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We need to begin with the games being played in English public schools in the middle of the 19th century. For non-British readers it is worth noting that the world “public” here does not mean state-operated and open to all. These schools were – and are – the antitheses of such establishments: all-male boarding schools that charge significant fees for the privilege of attendance. On the pitches of these schools a variety of games called “football” were being played and in time they began to codify their rules. The earliest surviving “school code” were the Rugby School laws, approved on the 28th of August 1845. The game they describe is, unsurprisingly, very different to football and, err, very much like rugby. The earliest surviving rules for Eton College’s Field Game date from just two years later, and include the crucial clause “Hands may only be used to stop the ball”. They also had an offside rule (which they called “sneaking”)2 in order to prevent attackers simply hanging around their opponent’s goal waiting for a ball to be kicked their way.

Schools including Harrow, Westminster, and Shrewsbury similarly had their own versions of the game, and in concert these educational establishments did much to form the institutional nature of the sports They made football games regular events where matches were attached to the school calendar rather than confined to an occasional festival. With boys representing houses, forms or schools, they encouraged fixed sides, with collective tactics and enduring loyalties. And they also debated, agreed, and recorded, codes for the game and then old boys took their rules to universities, military units, churches, businesses and adult clubs.

There was, however, a problem. It still wasn’t easy for the schools to play against each other because the sides would be familiar with different sets of rules. What was needed was a melting pot to blend all of the variations together, and it turned out that Cambridge University was just the place for this to happen. Old boys of the various schools wanted to play football, and they needed a unified set of rules to do so, and these rules were created. The earliest surviving set dates from 1856, but it drew upon, now lost, codes from earlier decades:

Football wasn’t just the preserve of public school boys though, versions of the game were being played by factory workers and miners and railwaymen across the country. In 1855 in Sheffield the members of the local cricket club started having informal kick-abouts and enjoyed them so much that two members, Nathaniel Creswick and Willian Prest decided to set up a dedicated football club. The first meeting of Sheffield Football Club (the oldest, continuously operating independent football club in the world) took place on the 24th of October 1857 and it was clear that a codified set of rules was needed to govern their play. These were drawn up by Creswick and Prest and approved at the club’s AGM on the 21st of October 1858:

As you can see, this allowed for some handling of the ball and had no offside rule but they proved popular, and other teams soon adopted them. At the code’s height in 1877 there were 27 clubs making up the Sheffield Football association. This was not, however, the only game in town. Okay, it was the only game in Sheffield, but you get what I mean. Many clubs had sprung up in London as well and they too needed an agreed set of rules by which to play. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, captain of Barnes Football Club, argued that football needed an institution comparable to the Marylebone Cricket Club and in 1863 he wrote to the sporting press proposing just such a governing body. Representatives of London and suburban clubs met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street on 26 October 1863 and formed the Football Association. Its stated objective was “establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game”.3

It turned out that this wasn’t that straightforward. Rival factions debated whether “hacking” (deliberately kicking an opponent in the shins) and the use of hands should be allowed over the course of six meetings. The final laws were approved on the 8th of December 1863 and were as follows:

THE LAWS OF FOOTBALL

Drawn up by the London Association

LAWS

1. The maximum length of the ground shall be 200 yards, the maximum breadth shall be 100 yards, the length and breadth shall be marked off with flags; and the goals shall be defined by two upright posts, 8 yards apart, without any tape or bar across them.4

2. The winner of the toss shall have the choice of goals. The game shall be commenced by a place kick from the centre of the ground by the side losing the toss, the other side shall not approach within 10 yards of the ball until it is kicked off.

3. After a goal is won the losing side shall kick off and the goals shall be changed.

4. A goal shall be won when the ball passes between the goal posts or over the space between the goal posts, at whatever height, not being thrown, knocked on, or carried.

5. When the ball is in touch the first player who touches it shall throw it from the point on the boundary line where it left the ground, in a direction at right angles with the boundary line, and it shall not be in play until it has touched the ground.

6. When a player has kicked the ball any one of the same side who is nearer to the opponent’s goal line is out of play, and may not touch the ball himself, nor in any way whatever prevent any other player from doing so, until the ball has been played; but no player is out of play when the ball is kicked from behind the goal line.

7. In case the ball goes behind the goal line, if a player on the side to whom the goal belongs first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick from the goal line, at the point opposite the place where the ball shall be touched.

If a player of the opposite side first touches the ball, one of his side shall be entitled to a free kick, but at the goal only, from a point 15 yards from the goal line opposite the place where the ball is touched.

The opposing side shall stand behind their goal line until he has had his kick.

8. If a player makes a fair catch, he shall be entitled to a free kick, provided he claims it by making a mark with his heel at once; and in order to take such a kick he may go back as far as he pleases, and no player on the opposite side shall advance beyond his mark until he has kicked.

9. No player shall carry the ball.

10. Neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push an adversary.

11. A player shall not throw the ball or pass it to another.

12. No player shall take the ball from the ground with his hands while it is in play, under any pretence whatever.

13. No player shall wear projecting nails, iron plates, or gutta-percha on the soles or heels of his boots.

Hang on a second, didn’t I just say that the peak of the Sheffield Code was in 1877, some 14 years later? Does that mean that both football codes were operating at the same time? Yes, and not just these two, there were others, most notably in Scotland. This obviously caused problems when teams from the different associations faced each other. Whose code should they follow, or should they follow an amalgamation of the two?

Despite these challenges the first Football Association Challenge Cup, better known as the FA Cup today, took place in the 1871–2 season, using the FA code, and it remains the oldest association football competition the world. The final took place on the 16th March 1872 where the Wanders beat the Royal Engineers 1:0.

I will spare you too much detail, but eventually a unified code combining parts of the Sheffield, FA codes with input from the Scottish club Clydesdale, was agreed, as reported in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent on the 24th April 1877:

A meeting of the Sheffield Football Association was held last evening at the Imperial Hotel, Castle street; Mr. Dickinson presiding. Mr. W. Peirce Dix, hon. secretary, rendered a report of his recent visit to the London Association meeting in the metropolis, and described the views which guided those present in arriving at the resolution submitted by the Clydesdale Club, and supported by the Sheffield Association. He referred to the excellent speech made by Mr. Alcock in support of the proposal, and said the result was highly gratifying to the Sheffield Association. It was then formally resolved, on the motion of Mr. W. E. Clegg, seconded by Mr. Skinner, that the Sheffield Association accept the Clydesdale amendment and the London Rules.

