Oxford:

All that I am about to record I received from the lips of Jonathan Martin. His mode of expression was vehement, his language rude and unpolished—I think it had the Northumbrian twang—he was dogmatical and peremptory, as if he spoke with authority; indeed, if there were anything of which he was truly convinced, it was that he was a special instrument appointed by God to do great works—works too great to be committed to any but the most highly privileged exponents of the Divine will. He once said to me in prison, “Is there any one, from the king on his throne to the lowest of the people, who is not thinking of and speaking of Jonathan Martin; and would this be so, unless Jonathan Martin had to do what can be done by nobody but myself?” …

One of the earliest and most remarkable observations of Jonathan’s intellect was the reasoning unreason… with which he persuaded himself that for the purpose of promoting church reform he was called upon to murder a bishop. He told me that a succession of heavenly visitors had appeared to him at night, and communicated a mandate from God the Father that he should destroy some right reverend prelate. He had no personal resentments to indulge, and therefore his conscience freed him from the charge of malice prepense. He had been offended by the intrusive and imposing character of the cathedral, as it towers over the Lincolnshire flats, and determined that the bishop of that see should be the first example of the Divine judgment.

“I was asleep,” he said, “when an angel appeared to me—a smiling angel—he had a bow in his hand, a quiver with arrows on his back. He looked kindly and tenderly towards me, and having said, ‘Jonathan! shoot the bishop!’ he disappeared. I was a good deal perplexed and embarrassed. I did not like the suggestion. I thought I might be deceived. I did nothing, and I said nothing to anybody, but I still felt that the angel had been instructed to point out my duty to me… when I fell asleep at night, after much restlessness and many tossings and turnings on my bed, the angel again appeared, but he did not smile—he looked melancholy and disappointed. I fancied he had come to reproach me for my hesitations and doubts. He shook his head mournfully; he held his bow in his left hand, took an arrow from his quiver, and, in a voice that had more in it of sorrow than of anger, said, ‘Jonathan! Jonathan! Shoot the bishop!’ and then quitted my presence…

“I took out a pistol which I had in my room, and loaded it; but I resolved upon nothing then. I passed another miserable day…

“On the third night, however, the angel’s visitation took quite another character. There was no smile of satisfaction, there was no expression of sorrow; but the angel appeared with terrible frowns on his countenance, and looked at me with indignant anger and displeasure… ‘Jonathan! Shoot the bishop!’ was again repeated, and the angel, amidst a crash which seemed to shake my bed and make the whole building totter to its foundations, vanished out of my sight. This seemed so manifest and irresistible an announcement from above, that most of my scruples were removed, and I then confided to my wife that it was my purpose to obey the Lord’s commands…”

“But, Jonathan,” said I, interrupting him here, “you are familiar with the Scriptures. You know the commandments. Did you not find this: ‘Thou shalt do no murder’?”

“Yes! I did, and that commandment somewhat perplexed me. Was it not given by Moses? But don’t you know, and does not everybody know, that more is to be learnt from men’s works than from their words? And I studied the history of Moses, attending less to what he said than to what he did. And did he not slay the Egyptian? And was not this my warrant for slaying the bishop?”

The interviewer then relates how Jonathan’s wife alerted a magistrate, hence her husband’s arrest and imprisonment. His escape is worth noting in passing:

He was placed in a cell with a brick floor, which had been lately scrubbed with pumice-stone, a fragment of which had been scraped down to a sharp edge, and was left in one of the corners. The door was strongly bolted and locked; the windows had iron frames; even the funnel of the chimney was protected by bars of iron. Yet with that small unnoticed piece of pumice-stone Jonathan managed to cut through the bars placed across the chimney,4 and with the dexterity of a sweep made his way up to the top, whence he descended to the ground… He knelt down outside the jail, thanked God for his deliverance, confirmed in his conviction that he was a special instrument in the hands of Providence to accomplish some great design.

The interviewer then tells the story of Jonathan’s assault on York Minster, which I’ll skip repeating here (his escape makes one think somehow of Quasimodo at Notre-Dame or the Phantom of the Opera: “when Jonathan had satisfied himself that the work was done, he went into the belfry, seized one of the bell-ropes, and by its aid escaped into the open country, through a window of the cathedral which had been left open”).

