Shadow of the Raven

by Tessa Harris

  seventeen thousand acres in just over a sennight in Virginia: In 1750, John Buchanan, the deputy surveyor of Augusta County, reported that his party had surveyed eight tracts totaling seventeen thousand acres in just fifteen working days.

  enclosure: Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, landowners began fencing off land previously available for common use. During the eighteenth century, enclosures were regulated by Parliament; a separate Act of Enclosure was required for each village.

  Euclid: Euclid of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician who is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He lived around 300 BC.

  mariner’s black spot: Although now in popular culture thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, published in 1883, the black spot might owe its origin to the historical tradition of Caribbean pirates showing an ace of spades to a person condemned as traitor or informer.

  sawpit: Several depressions can still be found in Chiltern woodlands, indicating disused pits.

  a murder of crows: According to an old folktale, crows will gather to judge the capital fate of another. Their appearance was also thought to be an omen of death by some.

  Chapter 2

  Bethlem Hospital: Bethlem Royal Hospital, to give it its full name, was originally founded in 1247 but did not begin to treat the insane until the fourteenth century. In 1676, the hospital moved from the site of what is now Liverpool Street station, London, to a magnificent baroque building designed by Robert Hooke, at Moorfields. The hospital moved to its third site in 1815 and now forms part of the Imperial War Museum.

  elaborate carvings: A detailed description of Bethlem in 1786 is given by Sophie von La Roche, a European lady who kept a diary of her travels.

  Newgate Prison: The prison had to be completely rebuilt following the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reopened in 1782.

  Primum non nocerum: Translated as “first do no harm,” the phrase does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath but in the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of work containing around sixty medical treatises.

  Chapter 3

  hanging: During the eighteenth century there were fifty-six public executions at Oxford Castle, for crimes ranging from sheep stealing and arson to spying.

  Amersham: A day’s ride northwest of London, the Chiltern town was a natural resting place for men and horses. By the late 1770s there were no fewer than seventeen licenses granted to innkeepers and alehouse keepers.

  Tyburn: The site of London’s gallows was moved from Tyburn to Newgate in 1783. Executions were carried out outside the prison.

  clustered ’round the dead men’s feet: The death sweat from a hanged person allegedly had the power to cure scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.

  the High: Locally the main street in Oxford is often known as the High.

  the Jolly Trooper: Now known as the Bear, the inn is one of Oxford’s oldest, but the present building, just opposite Bear Lane, was built in the early seventeenth century as the residence of the coaching inn’s ostler. It was converted into a separate tavern, the Jolly Trooper, in 1774.

  an Act of Enclosure: Originally, enclosures of land took place through informal agreement; however, during the seventeenth century the practice of enclosing land, that is, fencing it off, required authorization by an Act of Parliament. Most attempts by landlords went unchallenged, although some caused discontent and riots.

  compensation: Although commoners were usually compensated for their losses, they were often given smaller holdings or inferior-quality land or allowed to remain only on the condition that they fence their allotment at their own expense.

  stint: The fee for pasturing animals on common land to prevent overgrazing.

  set fire to a hayrick: There are several reported incidents of arson attacks in protest at enclosures during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An anonymous letter sent to an Essex farmer in 1773 warned, “As soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire.”

  Eton: Still arguably the world’s most famous school, Eton College, Eton, near Windsor in Berkshire, was founded by King Henry VI in 1440.

  Chapter 4

  sack: A sweet wine fortified by brandy.

  riots: While social unrest was quite widespread at this time, opposition to enclosures, together with a number of other factors such as the rising price of grain, did not come to a head until after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1830 there were widespread riots in England, known as the Captain Swing Riots.

  Chapter 5

  Great Tom: Housed in Tom Tower at Christ Church, the bell is the loudest in Oxford.

  Christ Church Anatomy School: Built between 1766 and 1767, it is now usually known as the Lee Building and used as the Senior Common Room of Christ Church College.

  their faces blackened with soot: It was very common for poachers to blacken their faces. The Black Act of 1722, which made poaching a capital offense, took its name from the practice.

  scalded with a red-hot iron or oil: Until the sixteenth century, gunshot wounds had been treated this way in the belief that gunpowder was poisonous. A French barber surgeon named Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–1590) put paid to the practice but still recommended extraction, which carried on until the end of the eighteenth century and risked the infection of the wound and therefore death.

  blunderbuss: An early form of shotgun. The word comes from the Dutch donderbus, which literally means “thunder gun.” It was often carried by coach guards for protection against highwaymen.

