This is an investigation into an element of naval history which took place nearly three hundred years ago. It arose out of a study made of the thirty-seven men ‘made post’ or promoted to the rank of captain in 1757, just after the declaration of war between Britain and France. More than six thousand letters were written by these men to the Admiralty during their careers, and these were photographed and transcribed. These letters brought closer their hopes and fears, their triumphs and tragedies, their successes and failures. Although the letters were very formulaic, the characters and personalities of the writers became familiar. A great deal was learned about the strengths and weaknesses of ‘the service’, as it was known to those whose voices were recorded.

It was also clear that the officer corps from which the tranche was drawn had been created by changes brought about by administrators such as Samuel Pepys. In the seventeenth century, gentlemen who went to sea were not professionals – until Pepys's introduction of a passing certificate made certain that every lieutenant was professionally qualified. Pepys went further:

Were it not to be wished that the seaman's trade be made so honourable and profitable that not only the younger brothers of England might be encouraged to seek their fortunes that way … but that even the elder might esteem it for the dignity of it.

Officers’ pay rates were established in 1700 and remained unchanged throughout the eighteenth century, until the mutinies of the fleet in the 1790s changed the way the Royal Navy was paid. Officers were paid by the day: admirals who were also commander-in-chief £5, admirals £3 10s, vice admirals £2 10s, rear admirals £1 15s.

INTRODUCTION

Barbara Bowndie, living in Kirkwall in Orkney, was accused of witchcraft and interrogated before the presbytery in 1643. She was accused in a linked trial, being denounced for witchcraft by another woman. Bowndie's case had a prehistory, and it is necessary to go back to 1642 to see why she came under suspicion of witchcraft. In that year, the presbytery began enquiring into the alleged witchcraft of Marjorie Paplay, whose name would repeatedly be linked with Bowndie's for the next few years. The minister of Shapinsay, Henry Smith, raised the initial case against Paplay; as we shall see, this would spark off a complex local power struggle. The case against Bowndie started during this struggle in November 1643.

When Bowndie was ‘incarcerat for witchcraft’ late in 1643, this was the worst year of witchcraft accusations in Orkney, and a national panic was going on in mainland Scotland. She mentioned several demonological ideas in her confession: witches’ meetings, dancing at witches’ meetings, the Devil in diverse shapes, sexual intercourse with the Devil, destruction of corn fields with the help of the Devil, and denunciation of several women suspected to be witches. She was first interrogated informally, in a ‘privat’ questioning by ministers and a ruling elder, and five days later was formally interrogated before the presbytery. She confessed during the informal interrogation, and retracted her confession later. The formal interrogation consisted of nine points which all related to the Devil, use of demonic witchcraft or witches’ meetings. Bowndie now denied all points, and refused to denounce other women. Then several witnesses gave their declarations, much of which concerned what had happened during her imprisonment. It became clear that she had been offered means to hang herself.

Cours d’instrumentation considéré sous les rapports poétiques et philosophiques de l’art. Par M. Georges Kastner.

Writing this review of Kastner's Instrumentation treated according to poetical and philosophical aspects of the art may have inspired Berlioz to write his own treatise; in places the review reads almost like a preliminary draft.

M. Kastner, whose compositions deserve to be better known in Paris, has already made a place for himself among competent, conscientious theorists through his Traité général d’instrumentation, a quite different work which is the indispensable introduction to the work under review. In the Traité general indeed, the author has confined himself to explaining clearly the range and capacities of each instrument, and if the Conservatoire has been quick to adopt it for classes in composition, this has been entirely reasonable, given that not only pupils but many justly celebrated teachers needed to learn from it facts of which they were unaware.

I should never have believed, if experience had not furnished me with unarguable proofs, the curious ideas several great composers harboured in this area barely a decade ago. One of them, whom I knew well, was so ignorant that he was wholly unaware of the range of the flute. I’d already noticed several times that his parts for wind instruments were cut short in the treble, when their upward movement would have meant the flute part going above g. When I asked him why, he replied that he stopped there because the instrument couldn't play any higher.

