Sunday 17 November 2013
The World at War
I've been watching the World at War Ultimate Restored edition, starting with the extras. Just finished watching an episode length piece to camera from Jeremy Isaacs about the approaches taken by the team who worked on the series all those years ago, and during which I kept thinking about how much he sounds like Ivor Cutler. Very mellow, that Glasgwegian-Jewish accent.
Monday 4 November 2013
A contemporary view of the King of Scots
What's probably the best contemporary description of James IV, King of Scots was that penned by the Spanish ambassador to Scotland, Don Pedro de Ayala in 1498. It begins with a description of the king himself.
“The king is twenty-five years and some months old. He is of noble stature, neither tall nor short, and as hand- some in complexion and shape as a man can be. His address is very agreeable. He speaks the following foreign languages : Latin, very well ; French, German, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish ; Spanish as well as the Marquis, but he pronounces it more distinctly. He likes very much to receive Spanish letters. His own Scotch language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian. The king speaks, besides, the language of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland and on the islands. It is as different from Scotch as Biscayan is from Castilian. His knowledge of languages is wonderful. He is well read in the Bible and in some other devout books. He is a good historian. He has read many Latin and French histories, and profited by them, as he has a very good memory. He never cuts his hair or his beard. It becomes him very well.”
He also praises the king's piety, character and courage, giving a glowing recommendation to his rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. It's best to take this with a pinch of salt–Ayala was trying to promote James as a potential husband for one of the Spanish princesses, after all and would gain status from organising such a match. However, he's spot on when he describes what was to become James' fatal flaw.
“He is courageous, even more so than a king should be. I am a good witness of it. I have seen him often undertake most dangerous things in the last wars. I sometimes clung to his skirts and succeeded in keeping him back. On such occasions he does not take the least care of himself. He is not a good captain, because he begins to fight before he has given his orders. He said to me that his subjects serve him with their persons and goods, in just and unjust quarrels, exactly as he likes, and that, therefore, he does not think it right to begin any warlike undertaking without being himself the first in danger.”
From one point of view, this can be seen as an admirable character trait. Leading from the front and taking the same risks as the men you command are still vital to leadership in modern armies: but for a king, whose death would inevitably lead to a massive political crisis, the considerations are different. At Flodden, James' decision to go down into the marshy dip and to take personal command of the troubled pikemen there led not only to his own death, but also to many years of of political instability and continual warfare in Scotland.
“The king is twenty-five years and some months old. He is of noble stature, neither tall nor short, and as hand- some in complexion and shape as a man can be. His address is very agreeable. He speaks the following foreign languages : Latin, very well ; French, German, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish ; Spanish as well as the Marquis, but he pronounces it more distinctly. He likes very much to receive Spanish letters. His own Scotch language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian. The king speaks, besides, the language of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland and on the islands. It is as different from Scotch as Biscayan is from Castilian. His knowledge of languages is wonderful. He is well read in the Bible and in some other devout books. He is a good historian. He has read many Latin and French histories, and profited by them, as he has a very good memory. He never cuts his hair or his beard. It becomes him very well.”
He also praises the king's piety, character and courage, giving a glowing recommendation to his rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. It's best to take this with a pinch of salt–Ayala was trying to promote James as a potential husband for one of the Spanish princesses, after all and would gain status from organising such a match. However, he's spot on when he describes what was to become James' fatal flaw.
“He is courageous, even more so than a king should be. I am a good witness of it. I have seen him often undertake most dangerous things in the last wars. I sometimes clung to his skirts and succeeded in keeping him back. On such occasions he does not take the least care of himself. He is not a good captain, because he begins to fight before he has given his orders. He said to me that his subjects serve him with their persons and goods, in just and unjust quarrels, exactly as he likes, and that, therefore, he does not think it right to begin any warlike undertaking without being himself the first in danger.”
From one point of view, this can be seen as an admirable character trait. Leading from the front and taking the same risks as the men you command are still vital to leadership in modern armies: but for a king, whose death would inevitably lead to a massive political crisis, the considerations are different. At Flodden, James' decision to go down into the marshy dip and to take personal command of the troubled pikemen there led not only to his own death, but also to many years of of political instability and continual warfare in Scotland.
