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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!

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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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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.

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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…

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. To learn and practice self-control;

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

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

6. To acquire the habit of advance planning;

7. To do our duties promptly; and

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 4 oz suet

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

• 8 oz grated raw carrot

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

• 1 egg, beaten

• 4 oz sugar

• 1 tsp mixed spice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is sharp contrast to what happens in Germany:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up until the second half of the 18th century, the act of shaving was laborious and risky. Men typically used a straight razor – a sharp steel blade that folded into a handle, what today we would often refer to as a ‘cut-throat razor’2 – and required considerable skill to wield. Many who could afford it preferred to be shaved by a barber. Satirists at the time quipped that the work of the barber was “to scrape the bristled chin as a farmer scythes the field”, which suggests that a fairly rough, workmanlike approach was taken to the process. Straight razors needed regular maintenance to maintain their edge through frequent honing on whetstones and stropping on leather.3 A pre-shave regimen might involve softening the beard with hot water towels and applying a lather made from soap (by the 1700s, specialised shaving soaps and brushes appeared, with the French often credited with refining the lathering brush technique). Still, even with a steady hand, cuts were common; barbers kept styptic pencils (alums) to stem bleeding, and clients often carried small pieces of tissue to dot onto razor nicks. In an era with only crude antiseptics and no antibiotics (and with a poor understanding of what actually caused infections), a simple cut could easily turn into something more serious.

The first attempt to solve this problem and create a safer razor came in 1762, when a French master cutler named Jean-Jacques Perret proposed a guarded razor in his treatise La Pogonotomie (‘The Art of Learning to Shave Oneself’). Perret’s design imitated a carpenter’s plane: he fitted a straight razor with a wooden sleeve that exposed only the blade’s edge, reducing the likelihood of deep cuts. This contraption, essentially a straight razor with a protective guard, is considered the direct ancestor of later safety razors. Perret wrote:

C’est pour épargner aux nouveaux Barbiers le désagrément de ces coupures au visage, que j’inventai, en 1762, le rasoir à rabot…très-commode pour apprendre à se raser soi-même, parce qu’il a l’avantage de bien raser, & aussi près que l’on veut, sans risque de se couper. Je conviens… que le rasoir à rabot demande un peu plus d’attention… Mais… je crois qu’il est bien avantageux de pouvoir se raser sans se balafrer le visage.

I invented, in 1762, the razor with a plane… very convenient for learning to shave oneself, because it has the advantage of shaving well, and as close as one wishes, without risk of cutting oneself. I admit… that the plane-razor requires a bit more attention… But… I think that it is very advantageous to be able to shave without slashing one’s face.

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It seems that this “bit more attention” is the reason why what would otherwise appear to be a significantly superior tool to the alternatives on offer at the time didn’t really catch on at scale. Whilst a straight razor could be swiftly cleaned with a single wipe with a towel, the plane razor would get grime and shavings trapped between the wooden sleeve and the blade and was, it seems, a right faff4 to clean. Meanwhile straight razor technology had been improving too. During the Industrial Revolution the quality of razor production improved markedly. A Sheffield cutler named Benjamin Huntsman pioneered a superior crucible steel in the 1740s that allowed for harder, finer razor blades that were both sharper and retained their edge for longer. Soon Sheffield-made, beautiful, straight razors with hollow-ground blades and ornamented handles were being coveted all across Europe.

The result of this innovation led to the second half of the 18th century in Europe being sometimes referred to as the “beardless” era (even so many men only shaved once a week). However, I am mindful of the fact that so far my focus has been almost wholly on men’s hair removal; what of women of the time? Social norms relating to female hairiness in the 18th century were very different from those of today. Incredibly few women would consider removing the hair from their legs (or arms, or armpits) with attention being given only to what was termed “superfluous” hair on the face (and sometimes the neck). In part this was simple pragmatism due to the challenges of hair removal but fashion also played a significant role. Women would expose essentially no flesh from the neck down when in company, legs would be robustly concealed behind stockings, so any hair that might have been there would never be seen.5

When it came to removing those unsightly facial hairs, razors were seldom used both because of the attendant risks associated at the time and for the sake of appearance – it might be okay for a man to have a few nicks on his face but this would have been mortifying for a lady. Rather they would tweezer, or thread, them out, or use one of a bewildering array of depilatory concoctions. Some of these were downright dangerous – many contained arsenic – while others, while being complex, seem unlikely to have been hugely efficacious,6 such as this “approved Depilatory, or a Fluid for taking off the Hair.” from a book published in 1769:

Take Polypody of the Oak, cut into very small pieces; put them into a glass vessel, and pour on them as much Lisbon, or French White Wine, as will rise about an inch above the ingredients: digest in balneo Mariæ (or a bath of hot water) for twenty-four hours; then distil off the liquor by the heat of boiling water, till the whole has come over the helm. A linen cloth wetted with this fluid, may be applied to the part on which the hair grows, and kept on it all night; repeating the application periodically till the hair falls off.

Despite remedies such as this female hair removal remained a challenge for a further century, as this late 19th-century account describes in somewhat gruesome detail:

There is scarcely a physician present who cannot call to mind some lady who has besought him for a remedy to rid her of hair upon the face. What has been done in such a case? Possibly the various depilatories recommended in text-books on Dermatology have been tried and found to be no more serviceable and far more unpleasant than the use of a razor. Possibly an effort has been made to destroy the hairs by inserting hot needles, or injecting acids into the follicles. These mean shaving proved futile, or perhaps harmful, it is possible that a vain attempt has been made to persuade the sufferer that the matter was of little or no consequence, and that cutting the hairs short, or plucking them with tweezers would remedy the evil.

A far better means of remedying this “evil” was eventually developed. In October 1875, a St. Louis ophthalmologist Charles E. Michel published a clinical report describing how he had removed ingrown eyelashes (trichiasis) by inserting a fine needle into the follicle and running direct (galvanic) current from a battery to destroy the papilla – the growth centre of the hair. By 1878 this technique, electrolysis, was being used more widely for aesthetic hair removal, as the proceedings of the American Dermatological Society of that year recount, though it was clearly a not wholly comfortable experience:

Dr. Taylor said that he had been using electrolysis for three or four years, and he employed a very delicate irido-platinum needle for this purpose. He considered the matter of pain quite an important element; and, in consequence of this, several séances7 were ordinarily necessary. He had had good results from this method in the treatment of comedones. Dr. White inquired if the effect was permanent, and in reply Dr. Fox said that no case should be reported until after a considerable time had elapsed. In one case he had removed as many as five hundred hairs, and, although the result was not perfectly successful, it was fairly encouraging. Sometimes hairs would return three months after removal.

Returning once again to razors, in 1847, an English inventor, William Henson, patented a novel razor with a perpendicular blade set on a handle – essentially the first “hoe-shaped” safety razor. Henson’s razor had a guard along one edge of a replaceable blade, mounted at right angles to the handle (much like a modern hoe or a paint scraper). The design was meant to make self-shaving easier by putting the blade at a fixed angle against the skin. A similar idea was later refined and produced in the United States by the Kampfe Brothers, who patented a safety razor in 1880 with a wire guard and a removable (but not disposable) blade. These early safety razors still used blades that required stropping and honing, but they significantly reduced the skill needed – one could shave with less precision in angle and still avoid most cuts.

The true revolution in shaving, however, came at the turn of the 20th century with the concept of disposable blades. In 1901, an American entrepreneur named King Camp Gillette8 took out a patent for a safety razor that used inexpensive, thin stamped-steel blades meant to be discarded after a few uses. Gillette, working with engineer William Nickerson, found a way to mass-produce sharp blades cheaply and designed a lightweight double-edged razor to hold them. Introduced commercially in 1903 as the Gillette Safety Razor, this product was a game-changer. For the first time, men could shave themselves easily without needing to sharpen a blade – when the blade dulled, one simply inserted a new one. Gillette’s design had a protective guard and was double-edged (so each blade could be flipped and used twice). The product wasn’t an overnight success. In his first year Gillette only sold 51 razors and 168 blades. In his second year, however he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades.9

The reason for this success was shrewd marketing which emphasised convenience (“No Stropping, No Honing” promised one early advertisement) and targeted not only civilians but also the military. During World War I (1914–18), the US Army issued Gillette safety razors to millions of servicemen (3.5 million razors and 32 million blades were handed out in 1918 alone). This had a lasting impact: daily shaving became a requirement for soldiers (partly to ensure gas masks would seal, a lesson learned on the battlefields) and those soldiers carried the shaving habit home after the war.

Whilst some women were using electrolysis to remove hairs from their face around this time, it took the launch of the Gillette’s razors for the female hair removal trends that (largely) persist to the this day to develop. In 1915, Gillette introduced the first safety razor for women, the Milady Décolleté, accompanied by an ad campaign in Harper’s Bazaar urging women to remove “objectionable” underarm hair to suit new sleeveless fashions.10 By the 1920s, smooth underarms became de rigueur for Western women, and by the 1940s, with hemlines rising and nylon stockings scarce in wartime, more women also shaved their legs. The trend had become so dominant that by 1964, 98% of American women routinely shaved their legs.

The next major development took place in 1962 when Wilkinson Sword introduced stainless steel blades that resisted corrosion and could be used for many shaves before dulling. At the same time aerosol shaving foam (first invented in 1949) became increasingly popular, removing the need to bother with soap and brushes, speeding up the whole process of getting a hairless face. The ‘cartridge’ style razor system that we use today can be traced back to Wilkinson Sword’s ‘Bonded Shaving System’, launched in 1970, with the first Bic disposable razors launching in 1975. The late 20th century saw razor companies engage in a ‘blade race’, introducing cartridges with two blades (Gillette’s Trac II in 1971), then three, four, and five blades by the 21st century, each promising an ever closer and safer shave. The multi-blade cartridges, often coupled with lubricating strips and pivoting heads, became the new norm in mass-market shaving, and continue to dominate the market.

The concept of the electric razor has been around since the late 19th century, with John F. O’Rourke patenting a motor-driven “automatic razor” in 1898, but his invention doesn’t seem to have reached production. In 1915 German engineer Johann Bruecker patented a rotary electric shaver concept but again, this didn’t really go anywhere. It took until 1930 for the electric razor to become a viable product when Col. Jacob Schick received US Patent 1,757,978 for a hand-held “shaving machine”. He launched them in New York the following year, and by 1937 had sold an astonishing 1.5 million devices – an incredible success considering that they cost $25 at launch, or more than $500 in today’s terms.

Inside Schick’s first shaver, a small electric motor spun a shaft. A tiny crank–slider turned that rotation into a rapid side-to-side (reciprocating) motion. Up at the business end sat a thin, toothed shear plate (what we’d now call a guard or “foil”) that lay against the skin. Just behind it, a matching cutter bar with teeth zipped left–right. Beard stubble poked through the shear plate’s slots; every time the moving cutter tooth crossed a slot edge, it sheared the hair clean off—exactly the same principle long used in powered hair clippers, just miniaturised and sealed into a hand unit.

Personally I have never really got on with electric razors, so as I am a bit stubbly this morning I will finish now and use a three-bladed device with a pivoting head and lubricating strip to remove my bristles, and reflect as I do so quite how long and intriguing the history of this tool is.