Our objective in this chapter is to analyse the data extracted from the manuscript texts written in English in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, since those in Latin cannot provide any linguistic evidence of provenance. We aim to (1) identify the linguistic features of each of the texts in the manuscript; (2) compare them with the features of each of the texts copied by the same scribe to determine what each scribe's individual repertoire might have been; and (3) attempt to localise an assemblage of features for each scribe comparing this information with the localised sources in The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English by applying the ‘fit’-technique. The ultimate objective is to establish, as far as possible, the likely linguistic provenance of the contributors to Brogyntyn ii.1.

Among the fifty-one entries copied in English, thirty-two are in verse, seventeen are prose, and two contain both verse and prose. For our purposes, the distinction among text types is relevant since poetic texts are more likely to retain linguistic features from earlier copies to preserve the rhyme and rhythm or other prosodic features. Thus, our data need to be analysed considering the type of text in which they occur. The subject matter is less relevant, although some topics provide more diagnostic lexical items than others; likewise, the type of narrative will determine the verb tenses used. In this miscellany, the length of texts varies considerably. The shortest entry in the collection has forty-six words (entry 50), and the longest has c. 10,122 words (entry 33).

In a 2017 post on the popular science website Edge.org, Steven Pinker provides an answer to the question, ‘What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?’ as follows:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases… Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.

Pinker's acknowledgement of this forbidding state of affairs (one which, on a bad day, might apply to any number of long-term scientific or scholarly enterprises, not excluding musicology in Ireland), is not, however, and end but a beginning, at least insofar as it leads him to a conclusion which is as transcendent and optimistic as it is far-reaching and (proverbially) universal:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

Human life as a rearguard action against the otherwise overwhelming and inevitable disintegration of the universe may not be to everyone's taste as an implicit principle of behaviour, but the resilience of this principle has a long history, even if it is not often formulated with such lapidary (not to say optimistic) grace, and especially not at the present moment, when the rage for order in human affairs is so violently contested and endangered.

In 1701, probably after the death of the exiled James II in France in September, a serious political conflict broke out in a high church Tory family. The political drama that unfolded between Samuel Wesley (bap. 1662–1735), a parson who recanted his refusal to swear new oaths of allegiance in 1689, and his wife Susanna (1669–1742), a woman educated by her learned father Samuel Annesley and persistently upholding Nonjuring Jacobitism, is in many ways similar to post-1704 Reform Comedy. Like the father and children in Cibber's The Non-Juror, Samuel and Susanna were equally adamant about their own political principles and as eager as each other to reform their spouse’s. One evening at their family prayers, Susanna said ‘Amen’ to all parts except that for King William. Samuel noticed and later questioned her about this in private. Dissatisfied with her response, Samuel ‘immediately kneeled down’ and swore not to sleep with Susanna again before she ‘had begged God's pardon and his, for not saying Amen to the prayer for the K[in]g’. And Samuel prayed for ‘Divine Vengeance upon himself and all his posterity’ if he should break his vow. Fearing that succumbing to her husband's demand might doom her soul to hell, Susanna ‘represented to him the unlawfulness and unreasonableness of his oath’ but to no avail. Since that night, Samuel forsook her bed and, perhaps for this reason, left Epworth for London for more than eight months.

As in The Lady's Last Stake, the collision of the active reform strategies led Samuel and Susanna to consider finding someone to arbitrate their dispute, but they, unlike Lord and Lady Wronglove, could not even agree on this issue.

On the first folio of the only extant manuscript of Hary's Wallace (NLS Adv. MS 19.2.2), a (presumably) sixteenth-century reader has left an enigmatic doodle (Fig. 4). Alongside the opening lines of Hary's poem there exists an image of a tower with what appears to be a ladder leaning against it. We know nothing of the context of the sketch and one explanation is that it represents a scaffold unrelated to the text the manuscript contains. Nevertheless, as I discussed in Chapter 1, the ladder had distinct associations with memory and with the depiction of vices and virtues. It is tempting to speculate that this doodle might demonstrate a direct response to Hary's text. In sketching this ladder alongside Hary's own calls to ‘hald in mynde’ the ‘nobille worthi deid’ of ‘our antecessowris’ (Wall. 1.1–2), did the impromptu illustrator signal their recognition of, or desire to remember, the virtues of the late fourteenth-century Scots and the vices of the ‘ald Ennemys’ (the English) who sought to ‘hald Scotlande at wndyr’ (Wall. 1.7, 13)? That, of course, is an impossible question to answer; however, what I want to consider in this chapter are the ways in which the late fifteenth-century poet known to us as Hary seeks to recollect events of the first Scottish War of Independence at a critical moment of Anglo- Scottish relations during the reign of James III. Hary's Wallace, composed c. 1475 and surviving in a manuscript from 1488, recounts the life and deeds of William Wallace. The poem acts as a commemoration of Wallace as a national hero: a textual memorial to the man whom Hary depicts as the saviour of Scotland.