The tale continues…

I then visited Jonathan in his prison cell. He was not serene, but triumphant. He was certain that all would work together for good—for his own good and for that of his country and of mankind. He was as vain of his exploits as if he had redeemed a race from slavery, or won the most glorious of victories. “I was nobody, and am now more talked about than anybody. Who is there in the land who is not occupied with the name and the deeds of Jonathan Martin? His name was known to nobody; it is now known to everybody. The king is now speaking about me.” And he rubbed his hands with delight, and his eyes sparkled with fire, and then he talked of his coming trial.

But who was this interviewer? It was easy enough to rule out Dickens himself – he would only have been a teenager when Jonathan Martin was brought to trial. But there were clues to be found. And that’s where we’ll stop for now, as I’ll tell the next part of the story (which definitely involves a shipwreck – and some might say involves a cursed painting!) in two weeks’ time…

Edit: part 2 is here, part 3 is here.

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As with crisps we have a very clear story for the origin of the fry. In 1984 the Belgium journalist and historian Jo Gérard published an article describing how he had found a family manuscript dating back to 1781 which described how, in winter, the good people of Namur would fry up potatoes in the absence of fish:

Les habitants de Namur, Andenne et Dinant ont l’usage de pêcher dans la Meuse du menu fretin et de le frire pour en améliorer leur ordinaire, surtout chez les pauvres gens. Mais lorsque le gel saisit les cours d’eau et que la pêche y devient hasardeuse, les habitants découpent les pommes de terre en forme de petits poissons et les passent à la friture comme ceux-ci. Il me revient que cette pratique remonte déjà à plus de cent années

The inhabitants of Namur, Andenne and Dinant are accustomed to catching small fish in the Meuse and frying them to improve their ordinary fare, especially among poor people. But when frost seizes the waterways and fishing there becomes hazardous, the inhabitants cut potatoes in the shape of little fish and fry them like that. It comes back to me that this practice already goes back more than a hundred years.

How lovely, my life is made so much easier when something has a clear origin story! Except no one else seems to have ever seen this manuscript and it remains unfindable to this day. Many people, particularly French writers on the matter, suspect that he made it up as a means of establishing Belgium primacy for a dish which has become inexorably linked to their national culture.

So what is the real story? Well, it turns out that actually fries were invented by Teresa of Ávila (better known as Saint Teresa, 1515-1582) or at least that is one of the myths that one might stumble across online. It seems pretty clear that she was eating potatoes (at a fairly early date in Europe) but we can’t say for sure if they were fried, nor what shape they took had such frying occurred. There is the text of a letter that she sent on the 19th of December 1577 to María de San José which includes the passage:

Jesús sea con vuestra reverencia siempre, mi hija. La suya recibí, y con ella las patatas y el pipote y siete limones. Todo vino muy bueno; mas cuesta tanto el traer, que no hay para qué me envíe vuestra reverencia más cosa ninguna, que es conciencia.

Jesus be with you always, my daughter. I received your letter, and with it the potatoes, the barrel, and seven lemons. All the wine was very good; but it costs so much to bring it, that there’s no need for you to send me anything else, for that is conscience.

And an earlier letter, from 26th of January of the same year, shows that she both ate and enjoyed potatoes, but, alas, still has no description of how they were cooked:

Dios se lo pague, mi hija, amén, amén, amén; y las patatas, que vinieron a un tiempo, que tengo harto mala gana de comer, y muy buenas llegaron; y las naranjas, que regocijaron a algunas enfermas.

May God recompense you for it all, my daughter. Amen, amen, amen. Also for the potatoes which came at a time when I had no appetite, but arrived in good condition, and the oranges, which were a treat to some of the sisters who were out of health.

I have to confess that I have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole attempting to find the earliest reference to fried potatoes. A possible contender is a passage from Cautiverio feliz, y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del reino de Chile (Happy Captivity, and Particular Account of the Protracted Wars of the Kingdom of Chile) which was written by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán (1607–1682) sometime in the late 17th century, but not published until 1863. There is no mention of fries in the original edition, but a 2001 critical edition of the book contains the following passage, relating to an event that took place in 1629:

…porque las mujeres casadas del presidio y sus maridos, cual envió la sopa todavía con muchos huevos fritos por encima, cual el guisado de pescado seco, y otros, el marisco de choros secos machas ostiones y otros géneros; unas enviaban las papas fritas y guisados, otras los porotos y garbanzos, y el capitán y cabo que tenían dispuestos otros cinco o seis potajes, y por postre unos buñuelos bien sazonados con azúcar y canela.

