This entry from the sixteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts of the parish church of St James, situated in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, is one of many regarding the maintenance of the church's clock along with its peal of bells. The latter were contained within the fifteenth-century steeple, itself crowned with one of the most architecturally impressive spires in the country; Nikolaus Pevsner affirming that St James's was ‘one of the most majestic of English parish churches’.

The Louth churchwardens’ accounts are some of the county's most comprehensive surviving parish records. These continue in an almost unbroken sequence from the beginning of the sixteenth century, opening a panorama on the financial undertakings of a large and relatively wealthy parish church. The first published transcription, edited by Reginald Dudding, rector of Saleby (1859–1937), covered the years 1500/1 to 1523/4 and recounts the construction of the church's spire in considerable detail.

Appendix 1:

Catalogue of Viking Raids on Irish Churches in the Annals, 795–1015

Almost all raids up to 850 are in AU, but after 850 the other annals together (AFM, AI, AC, ARC, CS, FA and, from 974 AT) provide much data.1 For details of editions of annals, see the bibliography. Locations of places suggested in Hogan, Onomasticon, and elsewhere, are sometimes cited, without implying acceptance. Where the location of a church raided is not certainly identified, the Irish form is given. Raids on groups of churches not individually identified are underlined. References to raids on Iona are noted in square brackets, but not used in the analysis, which covers Ireland alone.

795 (1) Rechru (Lambay Island, Co. Dublin, or Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim) burned (loscadh, AU 795.3) and (a) shrine(s?) destroyed and stripped.2 (2) Inishmurray and (3) Inishbofin, Co. Galway plundered (orcain, AI) [also Iona], with Viking involvement not explicitly stated.

798 Inis Phátraic (apparently St Patrick's Island, Co. Dublin) burned (combustio), cattle tribute of the territories (bórime na crích) levied, Dochonna's shrine broken and great raids/incursions besides in Ireland and North Britain/Scotland (Alba) (AU 798.2).

[802 Iona burned (combusta est) (AU 802.9)]

Patriotism was an essential but geopolitically and historically nuanced key concept in public debates across Enlightenment Europe in the eighteenth century. One important facet of patriotism in mid-century Europe encompassed a commitment to serve the public good, be it within the institutions of the state (the court, for instance, as outlined by Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1638–1751) in The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738) or outside (the public sphere). In Part I, I identified variants of reform and dynastic patriotism that materialised from specific geopolitical and historical positions and was explored and debated in salon sociability, conversations, letters, and correspondences. Such patriotism allowed balancing partiality, as the love for one's own country or, important to this chapter, for a region, with the more universal commitment to Enlightenment values of justice and human rights. In short, the objective was to balance patriotism with progressive reforms. In the case of Dorothea von Kurland, as one example, her commitment to the human rights of the Livonian serfs and peasants was an essential part of her dynastic reform patriotism for Courland and fed into the later Romantic nationalism in the region. She continued her economic reforms and social engagement in her new home in Löbichau and Tannenfeld in the duchy of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg (see Chapter 6).

In the following chapters, I want to explore further facets of the reform patriotism: economic/agrarian patriotism.

On 18 April 1593, in the archdeaconry court at St Albans, Hertfordshire, Elizabeth Stuttesbery submitted an account of her administration of the estate of her late husband, who had recently died intestate. The inventory of Richard Stuttesbery's movable goods, valued at just less than £14, reveals his involvement in the preparation of hemp and flax for spinning. He had died in debt to several creditors, three of whom (owed £10 10s between them) successfully sued Elizabeth for her late husband's obligations, recovering their costs and being awarded damages. By the time Elizabeth had also paid all the fees due for the probate process, her total expenditure in settling her late husband's affairs amounted to almost £20, a third more than the value of his assets. The yawning chasm between the gross and net value of Richard Stuttesbery's estate would be just one more sad story of a widow confronting the awful reckoning of her liabilities were it not for the fact that, some fifteen years later, the fees that she had incurred as administratrix became a point of contention in the Court of Star Chamber. In 1608, the sum of £1 9s 8d paid by Elizabeth Stuttesbery to James Rolfe, official of the archdeacon of St Albans, was merely one case among hundreds at issue in the prosecution of Rolfe for malfeasance and corruption. This suit generated testimony extensive enough to be an invaluable source for the reconstruction not only of ecclesiastical court practice, but also of the texture of social relations, in late Elizabethan and early Stuart Hertfordshire.