Three days later, a telegram came: “Arriving on noon steamer. Egon.” And even though the preceding days had been filled with airing and cleaning, shifting and straightening, the zeal of preparation was now redoubled. Countess Judith was to have the rooms next to her brother’s, while for Egon, as on earlier visits, they prepared the small room at the top of the old tower, whose lower part was entirely taken up by a staircase. Egon, when he stayed here, delighted in going up to the observation platform to take in the magnificent prospect of the lake from there. The old count viewed this as “German Romanticism,” and made fun of it, even though he was susceptible to other things which were more romantic yet.

And now the day of their arrival had dawned. Franziska rose early and made one more inspection, ending in the tower room. She was about to return to her quarters through the great dining room when she noticed Hannah, standing on the balcony opposite the old chapel, and looking intently at something happening in the courtyard.

“What is it?” Franziska asked. But Hannah only made a half-mysterious gesture, beckoning her to approach as silently as possible, and when Franziska complied, she saw a pigeon struggling to unwind a large ball of yarn lying in the middle of the courtyard, where one of the maids apparently had forgotten it.

Medievalist Jaques le Goff once pointed out, discussing ideas of empire and its survival throughout time, ‘the world in every age had one heart; the rest of the universe lived according to its rhythm and impulse alone’. This idea of the empire as a living being that evolves, transforms, and even migrates for security and survival was at the core of what King Alfonso X believed to be the main reason for his imperial dream.

The empire, as an institution, had created a sense of continuity throughout the centuries. During the Middle Ages, the notion of empire took the shape of an everlasting and permanent agent that was considered the highest level of temporal power. By changing and adapting to the needs of time, it became an institution always present in the political imagination. The concept, coined during this period, that gave a name to this idea of passing on and continuity is the so-called Translatio Imperii, in which the engine for historical evolution is, precisely, the transfer of the imperium, or imperial power.

The Staufen dynasty made an exemplary use of this concept to legitimise their belonging to the imperial throne, as was discussed in previous pages. By associating themselves with the empire, and therefore with the abstract idea of the Translatio Imperii, the decision of imperial succession was taken out of the hands of the Pope, and the empire became an ‘inherited’ institution, succession to which included the one and only Alfonso X.

INTRODUCTION

This notorious trial arose from the alleged demonic possession of Christian Shaw, daughter of the laird of Bargarran, in 1696–7. A number of witches were accused of afflicting her. The documents edited below are the record of the trial of Katherine Campbell, Margaret Fulton, Margaret Laing, James Lindsay alias Curate, John Lindsay alias Bishop, John Lindsay in Barloch, and Agnes Nasmith. The trial, which was held under the authority of a commission of justiciary granted by the privy council, took place in Paisley between 14 April and 19 May 1697, with some preliminary proceedings in Renfrew on 18 March. All seven were convicted, and they were executed in Paisley on 10 June 1697. An eighth suspect, John Reid, hanged himself in prison on 21 May.

The case has attracted attention from scholars, partly because of the wealth of documentation that it generated, and partly because of the interest attaching to Christian Shaw's bizarre behaviour. It has been the subject of a fictionalised but well-researched book by Isabel Adam, and has been discussed in several other recent studies. Brian Levack has discussed demonic possession in this and other related cases. Michael Wasser has set the case in the broader context of a subsequent, related panic in the Glasgow area in 1699. The trial documents edited below have never been published before, however.

The case formed the subject of two contemporary printed narratives: A Relation of the Diabolical Practices of Above Twenty Wizards and Witches of the Sheriffdom of Renfrew in the Kingdom of Scotland (1697), and A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girl (1698).