Museums and Curators

The origins of most public displays in museums or exhibitions can be traced back to private collections of fossils, minerals, specimens, tools, and artisanal objects amassed by aristocrats, monks, scholars, academicians, natural scientists, and wealthy citizens. In some instances, special galleries known as Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) were built in stately homes or palaces to accommodate them. For their owners, such places were expressions of authority and affluence, trophies that demonstrated possessive mastery and social preeminence. It was only when the general public was admitted into these galleries that the concept of the public museum was realized.

One evening in 1791, a room in Walbrook's Bull's Head inn began to fill with a rowdy London Welsh crowd, all members of the Caradogion – or ‘Caractacan’ – debating society. In a poem commemorating the night written by member David Samwell (1751–1798), he ironically declined to decide whether the society's round table reminded him of the one owned by King Arthur, or a modern cock-pit where ‘bloody fowl dispute’ – giving some indication of the lofty aims and raucous realities that fuelled these gatherings. Samwell was known to Welsh revivalists by his bardic name ‘Dafydd Ddu Feddyg’ (‘Dafydd the Black [i.e. dark-haired/complexioned] Doctor’), a bilingual poet and minor player in the revivalist Society of Gwyneddigion; but he was more widely renowned as a surgeon on Captain Cook's third voyage, and author of a famous account of Cook's death in conflict with Indigenous Hawaiians. It is appropriate, then, that the topic of Caractacan debate that night would involve another link between contemporary Welshness and Indigenous identity, namely the long-running controversy over Welsh claims to have ‘discovered’ and colonized America in the twelfth century, founding there a nation of so-called ‘Welsh Indians’. Samwell summed up the subject as follows:

One moon-light [sic] night it was decreed, To sift the tales that run; Concerning Owen Gwynedd's breed, Madog his gallant son.

Who, as our ancient bards explore, And histories a few; Found out America, before Columbus and his crew. (PH, p. 145)

This chapter will use Samwell's poem ‘The Padouca Hunt’ – named after a tribe supposed to be Madog's descendants – as a framework for investigating occasions when Welsh revivalism turned its gaze on the Indigenous peoples of Britain's wider empire.

INTRODUCTION

These trials originated with the illness of Sir George Maxwell, of Pollok House, south-west of Glasgow. On the morning of 14 October 1676, he was planning to visit the city. Prior to leaving, Sir George had called before him a servant, accusing him of having broken his orchard. The servant (whose name later emerged as Alan Dougal) admitted the offence, and added that Hugh Stewart, son of Janet Mathie, had been his accomplice. That night, Sir George fell ill and suffered for nearly seven weeks from pain in his right side. During his convalescence, an apparently deaf-mute girl aged 13, Janet Douglas, came to Pollok. Douglas identified Janet Mathie as having bewitched Maxwell, and led Maxwell's servants to Mathie's house where she ‘discovered’ a wax effigy, stuck with pins.

Janet Mathie was thus accused of witchcraft, along with two of her children: not Hugh, but her eldest son John Stewart, and their young sister Annabel Stewart, variously stated to be 12, 13 or 14 years old. Bessie Weir, Marjorie Craig and Margaret Jackson were also accused. Several of them were interrogated; Annabel Stewart seems to have been the first to confess, on 9 January 1677. Her confession brought demonology into the investigation. She confessed that she was present at a meeting in her mother's house, and that she saw a black man with white cuffs on his sleeves there. She had also been present at a meeting in her brother's house, where a ‘picture’ (effigy) of clay had been made. The stories of these two effigies, of wax and of clay, need to be distinguished in the testimonies. Later a third effigy, made of earth, was also mentioned.

From Appreciation to Attribution

Modern-day connoisseurship is essentially concerned with identifying an artist's “hand,” with determining “authorship.” Connoisseurship is premised on the idea of individual personality and assumes “that perfect identity of characteristics indicates identity of origin”—an assumption that is itself based on the definition of characteristics as “those features that distinguish one artist from another.” Interest in an artist's hand can be traced to Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, in which Giorgio Vasari distinguishes between good and indifferent work, and describes the methods, manners, processes, behavior, and ideas of his subjects. Vasari denoted all ways of working by the same term: maniera (manner). The word derived from the Latin manus (hand) and had originally been used to describe handwriting styles. Vasari believed that a painter's idiosyncratic manner could best be apprehended in passages executed with boldness and resolve when the painter did not follow nature too closely but relied more on his imagination and inborn talent. By calling attention to personal style and authorship, Vasari, himself a skilled and experienced connoisseur, imparted a powerful impulse to the ideology of attribution.