So we have got to the point where Britain has a single agreed set of football rules, but how then did these get propagated around the world and the game be adopted with such global fervour? In the last quarter of the 19th century, Britain (and its empire) accounted for around a quarter of the world’s GDP, and a similar share of its manufacturing output. British companies and British people were scattered across the globe building railways, running mines, and setting up a host of trading and manufacturing operations. And where they went, they took (often quite literally) football with them. They were also the first and only nation to have a codified, published, set of rules that could be distributed.5

Let’s start by looking at Brazil. For sure people had been kicking balls around there for a while, but the development of the formal game can be traced back to one Charles William Miller (1874-1953).6 He was born in São Paulo to a Scottish railway engineer father and a Brazilian mother of English descent. Educated in England, where he excelled at sports, he returned to the country of his birth in 1894 bringing along two footballs, a pump, some boots, and a set of rules from the Hampshire Football Association. On the 14th April 1895 he arranged the game that is seen as the symbolic beginning of organised football in Brazil. Teams representing employees of the São Paulo Railway Company and the São Paulo Gas Company played under association rules with Miller appearing for the railway side (which won 4–2). Miller went on to form the São Paulo Athletic Club, the first club in the country, and the first football league that survives to this day as Campeonato Paulista Série A1, the top-flight of Brazilian football.

In northern Italy, particularly in the cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan British sailors and merchants introduced their version of the rules of the beautiful game. Edoardo Bosio, a Turin businessman working in textiles encountered the game in Nottingham and in 1887 founded the Torino Football and Cricket Club – the first association football club in the country. A few years later, on the 7th of September 1893 a group of British ex-pats founded Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club which competes in the top-flight of Italian football today as Genoa CFC. And then there is one of the most famous of all Italian teams, AC Milan. Have you ever wondered why the English name of the city is used, rather than the Italian Milano? Well, that is because it was founded by a bunch of Brits and Italians as the Milan Football and Cricket Club.7

The rise of football in Germany turned to be a little bit more challenging. The country prided itself on its physical-culture tradition of Turnen (organised gymnastics). This was seen to promote bodily discipline, collective order, patriotism, and national regeneration. Gymnastic societies – Turnvereine – performed regulated exercises, often in synchronised groups and under formal instruction. Football, however was seen to provoke competition, violence, and individual initiative. The detractors of the game used terms such as Fußlümmelei, approximately “football loutishness”, and referred to the game as an englische Krankheit – an “English disease”. Rules and kit made their way into the country though, usually in the hands of returning German teachers. Arguably the first game of Association Football in the country tool place in Lüneburg in August of 1875, at the Johanneum school, organised by teacher Wilhelm Görges and the Australian-born Richard Ernest Newell Twopenny.8

Now let’s turn to the winners of the first World Cup, in 1930, Uruguay. The country had strong commercial connections to Britain in railways, banking, meat packing, and other industries and as they did everywhere else the ex-pats set up their own sports and social clubs. The Montevideo Cricket Club9 was established in 1861 and whilst cricket was its principal purpose, its members also experimented with rugby and different forms of football. The club records a football match against the crew of a visiting vessel in 1878, while the first generally recognised match between two established Uruguayan clubs was played in 1881, between them and the Montevideo Rowing Club. The person who is considered to be the “Father of Uruguayan Football” comes on the scene a little later, and was the Anglo-Scot William Leslie Poole (1866-1931). He started working as a teacher in the English High School in 1885 an enthusiastically taught the game to his charges. One of them, Henry Candid Lichtenberger founded the first Uruguayan10 football team on 2 June 1886, the Club Albion which plays at to this day at the country’s highest levels. Poole, amongst other things, was the president of the nascent Uruguayan Association Football League (founded 1900) and played for the country itself.

All around the world you will find the echos of the British influence recorded in the names of teams. Wanders, Juniors, Albion, Old Boys and so on. I could write half a dozen more posts delving into the stories behind these, but I will end by considering one final country, Argentina, with whom it is fair to say England has a bit of football history. In seven hours time, as I write this, we will face them in the World Cup Semi Final, but were we responsible for introducing the sport to arguably our greatest nemesis? Obviously yes.

The generally accepted starting point for the official form of the game took place on the 9th May 1867 when two Yorkshire-born members of the British ex-pat community in Buenos Aires, Thomas Hogg and his brother James, convened a meeting to form the “Buenos Ayres Football Club”, with matches to be played at the ground of the local cricket club. An inaugural match was originally intended for 25th May, but bad weather caused its postponement and it was eventually played on 20th June 1867. Only sixteen players could be assembled, so the sides consisted of eight men each rather than eleven. They were distinguished by coloured caps – one side red, the other white – rather than by complete uniforms. The match lasted approximately two hours, and Hogg’s side reportedly won 4–0.

Thomas Hogg was somewhat pessimistic about the enthusiasm for the game, as this statement attributed to him attests:

This game will take a long time to spread even among British residents, but I intend to persist, because I consider it the best, easiest and cheapest pastime for middle-class youth, as well as for the common people.

Hogg was not wrong, the sport continued to be played, for sure, but didn’t really take off until the arrival of the Scottish educator Alexander Watson Hutton who established the Buenos Aires English High School in 1884. This soon became a nursery for football, and the boys who learned there took the game with them as they moved into the world of work. In 1893 Hutton helped establish the Argentine Association Football, the predecessor of the current Argentine Football Association.11 Lest you doubt the extent to which the British helped create the opponent that England will face tonight, a notice telling people about the formation of the body that today runs the national team was published in English:

Before I started researching this piece I have to admit that I would cringe slightly at the whole “football’s coming home” thing.12 Not because of its (till now, at least) misplaced optimism, but rather than it smacked a little of embarrassing jingoism. Was England really the “home” of football? Clearly not alone, as Scotland played a pivotal rule in formalisation and internationalisation of the game that is played today, but it is hard to deny that had it not been for Britain both codifying rules and and spreading the game around the world then things would be very different today.13 Perhaps another country would have created their own code, and popularised it, but more likely it seems multiple codes would have arisen, and no ready winner would have been emerged. Things may have coalesced in time, but it is difficult to believe that the sport would be followed – and played – at quite the same scale that it is today.

Will football “come home” this year? I don’t think so, England has to beat Argentina and then Spain, and the odds look to be against them. Obviously I could re-edit this piece once that I know the result, to create the illusion of foresight, but I promise that I won’t!

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A week or so ago I overcame my disinterest to join my friend Craig down the pub to watch an England World Cup match,4 perhaps only the second5 football game I have watched in its entirety in my 53-odd years, and that inspired me to dig into the history of the sport a bit.

I should start by talking a bit about the name of the game, as I know that it is a point of some contention between nationalities. American readers will doubtless refer to it as “soccer” only to be lambasted by the residents of other countries with words along the lines of “It’s football! You are the only country who thinks that name refers to American football!”. The reality is that the global competition taking place this year is “association football”, there are many other similarly-named sports, such as “rugby football”. It may shock some of you to learn that not only is soccer a valid name for the game, it may actually be more appropriate than the more generic “football”!

