Juliet Barker > Quotes

“The first duty of an Author is --- I conceive --- a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.

--- Charlotte Bronte”
― Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters

“If England was first and foremost a trading nation this was because its temperate climate and fertile soils, particularly in the south and east, allowed it to produce a surplus to sell.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“After Chaucer’s death, Henry IV offered his position to Christine de Pizan, no doubt hoping that as she was a widow and her only child, her sixteen-year-old son, was effectively a hostage in his household, she could be persuaded to agree. If so, he completely misjudged this redoubtable woman, who had once replied to criticism “that it was inappropriate for a woman to be learned, as it was so rare . . . that it was even less fitting for a man to be ignorant, as it was so common.”
― Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England

“Something like one in thirty men in England in 1377 was either a member of a religious order or a fully ordained clergyman.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“.. I am free to walk on the moors - but when I go out there alone - everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and the the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening.

My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her.

The distant prospects were Anne's delight, and when I look around, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon.

In the hillcountry silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it, now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion and forget much that, whilde mind remains, I never shall forget.

Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency - but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness nor witnessed their last moments - it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning.

(Charlotte's letter to Williams, in which she express how much she misses her sisters)”
― Juliet Barker, The Brontës

“Aquitaine, or Gascony as the English preferred to call it, was actually a duchy subject to the French crown which had been inherited by English kings after the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. Its status had long been a source of dispute and conflict between the two kingdoms, leading ultimately to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“As a result of the pandemic the population of England, which had probably peaked at around five million in the first half of the fourteenth century, suddenly plummeted by between a third and a half. What is more, further outbreaks in 1361–2, 1369 and 1374–5, though not as severe in their mortality, prevented any recovery in population levels, which remained stagnant at between two and three million from the mid-fourteenth century until the end of the fifteenth.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“The idea that medieval people rarely washed is a nineteenth-century fallacy. Every courtesy book stressed the need to wash one's hands and face daily and it was also customary to wash the hands before eating: guests might be offered water scented with garden herbs or flowers or even, in the wealthiest households, with perfume imported from the east.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“The fourteenth century saw a transformation in the diet of the English lower classes from one composed mainly of cheap cereals, beans and pulses, with coarse black bread (made from rye or barley) and the occasional flitch of bacon to one with a high proportion of meat, particularly beef and mutton, and bread made from wheat.”
― Juliet Barker, England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381

“received a royal pardon, on the grounds that the conspirators”
― Juliet Barker, Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England

“am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fatheaded oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?”
― Juliet Barker, The Brontës