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.

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.

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.

More sole survivors

I recently wrote about Randolph Murray's return to Edinburgh with the Blue Blanket after Flodden, the sole survivor of the City Band. There is, of course, a rather more famous sole survivor of Flodden associated with Selkirk. This individual is said to have returned to the town carrying with him a captured English banner which he cast down silently before the townsfolk. He then either collapsed from exhaustion or expired immediately, depending on which version of the story you happen to be reading. This event is marked every year in Selkirk as part of the Borders Commons Riding season. The banner itself survives to this day in Halliwell's House Museum in Selkirk, and is an English banner of the correct vintage, now known as the Macclesfield Banner
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]

Kothar the Barbarian Swordsman

I spent a few hours yesterday at the book festival in Edinburgh. This inevitably involves a great deal of sitting around waiting for things to happen, but that's okay, since you won't be at a loss for something to read.

Myself, I used the time to read Gardner Fox's Kothar the Barbarian, part of my ongoing interest in pulp science fiction & fantasy. I'd picked this one up a couple of years back in the Star Books edition shown above. This Australian mass mass market paperback edition was fairly cheap ca.1969 when it came out and is still fairly inexpensive on the second-hand market, so it wasn't a difficult book to acquire.

Gardner Fox was an amazingly proloific writer. As well as working full-time for DC Comics as a writer (amongst the things he created while there was Batman's famous Utility Belt), he published at least one novel a year, and sometimes many more. When DC got rid of him and many of their other veterans in 1968 (so that they didn't have to provide health insurance for their older staff workers), he sought out other markets.

One of these other markets was TSR's games magazine The Dragon, which published his Niall of the Far Travels short stories from the mid-70s onwards. This was where I first encountered his writings as a young Dungeons and Dragons fan. At the time, I was completely unaware of his other work, so it was only much later that I realised how important a writer he had been for the creators of D&D, and the likely reason he had been asked to write for The Dragon to begin with (he also created a boardgame for TSR during this period–he really was a polymath).

I'm not going to claim that these stories about a humongous northern barbarian and his magic sword Frostfire are great art or especially innovative. Indeed, they're filled with the cliches of the genre with seductive witches, rubies the size of pigeons' eggs, low taverns and high body counts. However, what they do have is a tremendous energy as Kothar battles his way from encounter to fabulous encounter and a heavy sprinkling of that elusive 'sense of wonder' that fans so crave. If you're a player of D&D, you'll also notice a few ideas that Gygax & Arneson took straight from the Kothar stories and incorporated in their game.

In short, I enjoyed this and will be looking to read the other four books in the series. None of them seem to be especially cheap, so it may be a while before I find them at a price I like. Wish me luck!

Flodden and the Blue Blanket

A fierce migraine has been afflicting me all week, but I managed (just) to find time to visit the exhibition on "Flodden and the Blue Blanket" at the Trades Maiden Hospital in Edinburgh.

The Blue Blanket in question is the standard granted to the Hammermen of Edinburgh under which the Edinburgh Trades would muster in time of war. It wasn't unique–the Edinburgh Merchants had a Blue Blanket too, and so did the merchants and tradesmen of other Scottish burghs. Over time, the Hammermen themselves have had many Blue Blankets, regularly laying up worn colours and replacing them with fresh ones. This Blue Blanket in the Trades Maiden Hospital is believed to be late 17th century, and the oldest surviving example.

No photography was permitted, quite rightly, but I have posted an image of the flag at the to give an idea of its original appearance. Nowadays, there is almost none of that bright azure colour remaining, and the flag is a ghostly white, but it remains an impressive piece of Edinburgh history.

Much of the exhibition concentrates on Flodden, one of Scotland's greatest debacles, in a country famous for its debacles. The Edinburgh Trades contingent fought under their own banner at the battle and were essentially destroyed during it. The flag, now tattered and torn, was somehow rescued from the battlefield by Randolph Murray, captain and sole survivor of the Edinburgh City Band (the town watch), who carried it back to the capital with the news of Scotland's defeat.

The exhibition collected together several different depictions of Murray's arrival in Edinburgh on his wounded horse (above), carrying with him the Blue Blanket. The event also featured in William Edmondstoune Aytoun's "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers", a phenomenally succesful poetry collection in its day. The poem which you can read here, "Edinburgh After Flodden" while very much a piece of its time still has a little of that blood and thunder to shake the reader.

Lochleven Castle

It seems to be Mary Queen of Scots Year this year, at least for me. Earlier this year, I visited Tutbury Castle down in Staffordshire, one of the places where Mary was imprisoned during her time in England. It was apparently very run-down when the queen was there, and has gone only downhill since. Then in July I went to the National Museum of Scotland's imaginatively named temporary exhibition "Mary, Queen of Scots", which certainly did what it said on the tin. And then, a couple of days after that, I found myself on the way to another castle where the queen had been imprisoned, Lochleven Castle.

Here's a shot of the suviving parts of Tutbury Castle–there was a 1940s living history event being held there over the bank holiday weekend, and you can see some part of that going on in front of the best preserved parts of the structure. The building on the right is now used as a museum and tea shop and it was rather nice to stop there for a coffee and a cake on a bright summer's day.

Lochleven Castle is quite a different kettle of fish. For a start, it's in the middle of Loch Leven. The island is a lot bigger than it was in the 16th century because the loch has been partially drained since then. When Mary was here, the water came up almost to the base of the castle walls. The modern island is much larger and now pleasantly wooded.

It's also only accessible by a tiny ferry from Kinross. It can carry 12 passengers and runs every 15 minutes. Well, supposedly. If you follow Historic Scotland's Twitter feed, you'll have noticed that the service gets cancelled a lot, especially in high winds. There wasn't much in the way of wind on the day I was there, and apart from the wake of the ferry, the surface was as still as a mill-pond.

Looking from the curtain wall over to the tower house where Mary was held prisoner. You can see that the main entrance to the house is rather high, on the second floor rather than the first. Nowadays you can also enter at ground level.

Mary spent nearly a year here, before escaping in  male disguise aboard a boat that had been stolen by some of her supporters. Sadly for the queen, there was no tea-room to welcome her at the loch's edge as there is today, and things continued to get worse from then on, defeated in battle at Langside, forced to flee England, imprisoned by her cousin and then finally executed. When I was a student at the University of Edinburgh, one of the lecturers in Scottish history liked to call the story of the Stuart Dynasty a soap-opera and Mary's episodes are surely among the most dramatic. But as for me, it's time to go back to Kinross for a bite to eat and an ice-cream before my journey home to Livingston.