In the 19th century British public school boys had a tendency to abbreviate words and add “er” to the ends of them. So rugby became “rugger” and breakfast became “brekkers” – a tradition that continues to this day, most notably with the nicknames of English cricket players.6 Association football was initially shortened to “assoc”, which soon became “soccer”. The earliest reference to it in print comes from a letter from a pupil published in the 25 November 1885 issue of The Marlburian (the magazine of Marlborough College):

I can’t help thinking it a great pity that there has been no ‘Association’ on the Common this term. It must improve the forward play and is certainly a pleasant change occasionally from everlasting Rugby.

Rather than signing it with his own name, the letter was said to have come from “soccer”. Within days, the spelling “Socker” appeared in magazines connected with Radley College and Old Hall School, suggesting that the term was already well known and circulating orally among schoolboys. So please don’t hate on our American friends for using the word (for ease, in the rest of this piece I will use the word “football” to mean “association football”).

Back to the origins of the game itself. Humans have been kicking and throwing balls around with varying degrees of organisation for pretty much as long as the objects have existed. After all, what is the point of a ball is not to play with it? In ancient China there was the game Cuju (or ts‘u-chü) in which players from opposing teams attempted to kick a ball through an opening and into a hoop without using their hands, and also without it touching the ground. In this sense it was rather more akin to hacky sack than modern football. Not only was it popular as a means of recreation, it was also used as a training tool by the military, and it is in this context that we have the earliest reference to it, dating from around 300 BCE in the Zhan Guo Ce (《戰國策》, Strategies of the Warring States), there is a speech attributed to the diplomat Su Qin addressing King Xuan of Qi:

臨淄甚富而實，其民無不吹竽、鼓瑟、擊筑、彈琴、鬥雞、走犬、六博、蹹踘者。

Linzi is exceedingly prosperous and well supplied; among its people there are none who do not play the yu pipes, sound the se, strike the zhu, play the qin, fight cocks, race dogs, play liubo, or kick the ball.

And there is a nearly identical7 passage appears in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), composed in the early first century BCE:

Linzi was very wealthy and full. Its people were all playing the yu flute and the se, plucking the qin and striking the zhu, fighting cocks and racing dogs, playing liubo and kicking the ball. In Linzi’s roads, carriage hubs struck one another, shoulders rubbed together; joined robes made curtains, raised sleeves made canopies, and flung sweat fell like rain. The households were rich, the people sufficient, their wills high and their spirits proud.

We have an even earlier description of people playing with a ball in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 700 BCE):

Then when they had had their joy of food, she and her handmaids, they threw off their head-gear and fell to playing at ball, and white-armed Nausicaa was leader in the song…The princess tossed the ball to one of the handmaids; the maid she missed, and cast it into the deep eddy, whereat they shouted aloud; and goodly Odysseus awoke.

Then there is another Greek description of a more formal type of ball play from Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophists (c. 200 CE) He tells us that the game known in his day as harpastum (also harpaston) had earlier been called phaininda:

The ball-game now called harpastum was formerly called phaininda, which is the kind I like best of all. Great are the exertion and fatigue attendant upon contests of ball-playing, and violent twisting and turning of the neck.

We don’t the specifics of this game but it appears to have involved things akin to the feinting and passing of the modern game as he goes on share a much earlier description by Antiphanes, a comic poet of the fourth century BCE:

He seized the ball and passed it with a laugh to one player, while he dodged another; he pushed it out of the way of a third, and raised another to his feet amid resounding cries of “Out,” “Too far,” “Right beside him,” “Over his head,” “On the ground,” “Up in the air,” “Too short,” and “Pass it back.”

This game was, however, much more like rugby than football. The name harpaston comes from the verb ἁρπάζειν (harpazein), “to seize”, “snatch” or “carry off”, so one could think of it as meaning “the snatched ball” or “the snatching game.” The ball is likely to have been relatively small, the easier to throw and catch, possibly leather stuffed with feathers, or a bladder of some sort. We have a nice description of play during Roman times from the a letter written by Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430 - 481/490) in the 5th century CE:

We soon split into two groups, according to our ages: one shouted for the ball, the other for the board-game, both of which were to be had. I was the leader of the ball-players; you know that book and ball are my twin companions. In the other group, the chief figure was our brother Domnicius, that most engaging and attractive of men: there he was, rattling some dice which he had got hold of, as if he sounded a trumpet-call to play. The rest of us had a great game with a party of students, doing our best at the healthful exercise with limbs which sedentary occupations made much too stiff for running. And now the illustrious Filimatius sturdily flung himself into the squadrons of the players, like Virgil’s hero ‘daring to set his hand to the task of youth’; he had been a splendid player himself in his younger years. But over and over again he was forced from his position among the stationary players by the shock of some runner from the middle, and driven into the midfield where the ball flew past him, or was thrown over his head; and he failed to intercept or parry it. More than once he fell prone, and had to pick himself up from such collapses as best he could; naturally he was the first to withdraw from the stress of the game in a state of internal inflammation, out of breath from exercise and suffering sharp pains in the side from the swollen fibres of his liver.8

It is in Europe of the middle ages that we see a much more football-sized balls being used, but again the games that were played with them were very different from our modern understanding of the game, and furthermore there were a number of different versions of them. The earliest reference we have to a ball being used as play-thing in Britain can be found in Bede’s De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time), completed in 725:

The Earth is truly situated in the midst of the whole universe, not merely circular in breadth like a shield, but rather like a ball, equally rounded in every direction; and in so great a mass, even the enormous differences between mountains and valleys add or subtract no more than a finger’s breadth does from a playing-ball

And a century later, in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum (compiled 829-830) we get the first mention of people actually playing with one:

And, on the advice of his magicians, he sent messengers throughout all Britain to see whether they could find a child without a father. And, after travelling through all the provinces and very many regions, they came to the Field of Elletus, which is in the region called Gleguissing, and some boys were playing a ball game.

By the 12th century ball games were widespread in Britain, and particularly played on Shroventide (Shrove Tuesday) as recorded by William Fitzstephen in his Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae (c. 1174 – 1183):

After lunch, all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree adolescents.

Were these kids throwing the ball to one another like the Romans a thousand or so years earlier? It is hard to be certain, but it seems more likely that they were kicking it around. The earliest robust source for football being a game played, with, well, the feet, comes from a papal dispensation dating from May 1321. It was for Canon William de Spalding from Shouldham in Norfolk, absolving him of blame when one of his mates ran into him during a match and, err, stabbed himself to death in the process:

To William de Spalding, canon of Scoldham [Shouldham] of the order of Sempringham. During the game at ball, as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his, also called William, ran against him and wounded himself on a sheathed knife9 carried by the canon, so severely that he died within six days. Dispensation is granted, as no blame is attached to William de Spalding, who, feeling deeply the death of his friend, and fearing what might be said by his enemies, has applied to the pope.

Pretty much as soon as the nation became football crazy, steps were taken to ban the beautiful game. Those carefree adolescents spilling out across the streets of London made a hell of a racket, so local merchants persuaded King Edward II to ban the sport in the city on 13th April 1314:

…there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.