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In my last piece I explored the history of shaving up until around the year 0; this piece will cover the next two thousand years of hair-removal history. Early Christianity inherited no direct law about hair, but Church Fathers quickly developed views linking facial hair to piety, nature, and masculinity. Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215) was, I think it fair to say, very much in the pro-beard camp, in no small measure due to the similarity it gave men to lions:

[God] has adorned man, like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him… with shaggy breasts—a sign of strength and rule… This, then, the mark of the man, the beard, by which he is seen to be a man…

He wasn’t a fan, however, of hair on the top of the head (unless, and no, I have no idea why, it was curly):

About the hair, the following seems right. Let the head of men be shaven, unless it has curly hair. But let the chin have the hair. … For an ample beard suffices for men. And if one, too, shaves a part of his beard, it must not be made entirely bare, for this is a disgraceful sight. The shaving of the chin to the skin is reprehensible, approaching to plucking out the hair and smoothing. … the hair of the moustache … is to be cut round, not by the razor, … But the hair on the chin is not to be disturbed, as it gives no trouble, and lends to the face dignity and paternal terror.

This may all seem, to our modern eyes, both somewhat odd, and somewhat amusing, but for men at the time these views had a significant impact upon their daily lives – if a significant figure in your religion told you that you had to have a beard then you were pretty likely to have one. It wasn’t just Clement putting the barbers out of business. The Latin theologian Tertullian shared his stance, criticising men who meticulously trimmed or styled their beards, equating such vanity with female folly: “to cut the beard too sharply…to shave round about [the mouth]…all these things are frivolous, hostile to modesty”. Cementing the pro-beard consensus was the great St Augustine, who taught that “the beard signifies the courageous; the beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous”.

In time, however, things began to change, but not universally, and beards became an increasingly significant issue as the Christian church fragmented into different, often competing, traditions. In certain ascetic circles, shaving one’s head or face became a mark of humility. The tonsure – the practice of clerics or monks shaving part of the head – emerged in early monasticism as a symbol of renunciation of worldly vanity. During the medieval era, Western Europe reversed the patristic pro-beard bias. The Latin Church increasingly associated clerical celibacy and purity with a clean-shaven face, in contrast to the laity. The sixth-century Fourth Council of Carthage notably decreed in Latin, “Clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam”, which translates as “A cleric should neither let his hair grow long nor [grow] a beard.” This rule, widely repeated in canon law collections, set a precedent: throughout the Middle Ages.

The Greek East, however, maintained the older, bearded, tradition, in clear contrast to the church in the West. This divergence became so sharp that hair became a point of polemical contention between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. In the 11th-century Great Schism, Greeks mocked the Latins’ bare faces as an innovation against apostolic custom, while Latins accused Greeks of unkempt appearance. In one Eastern polemic, the shaven face was deemed “a departure from the sacred and holy” – the Old Believers of Russia in the 17th century even claimed that shaving the beard could invite moral depravity.

By the High Middle Ages, nearly all Western monks and priests were clean-shaven under their tonsured crowns – an image of self-denial and uniformity. In monastic rules, barbers held an important place: a designated barber-monk would periodically shave the brethren. There are even records of liturgical ceremonies for the first shave of a novice monk.2 In several medieval pontificals and monastic ordines, a rite ‘Ad barbam tondendam’ (‘for shaving the beard’) accompanied a monk’s first shave, with prayers framing the act as an offering of the ‘first-fruits of youth’ and invoking Psalm 132 (Ecce quam bonum)—in some books the abbot is directed ‘here the abbot shaves the beard’.

At the start of the second millennium the laity of Western Europe were often beard-free (particularly the elite classes who had both the time and the money to shave) but there were some variations. Among the most notable of these can be seen the Bayeux Tapestry (documenting the Norman invasion of England) – the English shown as moustachioed (and often with long hair)3 while the Normans were short-haired and clean shaven.

Soon afterwards beards had something of a resurgence, particularly among the nobles. It was said that before the battle of Antioch (1096) the crusaders “suffered their beards to grow” as an act of penitence (and also probably because they had been exposed to Eastern Christian traditions on their journeys to the Holy Land).4 Bearded upon their return home it became cool to ape their appearance, but the church was having none of it. In around 1105 Bishop Serlo of Sées preached before Henry I at Carentan about the evils of being overly hirsute and then physically cut the hair of both the king and his courtiers. I think that it is fair to say that he had pretty strong views on the subject:

It is not for their ornament or pleasure that penitents are enjoined not to shave their beards or cut their hair; but that, as their sins make them appear inwardly rough and unseemly in the sight of God, so they may in their exterior exhibit themselves before men unshaven and unshorn, and mark the deformity of the inner man by their outward ignominy. By their long beards they make themselves like goats, whose filthy lasciviousness is shamefully imitated by fornicators and sodomites, while good men justly treat them with abhorrence on account of the odious foulness of their lusts. As for those who nourish their hair, they are considered as fit associates of the women by whose blandishments they are seduced from manly virtue to evil courses, and very often involved in the wretchedness of a detestable apostacy.5

Not one to be timid of hyperbole, he went on to suggest that beards are forerunners of the apocalypse:

They suffer their beards to grow for fear that if they shaved, the short bristles might prick the faces of their mistresses when they were kissing them, and are so hairy that they look like Turks rather than Christians. Thus the personal neglect which is the mark of penitence is converted into a token of wantonness! In short these forward sons of Beliai dress their hair like women, while they wear things like scorpions’ tails at the extremities of their feet,6 thus exhibiting themselves as women by their effeminacy, and serpents by their pointed fangs. This kind of men were foretold a thousand years ago by St. John the mystic, under the figure of locusts, and he has plainly foreshadowed them in the Apocalypse, written in the isle of Pathmoth. Many persons adopt this perverted practice from ignorance that there can be so much mischief in the fashion of wearing the hair in which they glory. For this reason, I beseech you, most illustrious king, to set your subjects a laudable example, that they may see in your person, above all others, how they ought to adjust their own.

Most people, of course, didn’t have a bishop to shave them but luckily for them many monastic barbers transitioned into being lay professionals, willing to do the job for the small fee. By the later Middle Ages, many barbers in European towns performed a dual role as “barber-surgeons”, providing grooming and medical bleeding or wound care. In an era before physicians were accessible to most, the barber-surgeon was the community’s all-purpose practitioner for surface ailments – lancing boils, extracting teeth, setting minor fractures – as well as cutting hair and shaving beards. They used razors not only on faces but to open veins (bloodletting), which gave them surgical credibility. The red-and-white (and sometimes also blue) barber’s pole, still a symbol of the trade, purportedly represents blood and bandages of this once-common practice.7

By the 14th and 15th centuries, urban barbers had organised into guilds across Europe, their profession straddling hygiene and healing. Guild statutes regulated training: a would-be barber-surgeon typically served a long apprenticeship (often seven years minimum)8 under a master. For example, the barber-surgeons’ ordinances of Norwich (1605) required that any apprentice “use the mystery of barbours or surgery” for seven years at least before he could be examined and “allowed” by the guild’s wardens and the city authorities. After such apprenticeship and passing a test (sometimes an oral examination or presenting an “example of work”),9 the trainee gained his freedom to practice as a master barber-surgeon. Guilds enforced standards of competency and behavior, inspecting members’ shops and punishing malpractice. They also jealously guarded their privileges – for instance, prohibiting unlicensed “foreign” barbers from plying the trade in town. In London, the Worshipful Company of Barbers existed by 1308, and barbers were numerous in every city quarter. In 1540 King Henry VIII granted a landmark charter merging the Barbers’ Company with the Surgeons’ Fellowship into the unified Company of Barber-Surgeons. This pact – even commemorated by a painting of Henry VIII inspecting the guild’s members – acknowledged that barbers and surgeons often overlapped in practice. (It also allowed surgeons to perform anatomies on executed felons, and barbers to continue minor surgeries, illustrating a trade hierarchy.)

During the Reformation (16th century), facial hair took on new religious overtones. The reformer Martin Luther grew a great beard (initially while in hiding as “Junker Jörg”), and Protestant leaders like John Calvin and John Knox wore beards in deliberate contrast to clean-shaven Roman priests. This prompted Catholics to double-down on their no-beard rules for clergy. In 1560 the Council of Trent’s disciplinarian, St Charles Borromeo, even issued a pastoral letter De barbâ radendâ (“On shaving the beard”) exhorting priests to obey the old canons and shave. One French Catholic satirist of the era lampooned Calvinists as “poètes à longue barbe” (“long-bearded prophets”), conflating heresy with unkempt whiskers. Thus by 1600, beards in Europe were simultaneously a theological statement, a fashion choice, and a subject of medical belief (some physicians claimed a thick beard helped filter bad air and preserve health). Society’s attitudes toward facial hair were complex: a flowing beard could signify wisdom and dignity (as seen in portraits of philosophers or biblical patriarchs), yet excess facial hair on a common man might be deemed uncouth or even seditious (authorities feared rebels and bandits who hid behind big beards).

Beards, were in some instances, so contentious that laws were put into place to control, or at least monetise, their existence. It is sometimes claimed that Henry VIII placed a tax on beards, but this appears to be somewhat spurious (likewise the claim that Elizabeth I did the same). One royal who definitely was strongly anti-beard was Peter the Great of Russia. Having spent time in Europe on what one might call an elongated study tour (in which he studied shipbuilding, and err, destroyed John Evelyn’s garden – see link below!) he returned set on westernising his country. For him beards were symbols of outdated customs and he wanted to bring his peoples into the modern, clean-shaven world. Returning home in 1698 he publicly cut the beards of boyars (the highest rank of Russian nobility) and required his courtiers to be clean-shaven.

While this undoubtedly reduced the number of beards in his immediate environment, it wasn’t enough to achieve his goal of making Russia a beard-free country. To that end on the 16th January 1705 he passed an ​​ukaz (a formal degree) placing a tax on beards (earlier laws were also passed, but they have not survived):

…чтобъ впредь съ сего Его Великаго Государя указа, бороды и усы брили. А буде кто… брить не похотят… съ техъ имать… по 60 рублей… съ Гостей… первыя статьи — по 100 рублей… по 30 рублей съ московских жителей… А крестьянам… по 1 копейке с бороды при въезде в город

Henceforth, by His Majesty’s decree, beards and moustaches are to be shaved. Anyone who refuses must pay a duty: 60 rubles; from first-rank ‘Guest’ merchants, 100 rubles; 30 rubles from Moscow residents; and from peasants, 1 kopek per beard each time they enter a town.10

Some groups were except, such as members of the orthodox clergy (who were very unhappy about this tax, see earlier for their views on shaving) and it seems to have been pretty effective at removing the facial hair of the urban middle classes. After paying your tax you were given a copper token that you had you carry with you at all times so that you could prove, if challenged, that you had paid to have your beard! The tax was simplified to a flat-rate of 50 roubles per person in 1715 and, astonishingly, was only formally repealed in 1772 by Catherine the Great.

In my next piece I will (finally!) bring the story of shaving up to the modern day, but to end I’ll share (as trailed in the last piece) a little about the shaving habits of one Samuel Pepys. The great diarist adopted, for a while at least, a method of shaving I have never come across before – rubbing his face with a piece of pumice stone. We know this from three entries in his diary:

To trimming myself, which I have this week done every morning, with a pumice stone,—[Shaving with pumice stone.]—which I learnt of Mr. Marsh,11 when I was last at Portsmouth; and I find it very easy, speedy, and cleanly, and shall continue the practice of it.”
— 25 May 1662.

“I did also in a suddaine fit cut off all my beard, which I had been a great while bringing up, only that I may with my pumice-stone do my whole face, as I now do my chin, and to save time, which I find a very easy way and gentile.”
— 31 May 1662.

…the barber came and trimmed me (I having him now to come to me again after I have used a pumice-stone a good while, not but what I like this where I cannot conveniently have a barber, but here I cannot keep my hair dry without one)…”
— 14 September 1662.