Courtiers, officials, local notables, and petitioners followed the royal progress as the new king Charles visited the West Country in the autumn of 1625 to inspect his troops and fleet assembled for the expedition against Cadiz. A scandal unfolded nearby as the royal party broke its homeward journey in Somerset to enjoy the generous hospitality laid on at Hinton St George by John Poulet (1586–1649), ‘of whose nobleness all men talk’. According to hostile testimony, steeped in local gossip, the gentleman lawyer Hugh Pyne (1570–1628) said to a neighbour who had seen the king at Hinton,

These were dangerous words, sotto voce, not necessarily accurate, and best not repeated. But Pyne allegedly dug an even deeper hole for himself with expressions that were scandalous, undutiful, and arguably treasonous. Perhaps later at table, perhaps in drink, certainly in private, he was reported saying of King Charles, ‘he is to be carried any whither’, and then fumed aloud, ‘before God, he is no more fit to be king than Hickwright’, referring to ‘an old simple fellow who was then Mr Pyne's shepherd’ – as if fitness had anything to do with a monarch's right to reign and rule.

13th May 2021

‘Unconstitutional, null and void.’

With these words – which would soon go down in national folklore – the High Court of Kenya brought an ambitious project of constitutional overhaul to a juddering halt.

The origins of the words lay four years in the past. The 2017 General Election had seen a close and bitter contest between the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his challenger Raila Odinga. The process had been so rife with irregularities that the Supreme Court of Kenya had taken the unprecedented step of declaring the election invalid and ordering a rerun. But a few weeks before the rerun, Raila Odinga stated that none of the reforms recommended by the Supreme Court had been implemented, and that he was, therefore, boycotting the second election. Kenyatta's re-election became a formality.

In office, President Kenyatta gradually moved towards political reconciliation. The public articulation of this was a famous handshake between the two erstwhile contenders, on the steps of Harambee House. The constitutional articulation was a proposed set of seventy-four amendments, collectively known as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Bill, which would be presented to the public as a package deal for constitutional reform. From altering the structure of the executive to increasing the number of constituencies, from creating a presidentially appointed judicial ombudsman to police reform, the BBI Bill contained a motley set of far-reaching changes to the Constitution.

The law of capture at sea probably had its beginnings in the eleventh century in the Mediterranean Il Consolato del Mare. This was a code of sea laws compiled by order of the ancient kings of Aragon. Originally written in the dialect of Catalonia, it has since been translated into every language of Europe. By this code, neutral goods in captured enemy ships were restored to their owners, and enemy goods in neutral ships could be seized, although neutral ships and neutral cargoes had to be restored. Encapsulated in this and recognised by all the States of Europe as a common instrument between them, was the question of prize, from the Old French ‘prise’ meaning ‘taken or seized’. In the Atlantic the Rôles d’Oléron, perhaps initiated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, were based on the maritime trade in wine from La Rochelle along the Atlantic coast from the end of the twelfth century, and were sanctioned by the immemorial usage and custom of the sea.

The earliest recorded judicial proceedings regarding the legality of capture of foreign goods or vessels took place in 1357, and later proclamations through the centuries repeated the basic principles of legal obligation preserved within the legal system. The laws of the sea were enshrined in Liber Niger Admiralitatis, originally in ancient French or Latin. The earliest manuscript version, held in the National Archives, dates from 1450. This was a medieval code of maritime law and included not just the Rolls of Oléron, but all the most important laws, ordinances, decisions and acts of the High Court of Admiralty. This code emerged as a separate entity probably after the battle of Sluys in 1340.

Institutions, like the materials contained within them, can have long histories of their own. Founded in 1613, the Bristol Library was not the first public library in Britain as was once assumed by its nineteenth-century librarian, being preceded by libraries in both Norwich (1608) and Ipswich (1612), but it could proudly boast of being one of only a couple of dozen active during the seventeenth century. Nor was it necessarily the first accessible library in Bristol, with one held and managed by the Guild of Kalendars at All Saints Church (see Map) and active from 1464. The earliest iteration of what would one day become Bristol Central Library began its existence as a small collection of books managed by the city's civic governance, the Corporation, on King Street, then situated on the western edge of the city close to an area of marsh. Throughout its history, this library existed within a wider ecosystem of public and private repositories and archives, including that of church, club, and university libraries. Over centuries, interactions across these institutions, whether motivated by civic benevolence or private interests, influenced the form, functions, building and collections of Bristol Central Library today. The first home of the Bristol Library was a ‘lodge’ on King Street, south of Bristol Bridge, donated to the city in 1613 by Robert Redwood, a local merchant, as a ‘place to put bookes for the furtherance of Learninge’. Redwood would augment his gift with a further bequest of ten pounds, in 1630, to fund the acquisition of books, but the earliest texts in the library were chiefly the donation of Tobias Matthew (c. 1544–1628), the Bristol-born Archbishop of York.