Edward III10 issued a broader ban in a proclamation on the 12th June 1365, but his had a more serious intent behind it – people were playing football when they should have been practising their archery:

We, wishing to provide an appropriate remedy for this, order you that in all places in your shire, as well within liberties as without, where you shall deem it expedient, you shall cause to be proclaimed that everyone in the shire, on festival days when he has holiday, shall learn and exercise himself in the art of archery, and use for his games bows and arrows, or crossbows or bolts; forbidding all and every one, on our command, to meddle in any way with throwing stones, wood or iron, handball, football, hockey, cock-fighting, or any other such idle games, under pain of imprisonment.

Not wanting to be left out, King James I of Scotland banned the game as well with his Football Act of 1424:

it is statut and the king forbiddis that na man play at the fut ball under the payne of iiij d. to the lorde of the lande als oft as he beis taintit (be the scheref of the land or his ministeris, gif the lordis will nocht punnysh sic trespassouris).

(It is decreed and the king forbids that any man play football under the pain of 4 d. to the lord of the land as often as he is convicted (by the sheriff of the land or his ministers, if the lords will not punish such trespassers))

Perhaps the most famous version of the game played around these times was mob football (also know as folk football). The rules, such as they were, were pretty simple. Two teams of unlimited players had to get an inflated pig’s bladder (or ball) to their team’s marker. These could be at either end of the town, or, when played between two villages, suitably far apart from each other on neutral territory. You could do so by any means necessary, short of murder, and unsurprisingly these games could get very violent indeed.

A version of this which continues to this day is the Atherstone Ball Game which claims to have been played pretty much continuously, every Shrove Tuesday, since 1199. The reality is that it is hard to substantiate the origin anything like that far back; nonetheless, their rules are fun:

• Stay on Long Street

• Don’t kill anyone

Despite claiming to be the “home” of football Britain was still having somewhat chaotic games whilst Italy had an incredibly detailed rule set for their version of the sport. Florence had the game Calcio storico fiorentino which is thought to have started in Piazza Santa Croce. It became known as the giuoco del calcio fiorentino or simply calcio, which is now the Italian word for “football”. The exact origins of the game are unclear, but it is thought to have possibly arisen out of military training exercises. We know that it was well-established by 1530, as on the 17th of February a game was defiantly played whilst the city was under siege.

We have an incredibly comprehensive set of rules and instruction from Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del calcio Fiorentino (1580). An overview of them follows, and whilst lengthy, I think that they are fascinating!

1. The theatre of the game should be a principal city square, suitable for noble women and the people to watch.

2. The field should be fenced: 172 braccia long, 86 braccia wide, and two braccia high.

3. The game is public, played by two sides of young men, on foot and without weapons.

4. The object is to make the inflated ball pass deliberately beyond the opposing end boundary.

5. A successful passage beyond the opponent’s end is a caccia (goal).

6. The side with more cacce wins; falli (fouls) count against the offending side, with the later Capitoli tradition making two falli equal one caccia.

7. After every caccia or fallo, the teams change places.

8. The players number fifty-four: twenty-seven per side.

9. Each side consists of fifteen Innanzi (forwards), five Sconciatori (halfbacks), four Datori innanzi (full backs), and three Datori a dietro (goal keepers).

10. Players should be fit gentlemen, generally eighteen to forty-five, of good reputation and trained in noble exercises.

11. The season runs from early January to March, with Carnival as the most solemn period.

12. The game should be played toward evening and should last only as long as the players can bear the sweat, blows and exertion - roughly one or two hours in Bardi’s phrasing.

13. Dress should be short and free: hose, doublet, cap and thin shoes; in formal games, the two sides wear different liveries.

14. In an ordinary game, two knowledgeable captains choose the sides on the field from the assembled players.11

15. In a liveried game, the sides are chosen privately beforehand, often trialled in two colours, and publicly announced.

16. Six experienced former players sit on a raised seat and judge disputes.

17. A neutral ball-man, dressed in both colours, starts play by striking the ball and keeps spare balls available.

18. The game begins with the ball placed in the centre and the thirty forwards run at it from a circle.

19. The Innanzi must carry the ball softly with their feet, keeping it close and advancing in three squads.

20. Forwards should not hurl the ball; ordinary handling is limited to setting it down to the feet or to special breakaway circumstances.

21. A deliberate throw or hurl of the ball, and deliberate sending of the ball over the ditch-side fence, constitute falli.

22. Forwards should meet blockers with extended arms rather than begin fist-fighting.

23. The Sconciatori must shield the Datori, disrupt enemy forwards, delay rather than simply hold them, and preserve the line’s order.

24. Sconciatori should not usually strike the ball, except in defined circumstances, especially the ditch-side player returning dangerous balls.

25. The Datori innanzi govern the ball by powerful strokes and should not retreat for balls belonging to the rear line.

26. The Datori should not send the ball among the spectators, because that chills the game by stopping play.

27. The Datori a dietro are the last guard and must stand deep enough to move forward to the ball, not so close that they must retreat.

28. When the ball is on a side’s own end fence, the whole side should give common aid, keep the ball low, and stop it being lifted over.

29. When fights break out, the nearest players should separate them, but the rest should not abandon the ball to watch.12

30. Players should not bear grudges after the game; bodily blows received in calcio do not touch honour.13

31. During changes of field, the winning flag should be carried high and spread, the losing flag lowered and wrapped.

32. The flags should not be torn.

33. The highest honour sought through the game is not merely sporting reputation but recognition as men fit for civic and military service.

The game underwent a revival in the 20th century, and is played annually in Florence to this day. In my next piece (which will drop tomorrow, Saturday 18th of July!) I’ll explore how these varied games ultimately resulted in the sport watched today by billions and how perhaps England can claim to be the home of football.

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The barrier of access to coffee doesn’t seem to particularly have been price – in the late 17th century a cup would cost about the same as two pints of beer. In central London today that would be around £151 ($20) which is much higher than a cup of Joe from Starbucks, but beer was relatively a lot cheaper 350 years ago! The lack of coffee drinking was in part due to the limited supply of beans, and also because it wasn’t, unlike tea, a drink that people had the inclination or equipment to brew at home.

When coffee was made, it wasn’t in a manner that we would necessarily find appealing today, basically, boil up the grounds and drink it without milk and unsweetened, as per these approaches described in John Nott’s The cook's and confectioner’s dictionary, or, The accomplish’d housewife’s companion published in 1723:

171. To make Coffee.
TAKE running, or River-water, boil it, and put to a Quart, either one, two, or three Ounces of Coffee, as you like it, and let it boil only so long, as till the Coffee falls down.

172. Another better way.
TAKE running, or River-water,2 put your Coffee in cold; mix it well with the Water, set them over the Fire, and let them warm, heat and scald, and boil together, till the Coffee sinks; then take it off, let it settle, and drink it.