You, may like, me, be wondering how on earth one can shave with a piece of rock. The answer is seems is that the rough surface of the stone would literally abrade away the hair growing through the skin. It would only work on short stubble, and personally I’d worry about what it did to the skin itself, but Pepys was clearly a fan, so it can’t have been that bad!

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If you look online you will often see it claimed that shaving dates back to Palaeolithic times, with obsidian blades1 or sharpened clam shells used for the job (or even pairs of clam shells used as ersatz tweezers to pluck out offending hairs). The reality is that this is speculative at best. We don’t really know if ancient humans shaved (or plucked) – later encounters with peoples of a similar technology level, recorded in the histories of the last couple of millennia show evidence of such shaving, so it is probably true, but by no means certain. What we can be sure of is that shaving was taking place in the early Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago, as we have both the tools and the written records to support this. The fact that one of the first tools humans made when they learned how to fashion metal was the razor does tend to suggest that shaving had already been a thing, potentially for thousands of years already. Alternatively, it could have been that the practice became common only when a decent tool for the job became available.

The earliest evidence for shaving comes from ancient Egypt, where archaeologists have discovered solid copper and even gold razors buried in tombs dating to the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods (c. 3000–2500 BCE). These razors often had round heads or crescent shapes and were likely used with water and abrasive pastes as a shaving aid.

Their presence in elite burials (including pharaonic tombs) underscores the cultural importance Egyptians placed on shaving and personal grooming, as bodily hair was viewed as unclean or uncivilised in Egyptian society. Both men and women of the upper classes removed body hair; noblewomen often kept their heads clean-shaven (wearing wigs in public) and considered the presence of pubic hair to be undesirable. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, noted the extreme meticulousness of Egyptian priests in removing hair:

οἱ δὲ ἱρέες ξυρῶνται πᾶν τὸ σῶμα διὰ τρίτης ἡμέρης, ἵνα μήτε φθεὶρ μήτε ἄλλο μυσαρὸν μηδὲν ἐγγίνηταί σφι θεραπεύουσι τοὺς θεούς.

Their priests shave the whole body every other day, so that no louse or anything else foul may breed on them while they attend upon the gods.

This passage also emphasises an important point – in a world where lice were common the shaving of hair was not only carried out for aesthetics, it was also an effective means of removing parasites. Shaving was not the only method used by Egyptians to remove hair, they also had a range of depilatory ointments, and the recipes for some of these have survived on ancient papyri. I must confess I am convinced neither by their likely effectiveness nor their pleasantness:

• Boiled turtle shell, crushed; mixed with the leg fat of a hippopotamus or water-buffalo; applied repeatedly.

• Boiled & crushed bird bones, fly dung, sycamore juice, gum (sometimes with cucumber); heated and applied, presumably pulled off when cool.

• Burnt krtus leaf steeped in oil (it is suggested that this could be applied to the head of someone who had wronged you in order to cause them to lose their hair!)2

In Mesopotamia, by contrast, attitudes toward hair were very different. The Sumerians and Akkadians of the 3rd–2nd millennium BCE generally regarded a well-tended beard as a sign of masculinity, wisdom, and social rank. Mesopotamian men, especially kings and dignitaries, tended to keep their beards but groomed them meticulously – oiling, braiding, and waxing them into elaborate ringlets as seen on sculptures and reliefs. Nonetheless, shaving and hair-trimming were also practiced when circumstances required. A clear illustration of this comes from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th–12th century BCE). In this saga, Enkidu – a wild man covered in hair – is tamed from his primal state and integrated into human society. At the crucial moment of his “civilizing,” Enkidu’s body hair is removed:

He had his hair cut, he washed, he rubbed sweet oil into his skin, and became fully human

Ancient legal and ritual texts also indicate that forced shaving could be a punishment or a marker of humiliation in the Near East. For instance, a story in the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel 10:4) recounts that the Ammonite king Hanun, to insult Israelite envoys, “seized them and shaved off half of each man’s beard,” an action so degrading in that culture that the men dared not return home until their beards regrew. This half-shaving punishment was also used by the Spartans, inflicted upon cowards, as Plutarch recounts in his Life of Agesilaus:

One great one [law] was then before them concerning the runaways (as their name is for them) that had fled out of the battle, who being many and powerful, it was feared that they might make some commotion in the republic, to prevent the execution of the law upon them for their cowardice. The law in that case was very severe; for they were not only to be debarred from all honours, but also it was a disgrace to intermarry with them; whoever met any of them in the streets might beat him if he chose, nor was it lawful for him to resist; they, in the meanwhile, were obliged to go about unwashed and meanly dressed, with their clothes patched with divers colours, and to wear their beards half shaved, half unshaven.

By the first millennium BCE, clear regional differences had emerged in shaving customs. In the Classical Greek world (c. 8th–4th century BCE), adult men traditionally wore beards as a sign of maturity and status. Among the Greeks, a clean-shaven face on a grown man was initially uncommon and could even be viewed as effeminate or youthful. In Athens of the 5th century BCE, for example, men only cut their beards during periods of mourning. Things began to change, however, during the time of Alexander the Great (who was always portrayed as being clean-shaven). According to later historians, Alexander (356–323 BCE) instigated a shaving revolution. During his eastern campaigns, Alexander reputedly ordered his Macedonian soldiers to shave their faces clean before the decisive Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE). The classic explanation, recorded by Plutarch, was practical: beards gave enemies an easy handhold in close combat:

τοῦτο δὲ ἀμέλει καὶ Ἀλέξανδρον τὸν Μακεδόνα ἐννοήσαντά φασι προστάξαι τοῖς στρατηγοῖς ξυρεῖν τὰ γένεια τῶν Μακεδόνων, ὡς λαβὴν ταύτην ἐν ταῖς μάχαις οὖσαν προχειροτάτην.

And Alexander of Macedon, having considered this, as they say, ordered his generals to have the Macedonians’ beards shaved, since these offered the readiest grip in battle.

Whether this actually happened or not (Plutarch was writing centuries later) Greeks certainly took to shaving at around this time. Barbershops (τα κουρεία) became common in Greek cities, and daily shaves and haircuts turned into a social ritual for gentlemen.

Meanwhile early Romans of the Regal and Republican eras (6th–4th c. BCE) initially followed the old Italic custom of wearing beards. Pliny the Elder reports that Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE) dated the introduction of professional barbers (tonsōrēs) to around 300 BCE:

omnino tonsores in Italiam primum venisse ex Sicilia dicuntur… eosque adduxisse Publium Titinium Menam.

Barbers are said to have first come to Italy from Sicily in the 453rd year after Rome’s founding [300 BCE]… and that Publius Titinius Mena brought them.

Prior to this, Romans either let their hair grow or trimmed it themselves in a primitive way. The very Latin word for razor, novācula, does not appear in literature until this period. According to the Roman historian Livy, the legendary King Lucius Tarquinius Priscus in the 6th century BCE had introduced the novacula (razor) to Rome3 but even Livy implies that regular shaving was not adopted by the populace at that time. One shaving trend-setter was the great general Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 BCE). Pliny the Elder records that Scipio “was the first of all to institute shaving every day”.

In time barbering became big business in Rome. The Latin poets and satirists of the early 1st century BCE (e.g. Plautus, and later Horace) frequently mention the daily morning visit to the barber as part of a gentleman’s routine. Barber shops (tonstrinae) doubled as social hubs where news and gossip were exchanged. However, shaving in this era was still a perilous affair: Roman razors were made of bronze or iron and needed to be kept very sharp; nicks and cuts were common, and in a world without antibiotics infections could be debilitating or even fatal. If you were rich enough you would have your own dedicated barber slave, the accuracy of whose work you could be certain of. Soon a man’s first shave (the depositio barbae) would become a significant rite of passage marking the transition from youth to adulthood. Typically around age 21, a young man would shave for the first time in a special ceremony, often dedicating the shorn beard hair to a god (such as offering it in a box to Jupiter). Emperor Nero, for example, staged an extravagant celebration upon his first shave, the juvenalia, and encased his shaven beard in a golden box to dedicate in the Capitol.4

Julius Caeser was also noted for his grooming,5 as Suetonius reports in his Lives of the Caesars (c. 110 CE):

Cultu corporis nimium studentem fuisse; non modo tonderi diligenter ac raderi solitum, sed etiam superfluos pilos vellere…

He [Julius Caesar] was said to be excessively attentive to personal appearance; not only accustomed to have his hair cut and beard shaved meticulously, but even to pluck out stray hairs.

Caesar himself records that his foes, the ancient Britons, tended to favour the moustache, recording in his Gallic War, “They wear long hair, and shave every part of the body save the head and the upper lip.”6

Around the same time in Asia there were a number of different views on shaving. In the Indian subcontinent, hair practices were governed largely by religious and caste norms. Since at least the time of the Buddha (5th century BCE), monastic communities in India embraced head-shaving as a sign of renunciation: Buddhist monks shaved their heads (a practice the Buddha himself instituted for his followers), and Jain monks even plucked each hair out by the root to avoid vanity. Meanwhile, orthodox Hindu society treated hair in complex ways – the Manusmṛiti and other Dharmaśāstras prescribed that high-caste men keep a shikha (tuft of hair) on the crown but shave the rest of the head in certain rituals, and that widows or renunciants remove their hair as a symbol of worldly detachment.. Daily beard-shaving was less universally prescribed, but urbane and courtly culture under the Mauryas and Guptas (4th c. BCE – 5th c. CE) did include razors. The medical compendium Suśruta Saṃhitā (c. 1st millennium BCE) mentions razors (muṇḍa) among surgical instruments and advises shaving the surgical area – one of the earliest records of pre-operative shaving in medical history,

In China, on the other hand, the classical attitude toward shaving was coloured by Confucian values that regarded the hair and body as sacred gifts from one’s parents (and thus not to be cut). During the Warring States and Han dynasty (5th c. BCE – 3rd c. CE), the typical Han Chinese man grew out the hair on his head long, often into a topknot, and did not shave his face completely – moderate facial hair like mustaches or goatees were common. A saying attributed to Confucius goes: “To not destroy the body one has received from one’s parents is the beginning of filial piety.” As such, adult men rarely shaved their heads or faces entirely. There were, however, exceptions. One was punishment: criminals might be sentenced to have their head shaved (along with a brand on the face) – a punishment called ti* (剃), literally “shaving”, used in the Qin and early Han to mark disgrace. Another exception was the emergence of Daoist and Buddhist monks. When Buddhism entered China in the 1st century CE, monks followed the Indian tradition of shaving the head (which local observers found shocking at first). By the late classical period (c. 4th century CE), the image of the shaven-headed monk became familiar in China, though it remained a sign of religious devotion set apart from normal society.

In my next piece I’ll explore the conflicting Christian views about the holiness of beards, the rise of the barber-surgeons, the invention of the modern razor, and a brief digression describing how Samuel Pepys attempted to shave with a pumice stone. But I’ll end today with a rather astonishing shaving story which was heard by Usāmah ibn Munqidh (1095–1188), and reported in Kitāb al-Iʿtibār (The Book of Learning by Example, named in translation as “An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usāmah ibn-Munqidh”). It describes how a Frankish crusader knight in northern Syria discovered that parts of the body other than the face could be shaved:

We had with us a bath-keeper named Sālim, originally an inhabitant of al-Maʿarra, who had charge of the bath of my father (may Allah’s mercy rest upon his soul!). This man related the following story.