Monday 21 October 2013
The Scottish Moors
I'm now back home from my trip to Morocco and am completely exhausted by the experience. There were just too many early rises and long bus journeys for me. But at least I got to see a bit of Moulay Ismail's Meknes and the former pirate base at Essaouira. I also have no further excuse for not writing something about the Moors at the court of James IV, the first identifiable black people in Scotland since the creation of the nation in 843.
Much of what we know about these black courtiers comes from the accounts kept by James IV's Lord High Treasurer, which begin to mention Moors at the court from 1501 onwards, when a payment to 'the Moreyn' of 15s 4d is noted as having been made. More payments, often to named individual Moors followed- see here and here.
Of course, Moors were not necessarily black, and in 16th century Scotland, a 'black man' would more usually refer to a man with black hair, but there are good reasons to suppose that these Moors were of recent sub-Saharan African origin. Where we can trace the origins of the Moors, it seems that they all came out of Portugal, whether found aboard Portuguese ships taken as prizes by the Barton brothers, or brought directly from Iberia by William Wood. Traditionally, slaves in Portugal had been of Iberian Muslim origins, but by the end of the 15th century there were few of these left and they had been supplanted almost entirely by black Africans.
It was also a time when black servants and courtiers were quite fashionable in European courts and in a way in which Berber or Iberian Muslim slaves were not. They brought an exotic touch to the court, and one that demonstrated the universal reach of the king's power and the cosmopolitan nature of the court – and James IV was not the kind of man to be seen as being behind the times.
From the 15th century onwards, we have plenty of depictions of black servants and courtiers from other European courts, but none survive from the court of James IV, though I feel that it was likely that some would have been made. However, we do know from other sources how keen the king was to display his black Moors to the public. In the summer of 1507, an extraordinary pageant was held at Edinburgh to celebrate the birth of the king's son and heir, James, Duke of Rothesay, now known as the "Tournament of the Wild Knight and the Black Lady". In this pageant, the king, in the guise of the Wild Knight, jousted in the cause of the Black Lady, probably played by one of the two Moorish ladies in the household of Lady Margaret Stewart. The 'Moor lass' dressed in a 'gown of damask flowered with gold and fringed in green and yellow taffeta' was borne to the tournament in a 'chair triumphal", probably carried by Scotsmen with blackened skin. Upon the king's victory, she rewarded him with a symbolic kiss.
The tournament was such a success that it was repeated the next year, despite the death of the infant Duke of Rothesay on the meantime. The two tournaments were the two most expensive and flamboyant ever held during the reign of James IV, and the Black Lady herself was immortalised in verse by the makar William Dunbar, the greatest of that era. The poem itself 'Ane blak More [My ladye with the mekle lippis]' belongs to the Scottish flyting tradition, and so is far from complimentary. Be that as it may, it does immortalise one of the earliest black Scots.
Lang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt
That landet furth of the last schippis
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Much of what we know about these black courtiers comes from the accounts kept by James IV's Lord High Treasurer, which begin to mention Moors at the court from 1501 onwards, when a payment to 'the Moreyn' of 15s 4d is noted as having been made. More payments, often to named individual Moors followed- see here and here.
Of course, Moors were not necessarily black, and in 16th century Scotland, a 'black man' would more usually refer to a man with black hair, but there are good reasons to suppose that these Moors were of recent sub-Saharan African origin. Where we can trace the origins of the Moors, it seems that they all came out of Portugal, whether found aboard Portuguese ships taken as prizes by the Barton brothers, or brought directly from Iberia by William Wood. Traditionally, slaves in Portugal had been of Iberian Muslim origins, but by the end of the 15th century there were few of these left and they had been supplanted almost entirely by black Africans.
It was also a time when black servants and courtiers were quite fashionable in European courts and in a way in which Berber or Iberian Muslim slaves were not. They brought an exotic touch to the court, and one that demonstrated the universal reach of the king's power and the cosmopolitan nature of the court – and James IV was not the kind of man to be seen as being behind the times.