173. Another the best way.3
WHEN you have drank off a Pot of Coffee, put into the Pot to the Grounds, as much Water, as you design to make the next time, and boil them together; then take the Pot off the Fire; and let it stand to settle a quarter of an Hour; then pour off the clear Liquor, cast away the Grounds, wash the Coffee-Pot, then put in the Coffee you would make next time, pour the Liquor in scalding hot, and let them stand to infuse, till you use it; then set it on the Fire, let them warm and heat leisurely, till it boils, till all the Coffee is well boil’d down, then let it settle and drink it.

The coffee this produced was often not great. If boiled too much it would become bitter, and even after allowing it to settle one could get a load of gritty grains in one’s cup. Often egg white or isinglass was added in order to clarify the drink (though I doubt that this improved the taste). A better approach was advocated by Humphrey Broadbent year earlier in The Domestick Coffee Man:

Put the quantity of powder you intend, into your pot (which should be either of stone, or silver, being much better than tin or copper, which takes from it much of its flavour and goodness) then pour boiling-hot water upon the aforesaid powder, and let it stand to infuse five minutes before the fire. This is an excellent way, and far exceeds the common one of boiling, but whether you prepare it by boiling or this way, it will sometimes remain thick and troubled, after it is made, except you pour in a spoonful or two of cold water, which immediately precipitates the more heavy parts at the bottom, and makes it clear enough for drinking.

Some, make coffee with spring water, but it is not so good as river, or Thames-water,4 because the former makes it hard, and distasteful, and the other makes it smooth and pleasant, lying soft on the stomach. If you have a desire to make good coffee in your families, I cannot conceive how you can put less than two ounces of powder to a quart, or one ounce to a pint of water; some put two ounces and a quarter.

In France, however, a decade earlier, a more superior beverage, filtered coffee, was being produced. The grounds were put into a fustian (cloth) bag and boiling water was then poured over the top. This approach, which became popular in France, but never really spread to America or Britain, was not without its own problems. The cloth fabric of the bag would absorb the oils from the coffee and, over time, become greasy and hard to clean. And cleaning was an issue – leave it damp and it could go mouldy, dry it out too much and the coffee oils could go stale and impart a nasty taste – so often the solution was to keep the cleaned bag immersed in water, which sounds like a bit of a faff. Finally, no matter how much care one takes with one’s bag, the rate of flow of fluid through it, and hence the intensity of the coffee, would inevitably change over usage and time.

Towards the end of the 18th century, again in France, we see the next major advance in coffee making. This was a pot, initially made of tin, but later of porcelain, which consisted of two chambers, one above the other. At the join between them sat the coffee chamber: a perforated metal or porcelain grid, sometimes with a second pierced plate or ‘rammer’ above it. Ground coffee was placed on or between the perforated surfaces; hot water was poured into the upper vessel; the water passed slowly through the coffee bed and collected in the lower vessel. These were known as ‘De Belloy’ (or ‘Du Belloy’) pots taking their name from Jean-Baptiste de Belloy de Morangles, Archbishop of Paris and later cardinal. It seems unlikely that he actually invented them, it seems more likely that this honour lay with François-Antoine-Henri Descroizilles, a Rouen chemist and pharmacist, and that De Belloy or someone in his circle popularised the device in Paris. Whatever the precise origin, they were hugely popular, and highly regarded, as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) detailed in The Physiology of Taste:

A few years ago, everyone’s attention turned simultaneously to the best way to make coffee—a trend that stemmed, almost without anyone realizing it, from the fact that the head of government consumed a great deal of it.

Suggestions abounded: brewing it without burning the grounds or grinding them to dust, cold-brewing it,5 boiling it for forty-five minutes, using a pressure cooker, and so on.

Over time, I experimented with all these methods—as well as those proposed since—and, based on experience, settled on the Dubelloy method. This involves pouring boiling water over coffee placed in a porcelain or silver vessel perforated with tiny holes. You take this initial infusion, heat it to a boil, pour it through again, and the result is coffee that is as clear and delicious as possible.6

Among other experiments, I tried making coffee in a high-pressure kettle; the result was a brew heavy with extractive matter and bitterness—fit, at best, to scour a Cossack’s throat.

Savarin goes on to comment upon something I am all-too familiar with, the impact of the drink upon insomnia:

Doctors have expressed various opinions regarding the health properties of coffee and have not always agreed with one another; we shall steer clear of this debate to focus on the most important aspect: its influence on the organs of thought.

There is no doubt that coffee powerfully stimulates the brain’s faculties; indeed, anyone drinking it for the first time is certain to lose some sleep.

Sometimes this effect is mitigated or altered by habituation; yet there are many individuals for whom this stimulation persists, and who are consequently forced to give up coffee entirely.

Similar devices soon became popular in Britain, though they could both use a metal/porcelain filter or, as became more commonly the case, a cloth bag suspended in the top chamber. They revelled in the name ‘Biggins’, seemingly named after one George Biggin (died 1803) and inventor and scientist who, among other adventures, flew in one of Vincenzo Lunardi’s balloons on the 29th of June 1785. This flight is notable because the aeronaut alongside Biggin was Letitia Ann Sage, the first British woman to fly! Oh, and also because they had to be rescued from an angry farmer by a group of Harrow schoolboys upon landing.7

Biggins did a pretty decent job of making coffee, and remained in use for more than century, but in some places the old 17th-century approach to making coffee still persisted. In the USA, even in the mid-19th century, we find coffee being boiled up, as per the recipe in in a cookbook from 1840:

Allow half a pint of ground coffee to three pints of water. If the coffee is not freshly roasted, you should put in more. Put the water into the tin coffee-pot, and set it on hot coals; when it boils, put in the coffee, a spoonful at a time, (stirring it between each spoonful,) and add two or three chips of isinglass, or the white of an egg. Stir it frequently, till it has risen up to the top in boiling; then set it a little farther from the fire, and boil it gently for ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour; after which pour in a tea-cup of cold water, and put it in the corner to settle for ten minutes. Scald your silver or china pot, and transfer the coffee to it; carefully pouring it off from the grounds, so as not to disturb them.

It would seem that some Americans preferred this type of boiled coffee over the more refined European methods of production, most notably Mark Twain, who was very snitty about the continental drink in his 1880 book A Tramp Aboard:

To particularize: the average American’s simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel.8 The milk used for it is what the French call “Christian” milk—milk which has been baptized.9

After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.

Next comes the European bread—fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic;10 and never any change, never any variety—always the same tiresome thing.