I once opened a bath in al-Maʿarra in order to earn my living. To this bath there came a Frankish knight. The Franks disapprove of girding a cover around one’s waist while in the bath. So this Frank stretched out his arm and pulled off my cover from my waist and threw it away. He looked and saw that I had recently shaved off my pubes. So he shouted, “Sālim!” As I drew near him he stretched his hand over my pubes and said, “Sālim, good! By the truth of my religion, do the same for me.” Saying this, he lay on his back and I found that in that place the hair was like his beard. So I shaved it off. Then he passed his hand over the place and, finding it smooth, he said, “Sālim, by the truth of my religion, do the same to madame [al-dāma]” (al-dāma in their language means the lady), referring to his wife. He then said to a servant of his, “Tell madame to come here.” Accordingly the servant went and brought her and made her enter the bath. She also lay on her back. The knight repeated, “Do what thou hast done to me.” So I shaved all that hair while her husband was sitting looking at me. At last he thanked me and handed me the pay for my service.

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Sholes thought that Pratt’s design was “complicated and liable to get out of order" and believed that a better solution could be developed. He roped in fellow printer Samuel Willard Soulé (1830–1875), who had helped develop the numbering machine, and three of them got to work. By late 1867 they successfully produced a device, but it doesn’t look a lot like the typewriter that we know today; indeed it was described as a “cross between a piano and a kitchen table”. Despite this, they used their machine to type out letters, which they sent to friends, seeking investment in the venture. One of them, James Densmore, was so impressed that he offered them $600 (around $50,000 in today’s terms) for a 25% stake, despite the fact that he hadn’t actually seen the machine. When he did, in March 1868, he was somewhat shocked and declared that it was “good for nothing except to show that its underlying principles were sound”. Nonetheless they obtained a patent for their invention in June of 1868 and Densmore rented a building in Chicago to start manufacturing them in earnest. They were, however, only able to make and sell 15 units before running out of funds and heading home. So far, so much like all of the other tales of typewriter inventions, but they sucked up this knock-back and went back to the drawing board.

Over the next three years they created dozens more prototypes, drawing upon many of the ideas of earlier typewriter inventors. All of this took cash and yielded precious little income, which caused Soule and Glidden to give up on the venture and sell their stakes to Densmore and Scholes. Some limited production runs took place, but the product simply wasn’t good enough to take hold. In early 1873 Scholes too decided to throw in the towel, and sell his stake to Densmore for $12,000 (around half a million dollars today). His timing may not have been ideal, as in March of that year Densmore signed a deal with the arms and sewing machine manufacturer Remington to start making the machines. In conjunction with Remington’s engineers (notably J. Fay and W. J. Jenne) the cumbersome, ugly, error-prone device was turned into a sleek, treadle-operated device resembling a sewing machine. In fact, Remington explicitly drew the parallel in their marketing. As one contemporary ad proclaimed, “The writing machine is to the pen what the sewing machine is to the needle”, and early models were even sold mounted on sewing-machine stands with foot treadles This messaging helped the public grasp the invention: like the sewing machine had mechanised stitching, the typewriter mechanised writing. Remington painted floral decals on the black enamelled casing, boasting it was “an ornament to any parlour”.

Was this the start of the typing revolution? Not quite. The “Remington No. 1” went on sale in mid-1874 but they only managed to sell 400 machines in their first six months. In part this was the price, $125 (around $10,000 today) – businesses were skeptical in investing in something that might turn out to be fad and individuals simply didn’t write that much for it to make sense. The typewriters were also still, even after much refinement, temperamental and in need of frequent attention. Finally, there was a third, more cultural, problem. In offices still proud of elegant penmanship, the typewriter’s uniform print seemed impersonal and even insulting to some recipients. Anecdotes abounded: one indignant client (allegedly a Kentucky mountaineer) is said to have returned a typed letter with scrawled feedback, “You don’t need to print no letters for me. I kin read writin’.” The problem was that previously letter writing had always been a personal craft, and this new device blurred the line between individual correspondence and printed matter.

There were some early enthusiasts, however, most notably one Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), who wrote to his brother, Orion Clemens, on December 9th 1874:

I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing machine, but am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first attempt I ever have made, & yet I perceive that I shall soon & easily acquire a fine facility in its use. … The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. … It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around.

By 1877 only 4,000 machines had been sold, but things improved materially with the launch of the Remington No. 2 in 1878 which, through the introduction2 of the shift key, allowed the user to type in both upper and lower case letters – yes, the first model was all caps (which may well explain why some recipients of letters produced on it found them somewhat off-putting!). In the early 1880s a number of competitors started to enter the market with their own designs. Some, such as the Victor, took a radically different approach (see earlier image) but these failed to succeed. Most copied the same broad design as the Remingtons, including the QWERTY keyboard layout that we are all familiar with today. Now you may have read that this keyboard was designed specifically to separate common letters in order to reduce typebar jams. As the mechanisms of these early machines were somewhat slow, then it made sense to slow the typist down in order to stop two type slugs getting stuck together. This is probably part of the story, but more recent research suggests that this layout also aided telegraph operators (an important early market) when they were transcribing Morse Code.

Over the next decade the quality and popularity of typewriters increased significantly, and the benefits to businesses in particular became clear, as P. G Hubert noted in the June 1888 edition of The North American Review:

…with the aid of this little machine an operator can accomplish more correspondence in a day than half a dozen clerks can with the pen, and do better work.

Having sold the rights to his invention, Christopher Sholes didn’t benefit financially from this boom, but he did take comfort from the social changes that it wrought: “I feel that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard,” Sholes reflected near the end of his life, “This will enable them more easily to earn a living.”

Hubert agreed with him, as his piece went on to say:

[a] most excellent feature of this new profession for women is that it pays according to skill and education. Any bright girl in from three to six months may obtain sufficient facility with the typewriter to make herself valuable in an office, and after that everything she does adds so much practice. The salaries of good typewriters average … $15 to $20 a week, … it is a very poor sort of typewriter who, after six or eight months’ experience, cannot make as much at this work as at school-teaching.

By the late 1890s, the typewriter was here to stay – but it was about to get a major upgrade. Early Remingtons and their rivals were “blind writers”, meaning the text was printed on the underside of the platen (the roller) and remained out of sight until one removed the page. Typists had to trust their fingers and only check for errors after a line or two, a cumbersome system at best. The next leap in design was to make writing visible – to let operators see their work as it was being typed. Several upstart companies pursued this goal, but one machine emerged to define the new standard: Underwood.

The Underwood typewriter, first produced in 1895 (and popularized by the Underwood No.5 in 1900), moved the type-bars to the front of the platen and introduced a four-row straight keyboard. Now each keystroke struck the paper on the front, in full view of the typist. “Visible writing” was a revelation. An Underwood advertisement from 1909 proudly declared it “The Machine You Will Eventually Buy,”

Within a few years, Underwood had seized the market from older blind-writer makers like Remington and Smith-Premier. By 1915, an Underwood brochure could boast that “there’s but one absolutely visible typewriter… See what you are doing – as you do it.” Visible typing not only reduced errors; it made the whole experience more intuitive. As one typist recalled, it was like lifting a veil: “I no longer felt like I was typing in the dark. With the Underwood, I could watch the words march across the page.”3

At the start of the 20th century American firms were selling machines across Europe, Asia, and South America, adapting keyboards to local scripts – QWERTZ for Germany, AZERTY for France, even special characters for Spanish ñ or Portuguese ç. If there were strange alphabets or syllabaries, the engineers would find a way to put them on keys. By 1910 you could obtain a Cyrillic Remington in Moscow, an Arabic Smith Premier in Cairo, a Kana typewriter in Tokyo.

The next development in typewriters related to their size. Early standard machines were heavy cast-iron beasts, 25–30 lbs (11-14 kilos), often bolted to office desks. This was impractical for traveling businesspeople, journalists in the field, military officers on campaign, or simply anyone who wanted to move one around their house. The solution came from innovators like George Blickensderfer, whose Blickensderfer No.5 (1893) amazed people by fitting a full keyboard machine into a petite wooden case with the whole thing weighing less than 7 pounds (3.25 kilos). Soon, other companies followed. The Standard Folding Typewriter (later known as the Corona) came out in 1906 in the US, featuring a folding carriage that allowed a standard four-row keyboard to collapse into a compact size. It weighed about 9 pounds (4kg) and could be set up anywhere – a hotel room, a battlefield dugout, a railway carriage. By 1912, the Corona 3 (an improved model) became wildly popular, selling thousands to itinerant professionals and WW1 military officers (the British Army ordered them en masse for field use).4

The final evolution of the typewriter took place on July 31, 1961, when reporters and office equipment dealers packed an auditorium in New York City for a much-hyped announcement by IBM. Covered by a veil on stage sat a typewriter that looked like something out of science fiction – sleek lines, futuristic curves, and crucially, no typebars. When IBM’s spokesman unveiled the Selectric Typewriter, the audience saw a machine whose type element was a spherical ball that rotated and tilted to imprint letters. A gasp went up. The Selectric had no moving carriage; the paper stayed put while the “golf-ball” element darted across the page on a pivoting arm. It could type faster and with less jamming, and could change fonts by simply swapping out the typeball. As The New York Times reported the next day:

An electric typewriter that eliminates the customary typebars and moving carriage was demonstrated by International Business Machines… The machine’s spherical typing element can be changed in seconds to provide any of six different typefaces.

Electric typewriters were not new in 1961. IBM itself had been making them since the mid-1930s, after acquiring the Electromatic Typewriter Company. Early IBM electric models (like the 1935 Model 01 and the postwar Model B) still resembled traditional typewriters but used motors to drive the typebars, resulting in a lighter touch and quicker action. These found a niche in corporate typing pools where output quotas were high, but they never went mainstream. By 1958, IBM held a majority share of the US electric typewriter market, yet the basic mechanism – moving carriage, individual typebars – remained the same as the 1880s. The Selectric changed all that, arguably the biggest design leap since the shift to visible typing more than sixty years earlier.

At their peak tens of millions of typewriters were sold globally each year. Today that number is counted in the tens of thousands. IMB sowed the seeds of their downfall, only a couple of years after the launch of the Selectric. In 1964 they launched the world’s first word processor (the term “word processing” derived from the German Textverarbeitung, often credited to IBM’s Ulrich Steinhilper) the snappily named Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST), which let typists record, edit and replay text from magnetic tape. This was, to be fair, closer to a typewriter than what we would think of as a true word processor, but it got the ball rolling.

By the early 1970s, the word processor was a stand-alone workstation with a keyboard, storage and – crucially – a CRT screen for on-screen editing. Firms such as Lexitron and Linolex shipped CRT systems in 1972; Vydec followed in 1973, notably incorporating floppy diskettes for document storage and portability – an important usability leap for office workflows. Wang then hit it big with the Wang 1200/WPS (1976) and later OIS lines, which became fixtures in corporate typing pools and law offices. The explosion of personal computers, and word-processing programmes such as WordPerfect5 which launched on the machines in 1982, sounded the death knell for the typewriter. Though I will likely never use one again, I am fond of the fact that they have left their mark upon how I type to this day.

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In July of 1808 in Fivizzano, Italy, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano3 sat in a dimly lit study before an odd contraption of keys and levers. The fact that it was all but impossible to see in the room didn’t matter to the Countess – she had been blind from birth – and, possibly smiling at the novelty of the experience, she leant forward, laid her fingers on the keys, and began creating the earliest known typewritten document. We know from her surviving letters a little bit about both the design of the machine and her experience of using it. It could work using either ink, or a form of carbon paper, and was more akin to a printing press than a modern typewriter:

Mio caro amico, voglio provare se i caratteri novi scolpiscano meglio col l’inchiostro o col la carta nera…

My dear friend, I want to try whether the new characters take an impression better with ink or with black paper [carbon paper] …

Appena ristabilita dal mio fiero dolore di testa mi sono trattenuta con voi per mezzo della stampa, come vedrete dal foglio che vi ho mandato…

…as soon as I recovered from my fierce headache I kept company with you by means of the press, as you will see from the sheet I have sent you.