From the 15th century onwards, we have plenty of depictions of black servants and courtiers from other European courts, but none survive from the court of James IV, though I feel that it was likely that some would have been made. However, we do know from other sources how keen the king was to display his black Moors to the public. In the summer of 1507, an extraordinary pageant was held at Edinburgh to celebrate the birth of the king's son and heir, James, Duke of Rothesay, now known as the "Tournament of the Wild Knight and the Black Lady". In this pageant, the king, in the guise of the Wild Knight, jousted in the cause of the Black Lady, probably played by one of the two Moorish ladies in the household of Lady Margaret Stewart. The 'Moor lass' dressed in a 'gown of damask flowered with gold and fringed in green and yellow taffeta' was borne to the tournament in a 'chair triumphal", probably carried by Scotsmen with blackened skin. Upon the king's victory, she rewarded him with a symbolic kiss.
The tournament was such a success that it was repeated the next year, despite the death of the infant Duke of Rothesay on the meantime. The two tournaments were the two most expensive and flamboyant ever held during the reign of James IV, and the Black Lady herself was immortalised in verse by the makar William Dunbar, the greatest of that era. The poem itself 'Ane blak More [My ladye with the mekle lippis]' belongs to the Scottish flyting tradition, and so is far from complimentary. Be that as it may, it does immortalise one of the earliest black Scots.
Lang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt
That landet furth of the last schippis
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Friday 20 September 2013
All at sea
With yesterday being Talk Like a Pirate Day, I found myself thinking of the famous Scottish privateer Sir Andrew Barton, the villain of Child Ballad 167, Andrew Bartin.
To cut a long ballad short, Sir Andrew had been given a letter of marque by King James IV of Scotland, allowing him to carry out attacks on Portuguese shipping. Since Portugal was England's oldest ally, Henry VIII of England charged Sir Edward Howard and his brother Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk to rid the seas of this menace. This they do, but only after a vicious sea battle in which Sir Andrew is slain, though not before declaiming that he's not dead, it's only a flesh wound:
‘Fight on, fight on, my merry men all,
A little I am hurt, yet not slain;
I’le but lie down and bleed a while,
And come and fight with you again.
It's worth remarking here that this is the same Thomas Howard who, as Lord High Admiral of England who led the men of the English fleet to fight at Flodden. Everything's connected.
To cut a long ballad short, Sir Andrew had been given a letter of marque by King James IV of Scotland, allowing him to carry out attacks on Portuguese shipping. Since Portugal was England's oldest ally, Henry VIII of England charged Sir Edward Howard and his brother Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk to rid the seas of this menace. This they do, but only after a vicious sea battle in which Sir Andrew is slain, though not before declaiming that he's not dead, it's only a flesh wound:
‘Fight on, fight on, my merry men all,
A little I am hurt, yet not slain;
I’le but lie down and bleed a while,
And come and fight with you again.
It's worth remarking here that this is the same Thomas Howard who, as Lord High Admiral of England who led the men of the English fleet to fight at Flodden. Everything's connected.
Saturday 14 September 2013
The Death of Richard III
I went to a talk on the final minutes of Richard III in Cramond Village Hall this morning. This was an updated version of the talk that Bob Woosnam-Savage, Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries in Leeds had given at the Leicester conference on March 2nd this year.
It's quite remarkable how the king's skeleton keeps providing more information for investigators. Part of this is because we know more about the lifestyle and status of Richard than we do about most of the people that archaeologists are usually able to study, and part because we know about the particular circumstances of his death.
As an example, we know that there's no possibility of Richard having been struck by arrows, but his skull had injuries of a type identified as arrow wounds by the team who worked on the Towton dig. These wounds now look much more likely to have been inflicted by daggers, evidence of close-up and personal fighting.
Also worthy of mention are the roundworms that were found in the area of the king's abdomen, and the proposed study of the plaque on his teeth which might reveal what he had been eating in the weeks or days before his death. Archaeological science is progressing very fast these days!
A couple of other things worthy of mention are that the Bosworth battlefield is yielding a large amount of shot, more than any other European battlefield site yet examined, indicating that there were far more cannon and handgonnes in use in the 15th century than the historical sources mention, and that the account of Richard's death recorded by Jean Molinet fits the information now being given up by the king's skeleton far more closely than any of the other sources and needs to be reassessed in the light of this.