The next technical innovation occurred in 1819, when the Paris tinsmith Joseph-Henry-Marie Laurens produced a coffee-making device in which boiling water was raised through a tube and delivered over the coffee, this invention the first coffee peculator. Multiple variations of these pots were in use across the 19th century but their use really took off in the USA with the version patented by Hanson Goodrich 1889 – a pot that could sit on a stove have and have the coffee recirculated:11

Before I get into the developments which led to the machines that we find in the coffee shops that we visit today, a quick digression about the adding of milk to the drink. As mentioned earlier, initially coffee was drunk black, and unsweetened though some experiments with adding milk took place surprisingly early:

About 1660, Nieuhoff, the Dutch ambassador to China, was the first to make a trial of coffee with milk in imitation of tea with milk. In 1685, Sieur Monin, a celebrated doctor of Grenoble, France, first recommended café au lait as a medicine. He prepared it thus: Place on the fire a bowl of milk. When it begins to rise, throw in to it a bowl of powdered coffee, a bowl of moist sugar, and let it boil for some time.

By the mid-18th century, café au lait (coffee with milk) had become commonplace in France, particularly as a breakfast drink, as Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d’Aussy recounts in his Histoire de la vie privée des Français, depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours (1782):

There is no middle-class home where coffee is not offered at dinner. No shop girl, cook, or chambermaid who does not have coffee with milk for breakfast. This taste, believe it or not, has even reached the lowest classes of the common people.12

Arguably the most famous coffee-with-milk drink, the cappuccino has a history that is perhaps older than one may expect, and it certainly long predates the modern version of the drink. The Viennese Kapuziner arose in the 18th century as a dark cup of coffee with cream added to it (and later sugar and spices). It takes its name from the cappuccio, the hood worn by Capuchin friars as, once mixed, it shared the same brown colour.13 For the drink to become the one globally loved today the final major development in coffee technology had to take place, the invention of high-pressure coffee-making which created the espresso.

The Italian coffeemaker Illy describes that acme of the drink as being created in the following manner:

A jet of hot water at 88°-93°C (190°-200°F) passes under a pressure of nine or more atmospheres through a seven-gram (.25 oz) cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. Done right, the result is a concentrate of not more than 30 ml (one oz) of pure sensorial pleasure.

The original version of this brew was, however, a little different from this. In 1884 one Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a machine for the “economic and instantaneous” preparation of coffee. This wasn’t the counter-top device you will be familiar with today, rather it was a large boiler at a pressure of about 1.5 bars that first pushed water through the coffee grounds, before a secondary boiler drove steam through it to finish the job. It produced coffee en-masse for the Turin Expo. It seems to have been a success, but it never really caught on as Moriondo only built a couple of the machines, and they were used solely in establishments that he owned – he basically thought that they were so good, that they would bring customers flooding in.

Next up we have Luigi Bezzera of Milan who, in 1902, created essentially the first modern expresso machine. It would produce individual cups on demand and had the portafilter,14 the little bucket-type thing that the coffee grounds sit in. Again though the pressure in this device was low by modern standards, 1.5-2.0 bars.

It wasn’t until 1938, with Achille Gaggia that we finally got expresso with crema, the foam that sits atop a good expresso. He invented a machine that used hot water, rather than steam, pressure which could achieve 9 bars, and the company that bears his name manufactures coffeemakers to this day. There is more I could add to this history, the invention of instant coffee, the debate over who really invented the flat white, and so on but I fear continuing much further would try your patience. And beside, I could really do with a cup of coffee right now…

The story of European coffee begins with the capture of Constantinople but the Ottomans in 1453 because this turned the city into their imperial capital: a huge administrative, commercial, diplomatic, and cultural hub linking the Balkans, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Egypt, and eventually Yemen. This was followed by the conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516–1517, which brought Syria, Egypt, the Hijaz connection, and much of the Red Sea commercial world into the Ottoman sphere. As we learned in my last piece, coffee drinking was well-established in Egypt at that point, particularly in Cairo and it wasn’t that long before the drink spread to Constantinople itself.

We can date very precisely when this great beverage arrived in the city, from a history written by İbrahim Peçevi (aka Peçevî İbrahim Efendi) – Tārīḫ-i Peçevī (“Peçevi’s History.”) which was probably written in the early 1640s, and is a history of the Ottoman Empire, with good details on the period from 1520-1640:

Before the year 1554, no coffee was seen, much less sold, at Constantinople. If ever it was so much as heard of, it was only when the Sultaness obtained an order to prohibit the use of it at Mecca, as we have already mentioned, from the accounts she had received from pilgrims or other travellers into Arabia, Egypt, or Syria. But in that year, which was near a hundred years from the time it was discovered by the Mufti of Aden, in the reign of Soliman the Great, son to Selim the First, two men, named Schems and Hekim, the one from Damascus, the other from Aleppo, set up each of them a coffee-house in that quarter of Constantinople called Takhtacalah, furnished with very neat couches and carpets, on which they received their company, which at first consisted mostly of studious persons, lovers of chess, trictrac, and other sedentary diversions.

And as the generality of the Turks soon came to relish this sort of meeting-place, called in their language Cahveh Kaneh, the number of them multiplied insensibly. They looked upon them as very proper places to make acquaintances in, as well as to refresh and entertain themselves at an easy charge, a dish of coffee costing but an aspre, which is not a halfpenny of English money. Young people near the end of their public studies, such as were ready to enter upon public posts; cadhis out of place, who were at Constantinople making interest to be restored, or asking for new employments; the muderis, or professors of law and other sciences; and, in fine, persons of all ranks flocked to them. At length even the officers of the seraglio, the pashas, and others of the first quality were seen to go openly to the coffee-house; and as this served to increase their reputation, so it multiplied the number of them to too great an excess.

These final lines are particularly important in showing just how socially transformational these coffee houses were. To use the terminology of the 21st century they were a novel urban space – non-domestic, non-religious, conversational, and comparatively open to men from different social ranks. For cultures where alcohol consumption was permissible taverns had served this function for centuries, but in those where it was banned there previously had been no such places.

Less than 20 years later we get the first Western European account of coffee by the German physician Leonhard Rauwolf who encountered coffee in Aleppo in 1573 (and published his account in 1582):

Among other things they have a good drink, which they hold in high esteem, called by them Chaube. It is almost as black as ink and is very useful in ailments, especially of the stomach. They are accustomed to drink this early in the morning, also in open places, before… before everyone publicly, without any hesitation, from deep earthenware and porcelain bowls, as hot as they can bear it. They often raise it to their lips, but take only small sips, and then pass it on, as they sit beside one another in a circle.

For this drink they use a fruit called Bunnu by the inhabitants. On the outside, in size and color, it looks almost like laurel berries, and is enclosed in two thin little shells. According to their old reports, it is brought from India. But since the fruit itself is light, and inside has two yellowish kernels separately enclosed in two little husks; and since, in its effect, name, and appearance, it is very similar to the Buncho of Avicenna and the Bunca of Rhazes in the Almansor, I shall consider it to be that, until I receive better information from learned men. This drink is very common among them.