Mi si è guastata la stamperia; la tavoletta non chiude più…

…my little press has broken; the tablet/board no longer closes …

Sadly, little else is known about this machine. The “dear friend” to whom she refers is Pellegrino Turri, a Garfagnana-born noble who settled in Reggio Emilia and who created the device that she was using, but again, not much else about his life survives. It is possible that he invented the device, but it is more like that Agostino Fantoni devised an earlier “stamperia” in 1802 for his blind sister and that Turri refined it and developed carbon paper.

It is also possible that, almost a century earlier, another device existed about which we know even less. In 1714 and English engineer named Henry Mill petitioned Queen Anne for a patent on:

an Artificial Machine or Method for the Impressing or Transcribing Letters, singly or progressively one after another as in Writing, whereby all Writing whatever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print.

It appears, however, that this machine was never even constructed. The next person on the scene was the American William Austin Burt (1792–1858) who on on July 23, 1829, received US X-patent 5,581 for a “Printing Machine Styled the Typographer”, which explains:

This patent discloses the actual construction of a type writing machine for the first time in any country. The type are arranged on the under side of a segment carried by a lever pivoted to swing vertically and horizontally. The desired character is brought to the printing point by moving this lever horizontally to a position over the same character in the index and the impression is made by depressing the lever.

Several styles of type may be used, and they are arranged in two rows on the lever; these rows of type can be shifted on the lever to bring either one to the printing point. The paper is carried on an endless band which travels crosswise of the machine, and this band is moved for letter space by the impression lever every time said lever is depressed to print. The line space is made by shifting the frame carrying the printing mechanism toward the front or rear of the machine, the paper remaining stationary.

Ink pads are located at each side of the impression point, and all the type except the one in printing position are inked every time the impression lever is pressed. A dial is provided which indicates the length of paper in inches which has passed the printing point in printing each line, and as the operator knows the width of the paper being used, the time to stop printing at the end of the line is indicated.

As you will have guessed from both the description and the picture, this device was very different from what we would consider as a typewriter (and it seems likely that the earlier device, with individual keys, would be more familiar to us). Either way, it was not a commercial success, and one model that we know was built, and lodged with the Patent Office, was destroyed there in a fire in 1836.4 Possibly due to its cumbersome nature, and cost, the product failed commercially.

In 1843 we see another attempt, with American Charles Thurber patenting “Thurber’s Patent Printer”:

This machine is intended as a substitute for writing, where writing with a pen is in convenient by reason of incompetency in the performer. It is specially intended for the use of the blind, who, by touching the keys on which raised letters are made and which they can discriminate by the sense of touch, will be enabled to commit their thoughts to paper. It is intended for the nervous, likewise, who cannot execute with a pen. It is useful for making public records, as they can be made, with this machine as accurately as with a common printing-press. It is intended for those who wish to keep a legible record of daily events, so that they may be read with ease and dispatch by others; and the various useful purposes to which it may be applied will readily suggest themselves to everyone.

Alas he himself admitted that the device was slow and crude, and it too was never manufactured en masse.

Next on the scene we have the Italian Giuseppe Ravizza (c. 1811–1885) who spent almost 40 years attempting to perfect the typewriter. In 1855 he patented what he called “cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a tasti” (“scribe-harpsichord, or key-operated typewriter”). This had 31 keys5 and a space bar arranged on two rows, each key linked by wooden levers to a type hammer weighted with lead shot for a crisper strike. The hammers (“martelletti”) are arranged in a circle around an inner brass ring on iron posts—bringing multiple types to one point, like later up-strike machines. There was an ink ribbon, a bell that dinged to let you know that you had reached the end of a line and a cord to pull to cause the carriage to return. All in all it had most of the features of what we would think of as a typewriter today. Ravizza continued to tinker with, and improve, the machine over the decades that followed but (and you may be detecting a theme here) the device was never produced at scale. Each was hand-built and of around 16 even produced and of these perhaps only half were sold.

Then we have Peter Mitterhofer (1822–1893), a South Tyrolean carpenter sometimes described as “the inventor of the typewriter”.6 His initial device, built in 1864 may not seem like a good start – it didn’t so much type as tattoo. Instead of metal letters, it used a forest of little needles to perforate the page in a flat frame. His next design, fairly sensibly, replaced the needles with printer’s metal types, and was sufficiently impressive to get funding from the Austrian state to continue his work. His later models in introduce the shift key (to swap between upper and lower cases) and a cylinder around which the paper is held (rather than, as with earlier designs), a flat metal plate. Unfortunately (and I am sure that by now this will come as a great shock to you) his designs never went into mass production and only a few were ever built.

Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–1890) was a Danish pastor and head of Copenhagen’s Royal Institute for the Deaf. In the mid-1860s he began experimenting with a device to let people produce text quickly and legibly – an aid for education and office work. By 1865 he had the working concept that would become the “Writing Ball”, later recognized as the first serially manufactured writing device/typewriter. Rather than a flat board, Malling-Hansen arranged 50-odd keys on a brass hemisphere—the “ball”. He tested letter placement (reportedly with a porcelain mock-up),7 putting the most common letters under the fastest fingers, generally grouping vowels to the left and consonants to the right. Each key drove a short piston straight down to a single printing point, minimizing motion and boosting speed. Early models typed onto paper clipped around a small cylinder; a separate “coloring sheet” (carbon paper) or ribbon supplied the ink. Striking a key forced its type to the common point while the paper advanced. Interestingly, Malling-Hansen’s first production machines used an electro-magnet to step the carriage, an early electromechanical assist. He replaced that with a purely mechanical escapement in later versions but nonetheless this can been seen as something of a forerunner to later electric machines.

The device was patented in both Europe and the USA and went into production,8 though was hardly a success – perhaps 180 machines in total were produced. Those who did use were impressed, including, most notably, Friedrich Nietzsche. Struggling with failing eyesight received a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball in 1882 and was so enamoured that he penned a brief poem about it which began: “The writing ball is a thing like me: made of iron…”. Although a commercial failure, this thing made of iron was actually very practical. Contemporary accounts report experienced users reaching typing speeds of 160 words per minute. To put this in context the five-minute speed record on a “modern” mechanical typewriter is around 176 words per minute. I find it fascinating to wonder what might have happened if this design had ‘won’ and quite how laptops would look today as a result!

The last9 of the “nearly, but not quite” typewriters was the Pterotype, patented by the American John Pratt in London in 1866 and it took a very different approach from the other attempts. Instead of having letters on hammers Pratt used a metal “type plate” embossed with characters.10

The plate moved up/down and left/right to bring the chosen character to a single printing point; then a hammer struck the paper from behind and pressed it against the plate. In this respect it can be seen as something of a forerunner of IBM’s “typeball” (also known as the “golf ball”) introduced in 1961 in their Selectric electric typewriters (more on this next time). Pratt’s machine soon went into mass production and was sold widely around the globe. No, of course it didn’t, none were produced commercially, but the publicity surrounding his work did help to inspire those who, as we shall see in my next piece, created the machines that transformed the world.

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These ‘cabs’ were not without their downsides, however. Phone-snatching, often carried out by criminals on e-bikes, is a scourge of modern London but something similar was also taking place in the 18th century as this entry from the Weekly Journal dated March 30th 1717 describes:

The Thieves have got such a villainous way now of robbing gentlemen, that they cut holes through the backs of Hackney coaches,1 and take away their wigs, or fine head-dresses of gentlewomen; so a gentleman was served last Sunday in Tooley-street, and another but last Tuesday in Fenchurch-street; wherefore, this may serve for a caution to gentlemen or gentlewomen that ride single in the night-time, to sit on the fore-seat, which will prevent that way of robbing.

The next major development in taxi evolution came at the hands of one Joseph Hansom, an architect from Yorkshire who, in 1834, invented the Hansom cab.2 Like the French cabriolets, these were vehicles for two people, pulled by a single horse; however they had a number of significant differences. The driver sat on a sprung seat at the back of the carriage, raised so that he could control the horse (and see where he was going) over the roof of the structure. Low-slung body work and high wheels gave the cab a low centre of gravity, which enabled safe cornering and overtaking, and two curved fenders prevented stones being thrown up into the passenger cabin from the horse’s hooves.

The low cab and large wheels could make getting in and out of the cab somewhat challenging, as Charles Dickens humorously described in his Sketches by Boz:

Some people object to the exertion of getting into cabs, and others object to the difficulty of getting out of them; we think both these are objections which take their rise in perverse and ill-conditioned minds. The getting into a cab is a very pretty and graceful process, which, when well performed, is essentially melodramatic. First, there is the expressive pantomime of every one of the eighteen cabmen on the stand, the moment you raise your eyes from the ground. Then there is your own pantomime in reply—quite a little ballet. Four cabs immediately leave the stand, for your especial accommodation; and the evolutions of the animals who draw them, are beautiful in the extreme, as they grate the wheels of the cabs against the curb-stones, and sport playfully in the kennel. You single out a particular cab, and dart swiftly towards it. One bound, and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right, and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins, working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab. There is no difficulty in finding a seat: the apron knocks you comfortably into it at once, and off you go.

The getting out of a cab is, perhaps, rather more complicated in its theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution. We have studied the subject a great deal, and we think the best way is, to throw yourself out, and trust to chance for alighting on your feet. If you make the driver alight first, and then throw yourself upon him, you will find that he breaks your fall materially. In the event of your contemplating an offer of eightpence, on no account make the tender, or show the money, until you are safely on the pavement. It is very bad policy attempting to save the fourpence. You are very much in the power of a cabman, and he considers it a kind of fee not to do you any wilful damage. Any instruction, however, in the art of getting out of a cab, is wholly unnecessary if you are going any distance, because the probability is, that you will be shot lightly out before you have completed the third mile.

As you may have gleaned from the above passage, an attractive feature of these new cabs was their price. A London magazine in 1842 noted that a cabriolet could be hired for as little as one shilling – within reach of the burgeoning middle class. For the first time, catching a cab wasn’t just a luxury for aristocrats; clerks, lawyers and visitors on errands could all ‘take a cab’ when speed or weather demanded. London and Paris led the way in formalizing cab services. Both cities required cab drivers to be licensed and numbered. Paris had its fiacre licences; London capped the number of cab licences (a carryover from hackney coach limits). Guidebooks from the mid-1800s list cab stands at railway stations, hotels and main thoroughfares, and newspapers regularly reported on cab fares and misadventures. In Paris, satirists and songwriters referenced fiacre drivers in popular culture – sometimes as rough-hewn but essential service providers. An 1848 Paris guide dryly noted that fiacre drivers, while prone to fleecing unwary tourists, “chaque jour rendent de grands services” (each day render great services). Though in time they would face competition from motorised alternatives, these cabs proved remarkably persistent – the last licence for a horse-drawn cab in London was issued in 1947.

The development that turned the simple cab into the taxi-cab came about as a solution to an obvious and all-too prevalent problem – how do you know if your cabman has charged you the correct fare or if he is trying to scam you? The answer to this was the taximeter – a device to automatically calculate fares based on distance (and time) – which was invented in 1891 by a German engineer, Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhnin. These devices were really very ingenious. When the passenger got in, but the cab wasn’t moving, a clockwork mechanism started which increased the fare based upon the time the vehicle was stationary. When the cab was moving a distance drive was taken by a flexible shaft from a front wheel, which increased the charge while rolling. The device automatically used whichever input was ‘on top’ at the moment: when the cab stood still the clockwork advanced the fare; once it moved, the wheel drive overran the clockwork and took over. As a report at the time explained:

The taximeters are circular instruments about the size of street-car fare registers. Unlike the latter, however, they are autotic in action, calculating and indicating at all stages of the trip the precise amount of fare the customer has to pay, thereby eliminating any possibility of the driver making excessive charges, and pocketing a part of the receipts for himself.