  Chapter 6

  coppicing in the coupe: Coppicing is the traditional method of producing firewood or wood for fencing and furniture. The part of a woodland coppiced is called a coupe, but many other terms are used, such as “burrow,” “hagg,” “fell,” “cant,” “panel,” or “burrow,” depending on the locality.

  stools: Coppice stools consist of the roots and stumps, which give rise to the coppice shoots, which are cut at regular intervals.

  London fires aglow: By the eighteenth century Chiltern trees had become an important source of firewood for London and local towns.

  small beer: Water was so often polluted that weak ale was frequently drunk by servants and even children.

  messuages: An archaic term for a dwelling house and its surroundings.

  Chapter 7

  schnapps: A type of distilled spirit made from fermented fruit, this remains a popular drink in Germany.

  matching pair: Most pistols were made and sold in pairs.

  Chapter 8

  London hospitals: Several hospitals were founded in the eighteenth century as a result of the growth of associational charities, such as the Lock Hospital in 1747 and the British Lying-In Hospital, established in 1749.

  Chapter 9

  bury man: Archaic name for a gravedigger.

  bellman: An ancient officer in some English towns, who also doubles as the town crier, as in Hungerford, Berkshire.

  as required by law: Before 1801, villagers had to be informed of the intention to enclose by way of a notice posted on the church door.

  the bitter winter: Following the Great Fogg (described below, under Chapter 10), temperatures in Europe in the winter of 1783–1784 were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit below average for the late 1700s. The Laki eruption has been blamed for this, although new research points to other factors.

  Chapter 10

  fulling mill: Fulling is the beating and cleaning of cloth in water.

  tenter frames: Once the woolen cloth was finished and washed, it was stretched to dry on tenter frames, which were set in what were called racking closes. The phrase “being on tenterhooks,” meaning to be held in suspense, is derived from these structures.

  stocks: Stocks were like huge wooden mallets that swung in an arc down onto the cloth contained in a wooden trough.

  a wooden cross: A cross made of rowan and bound with red thread was used as a protective charm. Examples can be seen in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

  Great Fogg: A deadly fog, now most widely attributed to the eruption o
f the Laki fissure in Iceland in 1783, covered the eastern half of England, killing thousands of livestock and contributing to the deaths of several thousand people. (See The Devil’s Breath, the third book in the Dr. Thomas Silkstone series.)

  kiln: Charcoal kilns contained a pile of wood, which was covered in bracken, followed by a layer of clay.

  cunning woman: The term was most widely used in southern England and the Midlands to denote a healer or wisewoman or white witch.

  shew stones: Polished objects engraved with magical names, symbols, and signs were often used as tools for occult research.

  Chapter 11

  commoners: In this case the term refers to people who share rights over an area of common land in a particular locality.

  an elected council: There were often courts that upheld the rights of villagers to graze their animals on the land, enforcing strict rules about when and how they did so.

  glean the grain: One of the many perquisites of a commoner was the right to glean the grain, or gather what remained on the ground after the harvest.

  pannage: The right to allow pigs to eat acorns and beech mast in the woods, usually applied during the autumn. Acorns are poisonous to other animals.

  bailiff: An administrative officer.

  The Riot Act: An Act of the Parliament of 1715, it meant that any group of twelve or more people held to be unlawfully assembled should disperse or face punishment. The act, from which comes the expression “reading the riot act,” was properly called “An Act for Preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies, and for the More Speedy and Effectual Punishing the Rioters.” It was not repealed until 1967.

  urine: Known as seg, the urine was used to scour wool cloth at the clothier’s premises.

  Chapter 12

  Drury Lane: A street off London’s Covent Garden that by the eighteenth century had become one of the worst slums in London, dominated by prostitution and gin palaces.

  public view: Indiscriminate visiting by the public for entertainment at Bethlem was stopped in 1770.

  Bath Assembly Rooms: These were elegant public rooms at the heart of fashionable eighteenth-century Bath life and remain open to the public today.

  taking in every detail: Much of this description was based on the satirical writer Ned Ward’s visit to Bethlem, recorded in the late eighteenth century in a publication called The London Spy. His descriptions of some of the inmates are both comical and poignant.

  Mr. Hogarth’s paintings: William Hogarth’s famous series of paintings entitled A Rake’s Progress features a dissolute young fortune hunter who descends into madness. The original series of eight paintings can be seen at Sir John Soane’s Museum, in central London.