For that reason there are many people in the bazaar who pour it out for sale, as well as many merchants who sell the fruit. Moreover, they also regard it as just as valuable and healthful as we among ourselves regard wormwood wine, or other herbal wines. Nevertheless, they would still prefer wine, if they were permitted it by their law, as was clearly seen under Emperor Selim, when he granted and allowed them wine: how they drank it, namely, that they came together daily, and when they sat together drinking, one did not merely drink one or two glasses of unmixed strong wine to another, but four or five little cups at once, of the kind that come to them from Venice; and they drank these down one after another so quickly and with such eagerness that, as I saw many times, they did not take enough time between them even to eat a bite or a few morsels.

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As to when coffee made its way into Western Europe, let’s just say that one can go down lots of rabbit holes attempting to answer that question! It probably arrived in Venice in or shortly after 1615 because that is when Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle (1586–1652), a well known Italian traveler and author of Travels in India and Persia, wrote a letter from Constantinople to his friend Mario Schipano in Venice:

The Turks have a drink of black colour, which during the summer is very cooling, whereas in the winter it heats and warms the body, remaining always the same beverage and not changing its substance. They swallow it hot as it comes from the fire and they drink it in long draughts, not at dinner time, but as a kind of dainty and sipped slowly while talking with one's friends. One cannot find any meetings among them where they drink it not.... With this drink, which they call cahue, they divert themselves in their conversations.... It is made with the grain or fruit of a certain tree called cahue.... When I return I will bring some with me and I will impart the knowledge to the Italians.

We don’t know for sure if he carried through with this promise, but it seems likely that coffee was low-key drunk in the city for medicinal reasons not long after that. If we want a good, dated, account of coffee being drunk in Western Europe then we can do worse than look to my home town of Oxford. In a note added to his diary entry for the 10th of May 1637 (when he was admitted to the college), John Evelyn wrote that the following took place in Balliol:

There came in my time to the College one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the patriarch of Constantinople, who, returning many years after, was made (as I understand) Bishop of Smyrna. He was the first I ever saw drink coffee; which custom came not into England till thirty years after.

The best guess for when this coffee-drinking took place is 1638–1639, possibly 1639, if Conopios came to Oxford as a refugee after the death of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris in June 1638. It was also Oxford that saw the first recoded coffee house in Western Europe1 opening, as the city’s greatest antiquarian, Anthony Wood, wrote about it in the year 1650:

This yeare Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter, in the East Oxon; and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank. When he left Oxon he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London, and was living 1671.

And that coffee shop is still there today! Okay, it isn’t, but there is a later building on the site which is now a cafe which trades upon this history:2

Four years later he writes about another establishment, just across the road from the first:

Coffey, which had been drank by some persons in Oxon 1650, was this yeare publickly sold at or neare the Angel within the east gate of Oxon; as also chocolate, by an outlander or a Jew.

And his coffee shop is still there too! Except whilst coffee has be sold very close to that site for more than 370 years, it seems that it has moved around a bit over that time. What we do know is that it is the location where, in 1768, Jeremy Bentham encountered the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” in a pamphlet and helped inspire his development of utilitarianism:

Somehow or other, shortly after its publication, a copy of this pamphlet found its way into the little circulating library belonging to a little coffee-house, called Harper’s coffee-house, attached, as it were, to Queen’s College, Oxford, and deriving, from the popularity of that college, the whole of its subsistence. It was a corner house, having one front towards the High Street, another towards a narrow lane, which on that side skirts Queen’s College, and loses itself in a lane issuing from one of the gates of New College.

This year, 1768, was the latest of all the years in which this pamphlet could have come into my hands. Be this as it may, it was by that pamphlet, and this phrase in it, that my principles on the subject of morality, public and private together, were determined.

Two years after the first coffee shop opened in Oxford, one did in London, and it was advertised with this brilliant hand-bill:3

In the decades that followed the number of such establishments exploded across the city, with their number likely in excess of 1,000 by the end of the 17th century. At the same time they spread all across the continent, most famously, perhaps, in Vienna which is noted for its coffee house culture to this day. According to legend, after they liberated the city from the second Turkish siege in 1683 a group of Polish-Habsburg soldiers found some sacks full of strange beans in a cellar. They initially thought it was camel feed, and wanted to burn them however the Polish king Jan III Sobieski gave them to one of his officers, Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki. Kulczycki, realising what they were (and conning the king out of a valuable product) brewed them up with some milk and sugar, and open the first coffee house in the city. Except the first coffee house in the city was actually opened in 1685 by an Armenian businessman named Johannes Theodat. Which is not such a good story…

As in Constantinople these houses provided a wholly novel space for people (well, men) to interact, gossip, read the latest newspapers and broadsides, and so on. As Henri Misson described the London coffee houses in 1698:

“You have all Manner of News there: You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you do not care to spend more.

So noted were they for these kind of interactions that they became known as “penny universities” though some writers, such as the one who wrote this satirical verse in a 1667 broadside, felt that was perhaps overstating their function a little:

At Coffee-House when they are plac’d,
you’d scarce believe it true.

They know all that is Good or Hurt,
To bless ye, or to save ye;
There is the Colledge and the Court,
the Countrie, Camp and Navie;
So great a Universitie,
I think, there ne’re was any:
In which you may a Scholar be
for spending of a Penny.

A Merchant’s ‘Prentice there shall show
you all and every thing,
What hath been done, and is to do,
‘twixt Holland and the King;
What Articles of Peace will be,
he can precisely show;
What will be good for Them or We,
he perfectly doth know.

Here men do talk of every thing,
with large and liberal Lungs,
Like women at a Gossipping,
with double tyre of Tongues;
They’l give a Broadside presently,
soon as you are in view,
With Stories that you’l wonder at,
which they will swear are true.

The drinking there of Chockalat
can make a Fool a Sophie:
‘Tis thought the Turkish Mahomet
was first Inspir’d by Coffee,
By which his Powers did over-flow
the Land of Palestine:
Then let us to the Coffee-house go!
‘tis cheaper far than Wine.

You shall know, there, what Fashions are;
How Perrywiggs are curl’d;
And for a Penny you shall heare
all Novells in the world;
Both Old and Young, and Great and Small,
and Rich and Poore you’ll see:
Therefore, let’s to the Coffee all,
Come all away with me.

Exaggerated though the quality of eduction one might receive there might be, these were definitely places for the exchanging of ideas, and particularly political ideas. We have an example of this from the diary of Samuel Pepys, from the 23rd January 1663 where there is talk of a rising in the north:

Thence to Mr. Grant, to bid him come for money for Mr. Barlow, and he and I to a coffee-house, where Sir J. Cutler was; and in discourse, among other things, he did fully make it out that the trade of England is as great as ever it was, only in more hands; and that of all trades there is a greater number than ever there was, by reason of men taking more ‘prentices, because of their having more money than heretofore. His discourse was well worth hearing. Coming by Temple Bar I bought “Audley’s Way to be Rich,” a serious pamphlett and some good things worth my minding. Thence homewards, and meeting Sir W. Batten, turned back again to a coffee-house, and there drunk more till I was almost sick, and here much discourse, but little to be learned, but of a design in the north of a rising, which is discovered, among some men of condition, and they sent for up.