Coming of age festivity was heavily reliant on its spatial setting: landscapes and built environments across Wales provided theatres for celebration and were actively used and fashioned to ascribe meaning to the occasion. As we saw in chapter 1, entire towns, villages and stretches of countryside were temporarily transformed by these celebrations, but these events also had a tendency to leave their mark, in the form of permanent physical memorials to the occasion and as memories which shaped people's understanding of and attachment to place. Land and locality formed core features in the discourse generated through these celebrations, reflecting the fact that the nature of the event, and the social relationships impinging on landed estates, were underpinned by concepts of property, tenure, inheritance, land use and estate management. Coming of age celebrations provide a range of distinctive insights into the lived experience, spatial configuration and territorial identity of landed estates. This chapter makes use of the evidence of such festivity to consider how estate landscapes interacted with and helped shape the places of Wales.

Views and Perspectives on Estate Landscapes

Since the emergence of English landscape history as an area of study under W. G. Hoskins in the 1950s the subject of ‘designed’ landscapes has gained ever-increasing traction in the historiography. Hoskins’ focus on the active ‘making’ of landscape over time has been followed by a stream of studies which have pursued the agency and inspiration involved in ‘creating’, ‘shaping’, ‘fashioning’, ‘arranging’ or ‘moulding’ landscapes. Such approaches are particularly pertinent to understanding the multigenerational formation of estate landscapes.

Among the widespread finds of spindle whorls in bone, clay, lead, and other prosaic materials in early medieval English graves are crystal spindle whorls. They are a footnote to history, often mentioned only because of the possibility that they might represent amuletic objects because of their unique nature. In many respects, they are like the “textile” half of the early medieval English textile metaphors: noted in passing, but rarely understood or considered in any depth. When crystal whorls are spun, however, a different story and set of possibilities emerge. When spun, the “faceted crystals would give a very pretty display of rainbow lights, adding interest to what must have often been a very tedious task.”2 The spinning, rainbow lights must have made the daily task of spinning seem magical, and certainly poetic. The interest such spinning created may also have served very practical functions, stimulating the young or the old to spin more thread, and promising the very young distraction and entertainment whenever the spinner was allowed to work uninterrupted at her task. Such whorls may have sparked the envy of others or increased the respect accorded their owners. For any of these reasons, or perhaps others, crystal spindle whorls became so treasured as personal possessions that they accompanied their owners to the grave, identifying them, at the very least, as women, forever after.

In the early seventeenth century, John Woodall (1570–1643), first surgeongeneral of the East India Company (EIC), published a practical text for surgeons at sea. The Surgions Mate, or A Treatise … of the Surgions Chest (1617) was positioned as a helpful guide for sea surgeons ‘who by reason of their youth and lack of practice’ required guidance, particularly for the extreme conditions of a ship at sea. Diseases, including scurvy, typhus and dysentery, along with accidents, foul living conditions, limited supplies and violent warfare, were only some of the challenges faced by a seventeenth-century crew and ship's surgeon. Woodall innovatively suggested an official inventory of medicines and tools for the EIC surgeon's chest. Across the seventeenth century other experienced practitioners also published guides for fledgling sea surgeons, often featuring rather traumatic case-histories. The hope, in the words of the surgeon John Moyle in Chirurgus Marinus: or, the Sea-Chirurgion (1693) was ‘to save the Lives and Limbs of many’. These surgeons’ accounts allow us to glimpse contemporary medical practices and customs aboard, such as how to treat wounds, ulcers, fractures and dislocations. Woodall's text recommends the use of citrus fruits to combat the ‘lamentable disease’ of scurvy which had ‘so long and so fiercely assailed saylers and sea-men of all sorts’ (and this was one of the earliest printed accounts to endorse the same). However, treatment of illnesses is not the focus of this chapter. My interest is in how a close reading of these texts can reveal something of the lived experiences of the crew and the surgeon on seventeenth-century ships, and even give insights into their cultural, social and emotional lives.

There are perhaps a few (now elderly) former students who can remember the Warwick History Department before Bernard Capp became a feature of it, but none of the current staff members there come close to doing so. Many of them, indeed, were not yet born when Bernard was appointed to a lectureship at Warwick, in 1968, at a time when he was still completing his doctoral research on radical millenarians in the era of the English Civil War, research undertaken at Oxford under the supervision of Keith Thomas. Although Bernard may not have known it at the time, he was to spend his entire academic career in this one institution on the outskirts of Coventry, founded only a couple of years earlier in 1965. He was in due course promoted to a senior lectureship, then a readership, and ultimately – the wheels of meritorious advancement turning more slowly in the preceding generation than in the present one – in 1994 a full professorship.