  St. George’s: The hospital, founded by a charitable institution in 1734, was located in Knightsbridge, which was then in the countryside.

  walk unfettered: Several “patients” were kept shackled.

  madness: This quote is paraphrased from the writings of Dr. John Monro, the physician of Bethlem from the mid-1750s.

  Chapter 14

  wayward son and heir apparent: When George III’s son, also called George, turned twenty-one in 1783, he enjoyed a combined annual income of more than one hundred and ten thousand pounds sterling—more than eight million pounds in today’s money. However, even this was too little for his lavish lifestyle.

  Jack Robinson: The phrase was used by Fanny Burney in her romantic novel Evelina, in 1778. The origin is unsure but might refer to Sir John Robinson, who was the Constable of the Tower of London for several years from 1660.

  Chapter 15

  village lockup: A few lockups, small buildings where drunks or those accused of minor offenses were kept overnight, still remain. West Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, and Lacock, in Wiltshire, are two good examples.

  pillory: These are often confused with stocks. A victim stands at a pillory and boards are placed around the arms and neck and fixed to a pole. With stocks, boards are placed around the legs and sometimes the wrists.

  Chapter 16

  Dr. William Battie: A delightfully eccentric character himself, Dr. Battie took an enlightened view on mental health. His 1758 Treatise on Madness advocates a humane treatment of the insane.

  John Monro: The physician in charge of Bethlem at the time, Monro was swift to react to Battie’s criticism by publishing Remarks on Dr. Battie’s Treatise. He advocated “the evacuation by vomiting” as very efficacious in the treatment of madness.

  whipped all along the high street: A vividly shocking firsthand account of a public whipping through the streets of Reading in Berkshire is given by former town mayor William Darter in his Reminiscences of Reading, edited by Daphne Phillips.

  Chapter 17

  the civil war: The English Civil War (1642–1651), fought between those who supported King Charles I and those who supported Parliament, led to the destruction of many Royalist family homes.

  aloe vera: Although it was used in Egyptian times, it was not until the eighteenth century that the plant’s additional healing properties were discovered for conditions such as skin irritations, burns, and wounds.

  willow bark: In 1763 the Reverend Edward Stone wrote a letter to the second Earl of Macclesfield detailing the effectiveness of dried willow bark in the treatment of those suffering from malarial symptoms in what is believed to be the first ever clinical trial. Willow bark is now known to contain salicin, which is a chemical similar to aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid).

  smuggling: By the 1780s smuggling was so rife that the anonymous author of a pamphlet on the subject lamented that in the countryside thousands of men had turned away from respectable jobs in order to be employed in the smuggling trade, to the detriment of the whole nation.

  Chapter 18

  gin: England’s “gin epidemic” lasted from 1720 to 1751, when the Gin Act was passed, prohibiting gin distillers from selling to unlicensed merchants. Although the act reduced large-scale drunkenness, cheap, illicit gin was still widely available.

  turpentine: Made from pine leaves, this was often used as a flavoring for gin instead of or as well as juniper berries.

  mother’s ruin: Gin joints in eighteenth-century England allowed women to drink alongside men for the first time. It’s thought that this led many of them to child neglect and prostitution. So gin became known as “mother’s ruin.”

  One man’s meat is another man’s poison: The proverb comes from the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius.

  Chapter 20

  French William: William the Conqueror (1028–1087).

  Treacher and Widginton: These surnames belong to the families of early chair makers in the Chilterns.

  Bedlam: Bethlem Hospital was also, informally and most notoriously, known as Bedlam.

  private madhouses: A 1774 act required all “madhouses” within seven miles of London to be licensed by a committee of the Royal College of Physicians, largely as a result of several cases where perfectly sane women were incarcerated on the wishes of their male relatives.

  Chapter 21

  proper leaves: The excise tax on tea made it a great target for smugglers. On August 13, the Commutation Act of 1784 reduced the tax on tea from 119 percent to 12.5 percent and the smuggling trade vanished virtually overnight.

  even the new vicar: Parson Woodforde, the Norfolk clergyman who famously kept a diary of his rural life, admitted to buying smuggled tea in 1777. He also regularly bought smuggled gin and brandy.

  beating the bounds: The custom was once found in almost every English parish but has now died out in many; however, in the Chiltern town of High Wycombe it was revived in 1985 and involved parading around the parish boundary and bumping boys on their heads at special marker points along the route.

  parish board: In 1782 a little-known private act, drafted and promoted by Thomas Gilbert, empowered parishes to provide a workhouse exclusively for vulnerable parishioners, that is, children, the sick, and the elderly.