Not everyone was thrilled about such activities, chief amongst them King Charles the Second who was trying to main a somewhat rickety restoration monarchy. In order to reduce the risk of people scheming against him over a cup of Java on the 29th of December 1675 he issued “A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses” requiring them to be shut down on the 10th of January, a scant two weeks later. He argued that he wasn’t doing so just because of people coming up with nefarious plots but also because tradespeople were chillaxing there when they should have been working!

Whereas it is most apparent, that the Multitude of Coffee-houses of late
years set up and kept within this Kingdom, the Dominion of Wales, and the
Town of Berwick upon Tweed, and the great resort of Idle and disaffected
persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well
for that many Tradesmen and others, do therein mis-spend much of their time,
which might and probably would otherwise be imployed in and about their
Lawful Callings and Affairs; but also, for that in such Houses, and by
occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, divers False, Malitious
and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defama-
tion of His Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; His Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, That the said Coffee-houses be (for the future) Put down and Suppressed, and doth (with the Advice of His Privy Council) by this His Royal Proclamation, Strictly Charge and Command all manner of persons, That they or any of them do not presume from and after the Tenth day of January next ensuing, to keep any Publick Coffee-house, or to Utter or Sell by retail, in his, her or their house or houses (to be spent or consumed within the same) any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea, as they will answer the contrary at their utmost perils.

And for the better accomplishment of this his Majesties Royal Pleasure, His Majesty doth hereby Will and require the Justices of Peace within their several Counties, and the Chief Magistrates in all Cities and Towns Corporate, that they do at their next respective General Sessions of the peace (to be holden within their several and respective Counties, Divisions and Precincts) recall and make void all Licenses at any time heretofore Granted, for the Selling or Retailing of any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea. And that they or any of them do not (for the
future) make or grant any such License or Licenses, to any person or persons Whatsoever. And his Majesty doth further hereby declare, that if any person or persons shall take upon them, him or her, after his, her or their License or Licenses recalled, or otherwise without License, to sell by retail (as aforesaid) any of the Liquors aforesaid, that then the person or persons so Offending, shall not only be proceeded against, upon the Statute made in the Fifteenth year of His Majesties
Reign (which gives the forfeiture of five pounds for every moneth wherein he, she or they shall offend therein) but shall (in case they persevere to Offend) receive the severest punishments that may by Law be inflicted.

Given at Our Court at Whitehall, this Nine and twentieth day of December 1675. in the Seven and twentieth year of Our Reign.

God save the King.

However he quickly back-tracked somewhat, due to pressure from business owners, and two days before the ban was due to come into effect the proclamation was watered down. The coffee shop owners said that they were very sorry that people had been saying nasty things about him in their premises, and that it would never happen again. Oh, and they would all swear oaths of allegiance to him. This seems to have done the trick:

Whereas His Majesty by His Royal Proclamation bearing date the 29th day of December last, upon the Reasons therein contained, did Command and Require all manner of persons, from and after the Tenth day of this instant January, to forbear to Sell or Vtter by Retail (to be spent within their respective Houses) any Coffee, Chocolate, Tea or Sherbett, and did give Directions to His Justices of the Peace, and the Chief Magistrates (within their respective Counties, Cities and Towns Corporate) not to grant any new Licences to that purpose, and to revoke Licences formerly granted.

And whereas since the issuing forth of the said Proclamation, several Retailers of the said Liquors, by their humble Petition on the behalf of them­selves and other Retaylers, did humbly Represent to His Majesty, That there are great quantities of Coffee and Tea at present in their hands, for which the Duties are already paid; besides what are already Shipped in parts beyond the Seas for England, and cannot be Remanded without great loss to the Owners thereof. And further, thereby, (confessing the former Miscarriages and Abuses committed in such Coffee-Houses, and expressing their true Sorrow for the same, and promising their utmost Care and Endeavour to prevent the like, for such time as they shall be permitted to Retail the said Liquors in their respective Houses) did humbly Beseech His Majesty, That He would be Graciously pleased to give them some further time for the Vending of the said Commodities, which would otherwise lie upon their hands.

And did further Offer, That if they might be permitted to continue to Retail the said Liquors (within their respective Houses) they would not onely take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, but also enter into Recognizances to His Majesty respectively, at the Sessions of the Peace to be holden in the respective Counties, Cities and Liberties where their Houses are to be.

It wasn’t just King Charles who had it in for coffee houses. As noted above, these were essentially male preserves that both helped strengthen even further the “old boys networks” and also took them away from their wives and partners. One (or possibly several, the authorship is unknown, just stated as “A well-willer”) woman was sufficiently irked by this that in 1674 she published The Women’s Petition Against Coffee.4 In it she satirically attempts to get men to shun coffee largely on the basis that it, ahem, impairs their performance:

That since ’tis Reckon’d amongst the Glories of our Native Country, To be A Paradise for Women: The same in our Apprehensions can consist in nothing more than the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome; But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us. Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.

There was a glorious Dispensation, ’twas surely in the Golden Age, when Lusty Ladds of seven or eight hundred years old, Got Sons and Daughters; and we have read, how a Prince of Spain was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times in a night: But Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone, The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a Bridle: being so far from doing any works of Supererregation that we find them not capable of performing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expectations Exact.

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts [sic] whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

For the continual sipping of this pittiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpice-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend ’twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it.

A Betrothed Queen might trust her self a bed with one of them, without the nice Caution of a Sword between them: nor can all the Art we use revive them from this Lethargy, so unfit they are for Action, that like young Train-band-men when called upon Duty, their Amunition [sic] is wanting; peradventure they Present, but cannot give Fire, or at least do but flash in the pan, instead of doing Execution.

Despite these challenges coffee houses survived, and not only survived, they thrived. One could write a book (or several) about their impact upon society, but just in England alone they helped lead to the creation of the Royal Society and the modern insurance industry though Lloyds of London, which began life in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house. Jonathan’s Coffee House performed a similar service for securities. Brokers excluded from the Royal Exchange gathered in coffeehouses; John Castaing posted prices of stocks and commodities there in 1698. Eventually the activity helped form the London Stock Exchange.

In my final piece I will explore how coffee grew over the centuries that follow to become a daily staple in our homes and on our high streets.

If all this is making you thirsty, here’s a previous piece we’ve had on making the perfect brew – well, 17th-century style anyway:

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

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

τῶν δὲ σιτίων ἐνδοξότατος ἦν ὁ μέλας ζωμός

Among their foods, the black broth was the most renowned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crackdown then began:

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

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

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

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

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

Nor for those two doctors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold Potatoes fried.—(No. 102.)

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

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

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

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

There is even a recipe for whole fried potatoes:

Potatoes fried whole.—(No. 105.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The text underneath reads:

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

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

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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…

UK History News

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

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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!