Bernard had then just published his ground-breaking study of the London plebeian celebrity John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’. It was the fourth of four monographs that were already cementing Bernard's reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on the social and cultural history of early modern England. Four more weighty monographs have followed, accompanied by a succession of invariably original and sometimes field-defining articles and essays, a stream of productive scholarship that shows little sign of coming to an end anytime soon. By my reckoning, Bernard has been published no fewer than seven times in Past and Present, the pre-eminent British journal for early modernists, and arguably for the historical discipline in the UK overall. I doubt whether any other living scholar has matched that – even Bernard's one-time supervisor, the formidable Sir Keith Thomas, has only managed five. Because he never goes on about it himself, it is sometimes possible, if only briefly, to lose sight of what a truly distinguished and influential historian Bernard Capp has been and continues to be.

While the pharmacopeia discussed in Chapter 2 were structured around descriptions of plants and animals and their medical uses, receptaria are a different kind of medical compilation. Receptaria list cures by disease, normally starting with the head, moving down through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, throat, etc., and finishing with diseases of the feet. The ultimate sources of such receptaria are very similar to those of the pharmacopeia, being the encyclopaedic literature of Classical antiquity: principally the Historia naturalis of the first-century Roman aristocrat Gaius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder in English. In compilations such as Bald's Leechbook and the Lacnunga it can be impossible to tell for certain whether an individual recipe comes from the pharmacopoeia or a receptaria, and therefore Emily Kesling mostly groups such simple recipes together as ‘short’ recipes, as opposed to the ‘long’ passages of aetiology and diagnostic criteria found in those Galenic-Hippocratic sources I will discuss in Chapters 4–6. This literature is utilitarian in its intent, the authorial prefaces tending to stress the intention of providing household remedies to be used when doctors are not available, as explained in the prefatory epistle attributed to Plinius Secundus Iunioris, that is Pseudo-Pliny, who must not be confused with ‘Pliny the Younger’. The texts tend to lack the complex aetiological discussions which characterise the literary output of trained physicians, they have far fewer Graecisms, and they tend to avoid dietetics and preventive medicine.

In 1894, the German explorer Adolf Count von Götzen arrived at the borders of the kingdom of Rwanda. Götzen was about to cross Africa for exploration and to investigate the progress of the Congo Free State on behalf of his government. He himself was a trained diplomat from a noble family. Only one European had set his foot into the kingdom; two years before, the Austrian Oscar Baumann had roamed through the border regions of Rwandan but was pushed to leave after a few weeks. He had seen neither the capital of the kingdom nor met its ruler, Rwabugiri. Götzen, however, was awaited at the borders by a young man introducing himself as Schirangawe, a son of Rwabugiri. His father, he told Götzen, wanted to have him at this court for negotiations; his task was to guard him and to serve him with all means necessary on his way. When Götzen eventually reached the residence of Rwabugiri, Schirangawe asked him to wait and stay on his side of the river separating his camp from the residence of his father. As the night was approaching, the German agreed, but the next morning he crossed the river. Halfway, an envoy blocked his advance trying to explain the diplomatic rules for his reception at the court. Götzen nonetheless ignored him and stormed with his soldiers into the compound. The court put a good face on this outrageous behaviour. The negotiations were polite but short, nothing more than “ceremonial palaver”, as Götzen noted. The next day the German demanded food, which the Rwandans courteously refused because they still had not received gifts from the guest.

In England, after Mary I's pregnancy experiences in the 1550s, several commentators argued that her so-called pregnancies were in fact molas, false, unnatural conceptions, rather than ‘true’ foetuses. Many critical observers to these events, and those writing in the centuries afterwards, argued that the misdiagnosis of Mary's pregnancies was the result of ‘foolish’ women and midwives. Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, many of Mary's English and Spanish male physicians also believed she was truly pregnant, based on the physical signs of her body. What did these men know about true and false conception, and how did they get the diagnosis so wrong? This chapter explores the knowledge about false conceptions and moles that Mary I's physicians would have learnt during their medical studies. The issue of human generation was a prominent one in European medicine and natural philosophy, and false generation was of particular interest to physicians, anatomists, and natural philosophers over the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Not only did the study of false generation offer key insights into embryological development and the nature of the soul, but it helped to explain the uncertainties attached to the reproductive body. Like Mary I's physicians, the doctors and philosophers who investigated and wrote about false generation commented on its ability to render true generation and pregnancy deeply uncertain.

European knowledge about moles and false conceptions formed the backbone of the theories about false generation in British medicine and midwifery that were discussed in the previous chapter. These ideas were circulated by the movement of people, as well as print and correspondence. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, many English and Scottish students travelled to Italian, French, German, and Dutch universities to study both formally and informally.