…because the married women of the garrison and their husbands sent various dishes: one sent soup still topped with many fried eggs, another a stew of dried fish, and others shellfish of dried mussels, clams, oysters, and other kinds; some sent fried potatoes and stews, others beans and chickpeas, and the captain and the corporal had another five or six dishes prepared, and for dessert some fritters well seasoned with sugar and cinnamon.

If this is correct, then Chile can lay claim to being the earliest known location of fried potatoes, but they were unlikely to be the fries that we know today. Early fried potatoes were cut into slices, partly because it enabled them to be cooked faster and more significantly it used a lot less fat or oil. It is easy to forget, living in the time that we do where vegetable oil is probably the cheapest available foodstuff in terms of cost per calorie, that fat and oil used to be much scarcer and more expensive. Poor people would have cooked with animal fats, for sure, but only in small quantities. It would have been highly unusual to have a sufficient amount to fill a pot large enough to cook fries in, and even if you could there was no real reason to do so when you could sauté slices instead.

Recipes such as this one from 1811’s Le Cuisinier impérial, ou l’art de faire la cuisine et la pâtisserie pour toutes les fortunes by A. T. Raimbault are typical of the period:

Pommes de terre frites : Vous les pelez toutes crues et les coupez en tranches

Fried potatoes: Peel them all while raw and cut them into slices

It certainly didn’t make a lot of sense to have a large pot of oil that was used at home only to cook dinner for your family. If you were into mass catering however, things were a little bit different. While oil was relatively costly, potatoes were cheap, took little preparation, and could be swiftly fried en-masse. Towards the end of the 18th century fried potatoes became a popular street food in France, most notably in Paris in the theatre districts and around the Pont Neuf. The earliest written references I can find about the practice come from the 1830s, such as this one from Le Gastronome, 28 November 1830:

C’est admirable ! à voir le peuple de Paris et ses pommes de terre frites au soleil, et ses marchandes de harengs tous chauds, et ses poires cuites au four, on croirait qu’il vit pour manger, et cependant c’est tout au plus s’il mange pour vivre

It’s admirable! Seeing the people of Paris with their sun-fried potatoes, their vendors selling piping hot herring, and their baked pears, you’d think they lived to eat, and yet, at best, they eat to live

And it is from the same publication, less than a year later (28th April 1831), that we crucially find a description of potatoes being cut into batons, rather than simply slices:

Nobles pommes de terre frites, chères au comité de salut public, j’admire vos diverses métamorphoses ! D’abord, c’est l’enveloppe terreuse que râcle un couteau ébrêché... ce ne sont pas des beignets : on coupe les longues dans leur longueur, les rondes dans leur rondeur, puis dans cet état de crudité elles vont pêle-mêle au fond de la tôle noircie changer de goût et de couleur.

Noble fried potatoes, beloved of the Committee of Public Safety, how I admire your many transformations! First, your earthy covering is scraped away with a nicked knife… these are no fritters: the long potatoes are cut lengthwise, the round ones cut into rounds, and then, still raw, they are thrown together into the bottom of a blackened metal pan, where they change both flavour and colour.

Why, almost 200 years ago, was there a movement away from frying sliced potatoes to the batons that we now consider to be French fries? After all, as noted above, thin slices cook more rapidly and in less oil than thicker sticks? There are probably two factors that came into play. The first is that sliced potatoes are, due to their large surface area, much more likely to stick both to each other and to the base of the pan in which they are being cooked. As a result they required more attention and stirring. The second is that it is, as we have all doubtless experienced, very easy to pick up and eat a rectangular stick of fried potato with one’s fingers.

We have a lovely demonstration of this in a lithograph by Honoré Daumier printed in Le Charivari from the 19th February 1842 showing an an actor from the Funambules theatre hustling to the stage door eating what are clearly fries:

The text underneath reads:

... there is a moment that fills you with passion! and in a little while you must be ablaze with love ... and say, Zaphisa [?], share my treasures and my throne; come, come and lose yourself in pleasure and abundance!’ — all while your stomach sounds like fried potatoes!”

So by the mid-19th century we clearly had French fries, as we would consider them, being eaten in France, but what about the Anglophone world? In Part 2 I will be exploring that history, including the claim that Thomas Jefferson introduced French fries to America and the development of that oh-so-British dish,1 fish and chips.

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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.

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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).

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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 :)

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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…

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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!

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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.

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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.)

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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

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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.

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‘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.