It's quite remarkable how the king's skeleton keeps providing more information for investigators. Part of this is because we know more about the lifestyle and status of Richard than we do about most of the people that archaeologists are usually able to study, and part because we know about the particular circumstances of his death.
As an example, we know that there's no possibility of Richard having been struck by arrows, but his skull had injuries of a type identified as arrow wounds by the team who worked on the Towton dig. These wounds now look much more likely to have been inflicted by daggers, evidence of close-up and personal fighting.
Also worthy of mention are the roundworms that were found in the area of the king's abdomen, and the proposed study of the plaque on his teeth which might reveal what he had been eating in the weeks or days before his death. Archaeological science is progressing very fast these days!
A couple of other things worthy of mention are that the Bosworth battlefield is yielding a large amount of shot, more than any other European battlefield site yet examined, indicating that there were far more cannon and handgonnes in use in the 15th century than the historical sources mention, and that the account of Richard's death recorded by Jean Molinet fits the information now being given up by the king's skeleton far more closely than any of the other sources and needs to be reassessed in the light of this.
Saturday 7 September 2013
Over at the National Library of Scotland website there's a fascinating collection of more than 1800 scanned and transcribed broadsides called The Word on the Street. It covers more than two and a half centuries of events from the 1650s right up to the 1910s.
More than half of the broadsides are ballads on topics of every kind, accidents, wars, crime and criminals, and so on, but the one that caught my eye today was this one, on the execution of David Myles, hanged in Edinburgh for the crime of incest on 27th November 1702.
The content isn't especially unusual for broadsides of this kind, consisting mostly of Myles confessing his sins from the scaffold and giving 'satisfaction' to the onlookers, unlike his sister, hanged the previous week for incest and infanticide. The interest lies in something rather more gruesome. David Myles was to be the subject of Edinburgh's Incorporation of Surgeons' first public dissection.
To advance the science of anatomy and the study of medicine, the Incorporation had constructed a new anatomy theatre in 1697 and secured an agreement from the Town Council to supply them with the corpse of one executed criminal each year for the purposes of public dissection. Over the course of a week, Myles' body was dissected by a series of experts on surgery and anatomy, concluding on the 8th day with an epilogue delivered by Archibald Pitcairne, one of the great physicians of the day, and who had been professor of medicine at Leiden before returning to Edinburgh. This public dissection was quite important for the teaching of anatomy in Edinburgh, and so the Incorporation didn't dispose of Myles's corpse in the usual fashion, but retained it in the form of an anatomical preparation. And so it is that over three centuries on, he can still be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
Monday 2 September 2013
More sole survivors
But what was this solitary rider's name? There is a statue outside the Victoria Halls in Selkirk, erected in 1913 to mark the 400th anniversary of the battle, known as the Fletcher monument (above), following a local tradition that his name was Fletcher. Walter Elliot, that tireless collector of Borders lore, has remarked that there are no contemporary records of a sole survivor of whatever name returning to Selkirk with the banner nor was anyone of that surname mentioned as living in or near the town in the period.
A different tradition records that the sole survivor was the town clerk Sir William Brydon,fletcher by trade, who had led the men of Selkirk at Flodden and who was knighted by James V in 1535 for his actions there. Sadly, this also appears to be untrue. Brydon does appear in contemporary documents and was indeed the town clerk in 1513, but in not mentioned as having a Flodden connection. Some documents do indeed style him "Sir William Brydon", but not as "Sir William Brydon, knight", which means that he was a priest of some sort.
It's not impossible that he fought at Flodden–other priests certainly did, and there is still a sword extant that is said to have belonged to him–but there's no contemporary record of this either. So, perhaps the truths of the sole survivor story are artistic rather than historical.
This is a shame, because otherwise it would be a nice piece of synchronicity. There is another very well-documented case of a sole survivor of a disastrous military expedition, a Scottish surgeon who arrived at Jalalabad on the 13th of January 1842 to report the total destruction of the army commanded by General Elphinstone during the famous Retreat from Kabul, part of the First Afghan War. And the name of this man, commemorated in Lady Butler's Remnants of an Army (below)?
It was William Brydon.
[pictures from Wikipedia Commons]
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