The English word taximeter comes via the French taximètre, adapted from German Taxameter. The German coinage combines medieval Latin taxa (charge, tariff) and meter (measure, from Greek métron). The first use of ‘taxameter’ in English occurred in The Times in 1894 and this had evolved to taximeter by 1898–9. The words taxi and taxicab were first seen in 1907 and have persisted to this day, though London black cabs are still formally referred to as ‘hackney carriages’, harking back to the days of the horse-drawn cabs.

Around the same time inventors were experimenting with horseless carriages for hire. In the 1890s, both electric and gasoline-powered vehicles appeared as potential cabs. One of the earliest was the Daimler Victoria, built by Gottlieb Daimler in 1897, a gasoline automobile equipped with a taximeter and delivered to Friedrich Greiner, who started the world’s first motor taxi company in Stuttgart. That same year in London, Walter Bersey introduced electric battery-powered cabs (nicknamed Hummingbirds for the noise they made) though they turned out to be a short-lived experiment due to the challenges of maintaining them – yes, there were all-electric cabs operating in London in the 19th century!

By 1899, Paris saw its first gasoline taxis (all French-made vehicles), and by 1903 the trend reached London in earnest, with motor cabs gradually replacing horse-drawn hansoms. These early motor taxis often used the latest French cars – in fact, many of New York’s first gasoline cabs were imported French Darracq or Renault. Paris embraced motorized ‘autotaxis’ quickly. A notable fleet, the Compagnie Française des Automobiles de Place, put scores of Renault motor cabs (with taximeters) on Parisian streets in the early 1900s. By 1907, Paris had thousands of motor taxis, which famously would play a role in 1914 ferrying soldiers to the Battle of the Marne.3 London’s motor cabs, often called just ‘taxis’ to distinguish them from the remaining horse-cabs, gained popularity after 1906 when reliable models like the Prunel and Unic came into service. In 1907, London mandated that all new cabs must have taximeters, a move initially resisted by drivers used to negotiating fares. 

Across the Atlantic, New York City lagged slightly but caught up dramatically around 1907. That year, a 30-year-old businessman named Harry N. Allen became a catalyst. After being overcharged by a Manhattan hansom cabbie, Allen vowed to start a better cab service. He imported 65 gasoline-powered French cabs (painted red and green) fitted with taximeters and launched New York’s first meter-equipped taxi fleet in mid-1907. As contemporary reports noted, “In 1907, [Allen] imported his vehicles with their taximeters from France to New York. He had the first metered cabs in the city.” The novelty of the precise fare and the speed of motor cars attracted curiosity and ridership in equal measure. However, Allen’s innovation met with pushback from the established drivers of horse-drawn cabs. Used to setting their own prices (and often receiving generous tips), many cabbies saw meters and employee status as a threat to their income. By mid-1908, Allen’s drivers were in open revolt over pay, and a strike turned violent. One period source recounts that “just a year later his drivers staged a walkout over their pay” – in fact, New York’s first taxi strike (and riot) occurred in August 1908. Striking cabbies attacked the shiny new motor taxis; several vehicles were smashed and tipped over in the streets of Manhattan and police intervention was needed to restore order. This violence was ultimately futile; the rise of the mechanised, metered cab proved to be unstoppable.

By the 1910s, every major metropolis had its fleet of taxicabs. They were often painted in distinctive liveries: London’s were initially green or red, but soon black became standard (giving us the London ‘black cab’). Paris taxis were famously red or green; New York’s early fleets were various colors – red-and-green, or yellow, or chequered. An arms race of sorts began in branding as the different companies competed for fares and this ultimately resulted in the NYC cabs that we know of today. In 1910, a New York cab company owner painted his taxis canary yellow based on a university study that found yellow most visible from a distance. Soon, yellow cabs spread to Chicago and beyond, thanks in part to businessman John Hertz,4 whose Yellow Cab Co. (founded 1915) became one of the largest taxi operators in America.

A few years later in New York, during the Great Depression, vast numbers of ‘wildcat’ cabs (unlicensed operators that undercut official fare rates to poach customers) flooded the streets which caused the wages of the official cab drivers to collapse. To address this, in 1937 the Board of Aldermen passed the Haas Act, which created a medallion system and capping the number of taxi licences at 13,595 (later falling by attrition to ~11,787 active by the 1940s). Licences cost $10 to renew; and only cabs with a medallion were able to ply their trade on the streets of the city. For decades the cap barely budged. New sales were rare until the late 1990s and 2000s, when the state and city authorized limited waves: e.g., up to 900 new medallions authorized in 2003 leading to big auctions in 2004 (nearly 600 sold that year; plan to lift the fleet from 12,187 to 13,087), then further sales in 2006, and a wheelchair-accessible tranche in 2013–2014. This forced scarcity of permission to operate in a highly lucrative trade made these medallions incredibly valuable. By 2003 they traded at over $300,000 apiece, but reached their highest peak in 2013–14 when they were selling for over one million dollars each.

This peak did not last for long. The growth of ride-hail apps in the years that followed caused the prices to crash and they now trade for between $90k–$200k. In London however, there is no formal limit on the number of black cabs, but their numbers are restricted by the fact that to be able to drive one you have to pass arguably the toughest examination in the world, The Knowledge. For the full ‘All London’ licence (the ‘green badge’), candidates must memorise every viable route, traffic restriction, and more than 6,000 landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, the traditional centre of London. The core syllabus is a set of 320 exemplar routes (‘runs’) published in Transport for London’s Blue Book; they also learn the ¼-mile catchment around the start and end of every run so the drivers pick up the local street web and the places people actually ask for (‘points’). This means that in order to pass, prospective drivers have to memorise more than 25,000 streets, a challenge which takes most candidates three or four years. 

This astonishing feat of memory actually changes the brains of the cab drivers who complete it. A famous University College London study by Professor Eleanor A. Maguire showed that licensed London taxi drivers have larger posterior hippocampi (a brain area critical for spatial memory) than controls, with the size increase correlating to years of their experience. The Knowledge has been a requirement for London cab drivers since 1865, and although the number of people passing it has declined in recent years (in part due to the rise of Uber and other apps) I hope that this astonishing tradition will continue for many years to come.

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Taxis, in essence, are a means of getting oneself around a city, or beyond, fairly quickly – something that has been a pretty tiresome business for much of human history. Streets are usually narrow, dirty, and congested, and for most people for the last few thousand years the only affordable means of transport has been their own legs. For those who have the money though there has also most always been a means of getting from A to B with considerably less personal effort. One has been able to, if you will excuse the pun, get someone else to do the heavy lifting. For thousands of years before the invention of the motorised taxi cabs the great and the good have been carried from place to place by others. In ancient Rome, for example, the wealthy were transported around lecticae, covered litters carried by slaves.

As you can imagine, these were fairly large and bulky affairs, and were carried along streets teeming with pedestrians. As the rich were unwilling to wait in the crowds they soon obtained the reputation of being somewhat careless in their attitudes to other street-users. The poet Juvenal (55–128 CE) describes this perfectly:

When duty demands it, crowds fall back to allow
The wealthy to pass, who sail past the coast
In a mighty Liburnian ship, while on the way
They read or write or even take a nap,
For the litter and its shut windows bring on sleep.
Yet he still arrives first; while we are blocked
In our hurry by a wave before us, while the great crowd
Crushes our backs from behind us; an elbow or a stick
Hits you, a beam or a wine-jar smacks you on the head;
My leg is covered in crud, from every side

It wasn’t just the pedestrians who were abused by this form of transport, the luckless slaves really bore the brunt of it, as Juvenal continues:

The Liburnian litter-slaves are told they’re late, they must pay for their master’s 
Slumbers. Sticks are broken on one slave, the whip and the strap scorch others;

Also in ancient Rome and closer to our modern concept of a taxi were the cisiarii (public carriage drivers) offered horse-drawn rides for a fee. These could be used for local journeys, but also between towns and cities at considerable speeds for the time as Cicero recounts:

Decem horis nocturnis sex et quinquaginta milia passuum cisiis pervolavit…
In ten night-time hours he flew by cisia for fifty-six miles…2

Litters for carrying people, similar to those in Rome, could be found all across the world. In India there was the palanquin or palki, Japan the kago or norimono, and in China the 轎 (jiao). This form of transport really took off, however, in 17th-century Europe under the name by which it is best known today, the sedan3 chair. Such chairs first became popular as forms of transport for the wealthy in France u​​nder various names – chaise à porteurs, chaise portée, etcetera – but these were transports owned by the people who used them. Their usage was catalysed in London in 1634 when Charles I granted Sir Saunders Duncombe a royal patent to supply numbered, licenced sedans for hire – to all intents and purposes an early, regulated, door-to-door, taxi service. Suddenly you didn’t have to be rich enough to own one (and the attendant servants to carry it) you could rent one for a single trip.

These chairs were basically wooden boxes that a person could sit upright in, usually clad with leather and sporting attractive brass fittings. A pole would run down each side through iron brackets and the sedan chair-carriers, the two ‘chairmen’4 would support the poles at waist height using leather straps strung over their shoulders. Empty these sedans would weigh between 45–60 kilograms (100–130 pounds) and even more if they were fancy. With the occupant inside the total weight would be more like 105–145 kilograms (230–320 pounds). This meant that the people carrying them had to be incredibly fit and strong,5 taking them along uneven roads and up hills all the while fighting their way through jostling crowds.

Sedan chairs soon spread to other cities and the characteristics of their services were often very similar to modern-day taxis. Edinburgh organized sedans into a regulated urban service in the early 1700s, issuing licences and numbered badges, ensuring that fares were publicly posted, and even enforcing rules about lights at night.6

Around the same time the true progenitor of the taxi cab, the hackney coach came into being. Coaches for hire had been around for sometime, but run by individual operators in a haphazard manner. Things changed in the mid-1620s one Captain Bail(e)y (said to be a retired sea captain, but things are somewhat unclear) bought four coaches, staffed them men in smart livery, and established what one can think of as the first ever taxi-stand, at Maypole in the Strand, as this account in a letter from 1634 explains:

I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up amongst us, though never so trivial: here is one Captain Baily, he hath been a sea-captain, but now lives on the land, about this city, where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney-coaches, put his men in livery, and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rates to carry men into several parts of the town, where all day they may be had. Other hackney-men seeing this way, they flocked to the same place, and perform their journeys at the same rate; so that sometimes there are twenty of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it; for, whereas, before, coaches could not be had but at greater rates, now a man may have one much cheaper.

Sedan chairs still continued to flourish, as they were cheaper, could go up streets too narrow for a carriage, and were often faster as they could weave their way through the traffic. Nonetheless the number of hackney carriages soon exploded, though not everyone was thrilled by this development – particularly the Thames watermen (with congested streets a boat on the river was often the fastest way to get around). The waterman and poet John Taylor (1578–1653) – who we’ve met before – in his pamphlet ‘The World Runs on Wheels’7 railed against:

…the caterpillar swarm of hirelings. They have undone my poor trade whereof I am a member: and though I look for no reformation yet I expect the benefit of an old proverb, ‘Give the losers leave to speak.’… This infernal swarm of trade-spellers have so overrun the land that we can get no living upon the water; for I dare truly affirm that in every day in any term, especially if the Court be at Whitehall, they do rob us of our livings and carry 500 fares8 daily from us.