The act of reading literature or watching drama is partly also an act of (re-)construction: piecing together the meaning, or at least one possible meaning, of a literary or dramatic narrative, including constructing the fictional lives and history of that narrative's characters. In the case of Classical, medieval, and Early Modern texts, such interpretative reconstruction is usually dependent upon not just the reader's literary– critical judgement – a judgement Fiona Tolhurst so ably illustrated in everything she wrote — but also the textual–critical decisions of the editor who stands between the modern audience and the pre-modern artefact or manuscript. The manuscript editor and codicologist must also reconstruct meaning by recapturing or even reconstructing the voices of the past that are recorded in these manuscripts. In this sense, as Ralph Hanna notes, textual criticism is partly ‘an act of cultural recuperation’ that ‘attempts to effect an historical bridge between a lost productive past and a consuming present’. In the case of the textual and critical reception of Sir Thomas Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’, however, the bridge leading the modern reader to the medieval text is littered with warning signs. My current argument was written as a prefatory addendum to, and is not a précis or reproduction of, the work Tolhurst and I have been doing trying to recuperate Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’ and its most famous protagonists; by a happenstance of publishing timelines, however, this current chapter will appear in print as a preface to, or very close contemporary of, our previously finished ‘Trystram’ theses.

The sixain, expertly used by William Shakespeare and Robert Southwell in their bestselling works of poetry, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Saint Peters Complaint (1595), moved through the hands of an extraordinary multitude of poets in the early modern period, from the sacred to the profane. The six-line stanza form has become known for both its capacity to hold together the play of paradox and antithesis and its ability to test a poet's control of metre and metaphor. In this chapter I suggest that the sixain offers an ideal case study for thinking about what might make good and bad poetry and how we might connect critical judgements concerning the use and misuse of particular poetic forms to intertextual and marketable phenomena. In so doing, I build on recent work by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton that establishes a ‘genealogy of the sixain’ and contests the idea that the form is ‘Shakespearean’, as suggested by popular reference to it as the Venus and Adonis stanza; as they note, ‘between 1476 and 1603, some 2445 poems were written entirely or partly in this stanza (7.5% of the total poems published or transcribed in the period), confirming it as one of the most popular English verse forms’. In looking beyond the sixain's use in Venus and Adonis they propose recognition of a countertradition that associates the sixain with poetry written ‘in the complaint mode and expressing amatory (or religious) distress’.

In seeking to further the notion of a counter-history of poetic form, then, this chapter also builds on a research project led by Lukas Erne that had the aim of establishing a quantitative approach to the popularity of printed books of poetry during the period 1583–1622.

Menyetla: Individual agency, collective collapse

The menyetla described in this book demonstrate the agency of township residents who, far from being powerless and waiting for the delivery of constitutional promises, find ways in which to advance their interests. However, this book is no celebration of menyetla. Quite the opposite. I have used the term menyetla because it carries greater neutrality than the best English translation. But this is neutrality in terms of the lex lokasi. The impact of menyetla is not neutral but has consequences. A key point developed in the case studies is that menyetla provide short-term benefit for individuals, albeit accompanied by risk, but result in damaging long-term consequences for society when practised at scale.

Thus framed, we should reject the idea that menyetla should be applauded as challenging South Africa's inequality. By and large, the menyetla described do constitute distributional struggles within a complex configuration of class and race. But, as much as inequality is the fundamental fault line of South African society, the pursuit of these menyetla do not provide a viable response. Chapter 10 described the dramatic, if little reported, destruction of the Metrorail system as short-term gain trumped the long-term value of urban infrastructure serving the poor. The unchecked pursuit of menyetla leads not to transformation but disintegration.

The pursuit of menyetla reflects a collective action problem in which it is rational to pursue individual short-term interests even when this results in the undermining of social and economic institutions. Individuals, and confederacies, do what they can in the absence of leadership able to marshal progressive collective action.

In early 1323, abuses in the collection of taxes by the Flemish ruling elites had precipitated an uprising in coastal Flanders that soon spread from the countryside to other castellanies and urban centres like Bruges and Ypres, whose skilled artisans quickly made common cause with the rebellious peasantry. While some of the first rural riots were dispersed by the year's end, the general hatred felt towards the nobility, together with the pro-French stance of Louis I, count of Nevers (r.1322–46), who had recently succeeded his grandfather as count of Flanders, soon transformed this localised peasant insurrection into a full-scale rebellion supported by a much broader coalition drawn from across the social hierarchy. At first the rebels were mostly peasants but, by the end of 1323, they had been joined by a significant section of the urban nobility and artisanal classes. As townsmen and peasants fought alongside each other under the banner of Willem de Deken, the burgomaster of Bruges, the socially mixed insurgents quickly captured the cities of Nieuport, Veurne and Ypres. At Courtrai, they were even able to take Count Louis himself prisoner. In 1325, however, the rebels’ momentum diminished after their attempts to seize Ghent and Oudenaarde had failed despite two lengthy sieges. The king of France, Charles IV (r.1322–28), used this opportunity to intervene and negotiate the Peace of Arques, the terms of which included the release of the count of Flanders from captivity in February 1326. But the ceasefire broke down just a year later, prompting the rebels to take up arms once more.