It wasn’t just the watermen who were annoyed by “the caterpillar swarm of hirelings”; Charles I got a bit pissed off about how they were clogging up the streets and on January 19th, 1635 a proclamation was made “to restrain the multitude and promiscuous use of coaches about London and Westminster.”

…hackney-coaches were not only a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest consort the Queen, the nobility and others of place and degree in their passage through the streets; but the streets themselves were so pestered and the pavements so broken up, that the common passage is thereby hindered and made dangerous; and the prices of hay, provender, etc., thereby made exceeding dear. Wherefore we expressly command and forbid that no hackney-coaches or hired carriages be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, except they be to travel at least three miles out of the same. And also that no person shall go in a coach to the said streets except the owner of the coach shall constantly keep up four able horses for our service when required.9

This proclamation was soon either withdrawn or simply ignored. The demand for them was too great, and the business for those operating them too good for it to cease. In July 1637 Charles I stopped trying to ban them and empowered his Master of the Horse, James, Duke of Hamilton, to license 50 hackney-coachmen for London and Westminster and the suburbs (and “other convenient places”). The coaches had to adhere to specific rules:

• They had to have four wheels and be available for hire

• They had to be pulled by only two horses

• They had to have six seats (four inside for the passengers and two outside, one for the driver and one for a servant).

It is believed that each licence holder was allowed up to 12 horses, so in theory there could have been 300 coaches in total, but as the horses would have been worked in shifts and rested the likely number would have been somewhat lower.

Further regulation was introduced under Cromwell in 1654, limiting the official number to 300 carriages (though likely many more than this were operating). Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, shared his father’s dislike of the vehicles, and promptly banned them in a proclamation issued on October 18th the same year. This, err, didn’t work as we know from a somewhat smug diary entry from Samuel Pepys a few weeks later:

Notwithstanding that this was the first day of the king’s proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired, yet I got one to carry me home.

Pepys had a somewhat riskier journey a few years later in 1665, when London was in the midst of the great plague:

At last [the driver] stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly struck very sick and almost blind. So I ’light and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself, lest he should have been struck with the plague.

Hackney carriages were often used to transport plague victims, both living and dead, at an obviously huge risk to the drivers, though care was taken not to infect future passengers, as Daniel Defoe records in his Journal of the Plague Year:

In the “Orders conceived and published by the Lord Mayor and Alderman of the City of London, concerning the infection of the plague, 1665,” appears the following order: “That care be taken of hackney-coachmen, that they may not (as some of them have been observed to do), after carrying of infected persons to the Pest-house, and other places, be admitted to common use, till their coaches be well aired, and have stood unemployed by the space of five or six days after such service.”

The hackney carriages numbers continued to increase in the decades that followed, but they were not without their problems. They were, as we have seen, fairly large vehicles, and as such were not exactly nimble and could get easily stuck in jams. Furthermore, with a capacity of four passengers, and two horses pulling them, they were pretty expensive to hire. When measured in terms of average wages at the time compared to those of today a fairly straightforward trip in London in 1654 would cost around £100 ($135), and hiring a carriage for a day would set you back over £1,000.

It was in France that the next evolution of taxis occurred at the start of the 18th century. A much smaller, lighter, vehicle was created that carried only two passengers and was pulled by a single horse. Rather than a fixed wooden structure the occupants were covered by a leather hood that could be pulled over them on a frame to provide shelter. The name of this marvel was the cabriolet and yes, that is where we get the word ‘cab’ from!

In my next piece I’ll describe how these cabriolets evolved into the cabs of today including the 18th-century equivalent of phone snatching!

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Initially tattooing was still considered to be a barbarian practice. In 1519, Spanish conquistadors in Mexico City were stunned to learn of one countryman, Gonzalo Guerrero, who had assimilated into Maya society and taken on their customs. When fellow Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar tried to ‘rescue’ him, Guerrero refused, saying:

Brother Aguilar, I am married and have three children and the Indians look on me as a Cacique and captain in wartime — You go, and God be with you, but I have my face tattooed and my ears pierced, what would the Spaniards say should they see me in this guise? 

In North America tattoos were common too. Captain John Smith (1579–1631), one of the founders of Jamestown, observed the patterns the Powhatan and other Algonquian tribes of Virginia had adorning their bodies. He wrote that the native men and women had:

…their legs, hands, breasts and faces cunningly embroidered with diverse marks, such as beasts and serpents, artificially wrought into their flesh with black spots.

Around the same time John White, an illustrator travelling with Sir Walter Raleigh, encountered similar body art on Roanoke Island in the Colony of Virginia and noted that it put him in mind of that tattoos that the ancient Picts were reported to have had (see Part 1). For many Indigenous nations in North America, tattoos were not simply adornment, but deeply spiritual and symbolic, often serving as rites of passage, markers of achievement and spiritual protections. Among the Sioux, particularly the Lakota, tattoos were believed to play a crucial role in the afterlife journey.

According to some versions of Lakota mythology, after death, the soul embarks on a journey to the ‘Many Lodges’, a realm resembling the world of the living but more abundant and peaceful. However, to enter this afterlife, the soul must present specific tattoos to an old woman named Hihankara, also known as the Owl-Maker. If the soul lacks the proper tattoos, Hihankara would deny entry, causing the spirit to be cast back to Earth to wander aimlessly as a ghost.

Sadly some European voyagers were not content simply looking at the tattoos of these locals (or recording them in drawings); they wanted to show the people back home exactly what they looked like. How did they do it? They kidnapped tattooed people and shipped them back to Europe. In 1566, after killing her husband, a group of French sailors abducted a tattooed Inuit woman and her (untattooed) child and exhibited them in a tavern in Antwerp for at least year. The English Privateer Martin Frobisher (c.1535–1594) brought three Inuit back to England in 1577, though they died shortly afterwards from illness and injury. This was not before Elizabeth I had heard of them, and to make up for her not having seen them in person,1 commissioned paintings of them. These included one of the mother, Arnaq, in which her facial tattoos can just be made out. 

The group of peoples who arguably did the most to raise awareness of tattoos among the Europeans were the South-East Asians and Pacific islanders who came into contact with European explorers with increasing frequency over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. The most famous example of this is ‘Prince Giolo’, also known as Jeoly, who originally came from Miangas, a small island in the Talaud Islands near Mindanao, Philippines. In 1690, he and his mother were captured by slave traders and brought to Mindanao. They were subsequently sold to English explorer2 William Dampier (1651–1715). Dampier described Jeoly's intricate tattoos in his journals, noting their elaborate designs and the use of a pigment made from the gum of the dammer tree:

He was painted all down the Breast, between his Shoulders behind; on his Thighs (mostly) before; and the Form of several broad Rings, or Bracelets around his Arms and Legs. I cannot liken the Drawings to any Figure of Animals, or the like; but they were very curious, full of great variety of Lines, Flourishes, Chequered-Work, &c. keeping a very graceful Proportion, and appearing very artificial, even to Wonder, especially that upon and between his Shoulder-blades […] I understood that the Painting was done in the same manner, as the Jerusalem Cross3 is made in Mens Arms, by pricking the Skin, and rubbing in a Pigment.

Dampier brought Jeoly back to England in late 1691 (his mother having died en route) and began displaying him himself, before selling him to the Blue Boar pub on Fleet Street, London, around June of 1692. Advertising fliers4 from the Blue Boar still survive:

Jeoly, as with many other foreign captives, was ill prepared to deal with European diseases and he died of smallpox in Oxford in 1693.5 It is believed that he is buried in the graveyard of St Ebbe’s Church, less than half a mile from where I am typing these words today. Or most of him rather – some of his skin was flailed and preserved for the Anatomy School of the University of Oxford. 

It is from expeditions to the Pacific less than a century later that we get the word ‘tattoo’ itself – prior to that the designs tended to be described as ‘marking’ or ‘pricking’. Captain Cook (1728–1779) led three significant expeditions into the Pacific Ocean between 1768 and 1779. He wrote in his journals of July 1769 about the Polynesian practice:

Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible. Some have ill-design'd figures of men, birds, or dogs; the women generally have this figure Z simply on every joint of their fingers and Toes; the men have it likewise, and both have other differant figures, such as Circles, Crescents, etc. which they have on their Arms and Legs; in short, they are so various in the application of these figures that both the quantity and Situation of them seem to depend intirely upon the humour of each individual, yet all agree in having their buttocks covered with a Deep black

The Polynesian word encountered by Cook was tatau, derived from Tahitian and Samoan languages. Tatau meant ‘to mark’ or ‘to strike repeatedly’ and was soon adopted, in a slightly modified form, into English, and thence other major European languages.6

The only reason the Cook had been able to go on the voyage in the first place is because he received a huge amount of funding from Joseph Banks (1743–1820), an aspiring naturalist backed by a vast amount of family wealth. Banks kept extensive journals from his travels – in case you were wondering about the how the buttocks got tattooed in black as mentioned above, he describes it happening in Tahiti on July 5th 1769:

This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performd upon a girl of about 12 years old, it provd as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about ¼ of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endurd, she began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease; she was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxd her. I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told causd more pain than what I had seen.

Despite incredible pain that was obviously involved in the process, a number of Cook’s crew were sufficiently taken with them that they got tattoos themselves, amongst them7 most likely Sidney Parkinson, a botanical draftsman. Now you may find it written that this introduced tattooing as the naval tradition that continues to this day but that isn’t true. British and American sailors had been tattooing themselves since at least the mid-1600s, often using gunpowder. The American Mercury, March 17 1720, describes one as having:

…on one hand S. P. in blew [sic] Letters and on the other hand blew Spots, and upon one arm our Savior upon the Cross, and on the other Adam and Eve, all Suppos’d to be done in Gun powder.

These designs were mostly simple letters, crosses, anchors and the like and it does seem that contact with the Polynesians introduced much more elaborate designs to the practice. Inspiration came from other places too. Whilst in much of China tattooing was only something that was meted out to criminals as a punishment in the south, particularly around the port city of Quanzhou it not only thrived, but became an incredibly elaborate art form. In the classic novel The Water Margin (date unknown, perhaps mid 14th century) a number of the main characters are described as having their bodies covered with tattoos of dragons and other mythical beasts. When the book was published in Japan in 1757, complete with beautiful woodblock illustrations, it sparked a craze for elaborate tattooing there. Sailors visiting these distant ports from Europe would get inked in the local styles, with the bodies becoming a visual record of their travels.

By 1800 around a third of British sailors, and a fifth of Americans, sported tattoos. Soon cottage industries sprung up in the port towns back home where former sailors who had learned their skills in Tahiti or Caton, would add to the ink collections of their comrades. But it wasn’t just sailors that they were decorating. People of ‘higher quality’ had been going under the needle for years. The earliest designs adopted by the gentry were, like initial sailors, likely very simple – hearts, initials, and in the case of women, fake beauty spots on their faces. We know that this latter practice was taking place from a passage in the Thomas Otway8 (1652–1685) play The Soldier’s Fortune (1681):

He keeps a Catalogue of the choicest Beauties about Town, illustrated with a particular Account of their Age, Shape, Proportion, Colour of Hair and Eyes, Degrees of Complexion, Gun-powder Spots, and Moles.

It was in the second half of the 19th century that tattoo fever took hold, driven in no small part by the fact that the classiest people of all, the royals,9 were getting them. In 1862 the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) got a Jerusalem cross then in 1881 the future King George V, at the tender age of 16, got a tattoo of a blue and red dragon in Yokohama. When he got married in 1893 such was the fascination with his ink that newspapers created illustrations guessing at what it might look like!

This is when one Sutherland MacDonald (1840–1942) enters the scene. Having originally set up as a tattooist in Aldershot, he opened the first public tattoo parlour in England (on Jermyn Street, London) sometime before 1894. He can reasonably be said to have been the world’s first tattooist, having coined the word. Previously the term ‘tattooer’ had been used but MacDonald considered ‘er’ ending trades as common (butcher, baker, candlestick maker etc.) where he was a professional, an artist, a tattooist.

He improved upon the electric tattooing machine patented by American Samuel O’Reilly in 1891 and he targeted a well-to-do clientele with the most astonishing designs that hold up with the best to be seen today. It was said of him that “No one in the past, and no man living to-day, can compare with Macdonald in placing really artistic pictures on the human skin” and he was described as the “Michelangelo of tattooing”.

You may think that permanent makeup, tattooed on the face, is a relatively recent thing, but no, Sutherland was doing it over a century ago, rouging the cheeks of ladies and colouring their lips. In 1898 the number of tattooed people in London was estimated at 100,000 and swiftly growing, and this craze was replicated in New York. There has clearly been an explosion in tattooing as the 20th century moved into the 21st but it seems that those getting inked today are actually behaving little differently from their ancestors from a hundred years or more earlier. While some may roll their eyes at people ‘disfiguring their bodies’ or ‘being common’, I for one would not have wanted to tell King George V that his tattoos made him ‘common’…

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It turns out that tattoos are incredibly old. Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age man found in the Italian Alps (d. c.3,300 BCE and who was mentioned in my very first piece on pockets) was covered with 61 tattoos. They are mostly groups of very well defined parallel lines and crosses that interestingly cluster on wear-prone joints (ankles, wrists, knees, lower back etc). While we will clearly never know for sure, it has been speculated that these tattoos were a form of therapy, perhaps akin to acupuncture, with the belief that the markings would alleviate the joint pain that inevitably accrues through use and age.2 

Around the same time, 5,000 years ago, Egyptians were getting tattooed as well. Two Egyptian mummies known as Gebelein Man A and Gebelein Woman had been on display in the British Museum for decades, seemingly unremarkable (other than the fact that they were mummies) until 2017 when researchers examined them using infrared scanning technology. What this revealed was not simply geometric tattoo designs, but figures of a bull and a sheep and an intriguing ‘SSSS’ pattern. It would seem that these were more than medicinal; rather that they had a symbolic significance, particularly the bull which could have represented strength and power.

There is some evidence of even older tattooing, stretching back almost 7,000 years. This is not to be found on a mummy, but rather on the clay figure of a person made by the pre-Cucuteni culture which was found in what is today Romania.

It has even been suggested that there is evidence of tattooing on the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being – the Venus of Hohle Fels (also known as the Venus of Schelklingen) which was carved between 40,000 and 42,000 years ago. It has a series of lines incised down the arms and across the torso and chest which could be representing tattoos. Similar markings can be also seen on the arm of the the Löwenmensch figurine (also called the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel) which dates from a similar time.

Anyone who has had a tattoo in the 21st century knows that great care has to be taken, even in our relatively sterile world, to prevent the skin getting infected. Analysis of tattoos on ancient subjects has shown little or no gross scar tissue and the designs were clean and clear, so incredible attention must have been paid to hygiene during the process and aftercare – something perhaps at odds with our general perceptions about cleanliness in the Bronze Age. In the case of Ötzi it has been suggested that his tattoos were created by incising the flesh with sharpened bone or copper, forcing a mixture of herbs into the cuts then setting them on fire. This would both have created the charcoal required to pigment the designs and also acted to cauterize the wound. However these designs were executed, we can be certain that the people creating them were very skilled – there were professional tattoo artists thousands of years ago.

Even more elaborate designs could be found adorning the bodies of members of the Pazyryk culture who lived in central Asia between 2,600 and 2,200 years ago. Their territory extended right up into Siberia, and as a result some very well preserved bodies have been found in the permafrost. Their tattoos are astonishing – beautifully executed, stylised designs of animals winding and interlacing. As these peoples would have been well clothed at all times due to the climate, it seems that all this work was not carried out for public display; rather it held a deeper, spiritual, meaning. As one of the archaeologists who studied them commented:

They never went nude… so most of these tattoos would never have been seen by others… I think they were for magical protection. Those tattoos were probably his spiritual weapons.

Tattoos have also been found on mummies in Chile dating back some 4,000 years and on ones ranging from 2,000 to 4,000 years old in the Tarim Basin in China. Where bodies did not survive, we have further evidence of tattoos from art and literature. In the Chinese history Wei Zhi (Records of Wei), compiled around 297 CE, the passage on the Wa (仵人, early Japanese) describes how:

Men great and small, all tattoo their faces and decorate their bodies with designs. From olden times envoys who visited the Chinese Court called themselves ‘grandees.’ A son of the ruler Shao‑k’ang of Hsia, when he was enfeoffed as lord of K’uai‑chi, cut his hair and decorated his body with designs in order to avoid the attack of serpents and dragons. The Wa, who are fond of diving into the water to get fish and shells, also decorated their bodies in order to keep away large fish and waterfowl. Later, however, the designs became merely ornamental. Each chiefdom has a tattoo style—left or right side, large or small—to indicate status.

In China itself tattooing was used as a form of punishment rather than adornment. From as early as 200 BCE Mo Xing (墨刑, literally ‘ink punishment’) was employed as a form of corporal branding or tattooing, marking criminals permanently on the face or forehead with black ink or pigment. It was the lowest of the Five Punishments (五刑, wǔ xíng) in early imperial Chinese law. The tattoo usually recorded the nature of the offense, such as ‘thief’ (賊), with the aim being both public shaming and social exclusion, since the mark was visible for life. We have some specific examples from later Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) legal codes. If a couple were caught committing adultery for the first time they would be separated and receive a telling off.3 If they got caught at it a second time the man4 would be tattooed on the face with the words “committed licentious acts two times” and banished!

There is one notable exception to Chinese tattooing being the preserve of the criminals and the underclasses. According to legend,5 during the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279 CE), Yue Fei (岳飛, 1103–1142) returned home to say farewell to his mother before enlisting to defend the nation against the Jurchen invasion. His mother, knowing that the path ahead would test his loyalty and resolve, feared that her son might be accused of disloyalty – or waver in his service to the emperor.

To ensure he would never stray from his duty, she took a needle and ink, and tattooed four Chinese characters onto his back:

尽忠报国
‘Jìn zhōng bào guó’ – ‘Serve the country with utmost loyalty.’

The tattoo became both a symbol of his unwavering patriotism and a testament to his filial obedience – as he submitted even his body to his mother’s will. He later became one of China's most venerated generals, celebrated for his military brilliance and incorruptible devotion.6

Every inhabited continent has a long history of tattooing, from New Zealand to Polynesia to the Pacific Northwes and sub-Sarahan Africa. Given the isolation of some of these populations it is clear that this art form has been independently invented time and time again over the millennia.

Back in Europe, meanwhile, the ancient Greeks and Romans had broadly similar views on this type of body decoration. For Greeks it was an abomination, something done by barbarians (or to slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war). Plutarch’s Life of Nicias recounts that after Athens’ defeat at Syracuse, the few Athenian prisoners who didn’t die were enslaved, their status being marked with a horse7 tattoo on their foreheads. To describe the process of tattooing they used the verb stizein, to prick or sting, and the noun used to describe the result was stigma8 which obviously persists into English today. They were not, however, averse to putting them to practical use, such as in the case of Histiaeus of Miletus the late 6th–early 5th century BCE Greek tyrant who was detained at the Persian court of Darius. Herodotus tells the story:

Histiaeus, being detained at Susa by Darius, felt that he was losing his hold on Miletus. To correct this, he shaved the head of his most trusted slave, and tattooed upon his scalp the famous message: ‘When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon.’ When the slave’s hair had grown again, the slave was sent secretly to Aristagoras in Miletus; upon arrival, Aristagoras shaved the slave’s head and read the message. This incited him to begin the Ionian revolt.9

The Romans would also tattoo slaves, criminals and gladiators, but additionally it played a significant role in their army. Tattoos on hands and arms were used to indicate both their status as a solider and the legion to which they belonged – somewhat akin to unit badges on uniforms today.10 Vegetius, writing in Epitoma Rei Militaris (late 4th–5th c. CE), suggested that new recruits shouldn’t be marked until after they proved themselves in training:

A recruit should not be tattooed with the pin‑pricks of the official mark as soon as selected, but first be thoroughly tested in exercise…

Writing a few centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Medicae artis principes (c. 6th CE), Aëtius explains how it was done:

First, the place where the tattoo was to be done was carefully washed with leek juice, which was known for its antiseptic properties. The tattooing ink consisted of Egyptian pine‑wood, corroded bronze and more juice from the leek.

He also handily explains how you could remove the tattoo if you were so minded:

When applying, first clean the tattoos with nitre, smear them with resin of terebinth, and bandage for five days. On the sixth, prick the tattoos with a pin, sponge away the blood, and then spread a little salt on the pricks. After an interval, apply the aforesaid prescription and cover it with a linen bandage. Leave on for five days, and on the sixth smear some of the prescription with a feather. The tattoo is removed in twenty days, without great ulceration and without a scar.11

Across the channel, in my native British Isles, the locals were very much into the tattooing game as well. Isidore of Seville writing around the year 600CE had this to say of them:

Picti a pingendo dicti, quia corpora sua ferro puncta, atramentoque per liniamenta in modum macularum pigmenta.

The Picts are so called from painting, because they puncture their skin with iron and apply pigment in patterns of spots.

It is possible that this love of body art is responsible for the name of these lands to this day. The name ‘Britain’ ultimately derives from the ancient Greek and Latin names:

• Greek: Πρεττανία (Prettania) or Βρεττανία (Brettania)

• Latin: Britannia

These likely came from an indigenous Celtic name – something like Pritani or Pretani – and it has been suggested that this meant ‘the painted ones’, so if you are tattooed Brit you are literally living up to your ancient name! Except this etymology is not universally accepted. It is possible the name Pretani simply referred to a tribal designation rather than their appearance. It is also possible that classical writers interpreted the name in light of their own assumptions about barbarian body art – certainly the name was in use long before Isidore of Seville used it, and he could simply have been drawing a conclusion that wasn’t true.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity led to a marked decline in tattooing in Western Europe.12 Guided by Leviticus 19:28 – “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the LORD” – church leaders were swift to condemn the practice as sinful, such as Clement of Alexandria who described it in the second century as “defacing the image of God”. Despite this prohibition, one form of acceptable tattooing did exist for Europeans in the Middle Ages, and that form had a deeply Christian significance.

As early as the year 500 CE Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land reportedly had crosses – or even Christ’s name – tattooed on their bodies. By the 13th and 14th centuries this practice had become common among crusaders and pilgrims alike as Swiss theologian Felix Fabri (1441–1502) describing how he received the tattoo of a cross on his right arm as a sign of his devotion.

In Part 2 I’ll explore the history of tattooing over the last five hundred or so years, including how it was ‘rediscovered’ by the Europeans. But before that I can’t help but mention that the place where Felix Fabri got his tattoo may still be in business today! Razzouk Tattoo began more than 700 years ago in Egypt tattooing Coptic Christians with small crosses on their wrists (which would enable them to gain entry to their churches). The business moved to Jerusalem around 500 years ago where it continues to this day, run by Wassim Razzouk, the 27th generation of his family to ink, making it without question the oldest tattoo parlour in the world.