Miriam Bibby's Blog

It was time to do that (often considered, but never actually started) research into Margaret Cavendish, 17th century Duchess of Newcastle. Prolific writer, proto-feminist and arguer for animal rights, natural philosopher and contender with the members of the Royal Society: those were the facts about her that I had acquired through other reading, or browsed from the bottom leaves of the internet tree, or found down the back of the sofa or something. Time to embark on a serious course of study of this interesting character who was derided by some of her contemporaries but has now been reclaimed by modern academics.

A selection of her writings including her Utopian contribution, "A New World called the Blazing World", seemed as good a starting point as any. The story revolves around a beautiful young "Lady" who, by a series of curious adventures, ends up as Empress of the Blazing World. (Career move: marry an emperor. If you can't get an emperor, a prince will do. If you can't get a prince - God bless you!)

Things went pretty well through the description of sailing into seas of ice - a bit reminiscent of the end of Shelley's "Frankenstein", I thought - and the various voyagings in ships with bear-men and fox-men and bird-men. I liked the ships that propelled themselves through the water by sucking air in and blowing it out - sort of "fartliners" I suppose - and the honeycomb ships that locked together. If they were real honeycomb ships, like Crunchie bars, you could eat them as you went along, I mused. Come on, this is a Utopian fantasy! Why not? So far, so good.

Brushing away the honeycomb crumbs and melted chocolate, we arrived at the palace of the Emperor of the Blazing World.

"The first part of the palace was, as the imperial city, all of gold, and when it came to the Emperor's apartment, it was so rich with diamonds, pearls, rubies, and the like precious stones, that it surpasses my skill to enumerate them all." [She'll have a go, though.] "Amongst the rest, the imperial room of state appeared most magnificent; it was paved with green diamonds (for in that world are diamonds of all colours), so artificially, as it seemed to be of one piece. The pillars were set with diamonds so close, and in such a manner, that they appeared most glorious to the sight; between every pillar was a bow or arch of a certain sort of diamonds, the like whereof our world does not afford..."

It was then that my earworm woke up.

"I'm a Barbie girl, in my Barbie World..." it sang.

"Shut up and go away!" I hissed, reading on.

"Her accoutrement after she was made empress was as followeth: on her head she wore a cap of pearl, and a half-moon of diamonds just before it; on the top of her crown came spreading over a large carbuncle, cut in the form of the sun; her coat was of pearl, mixed with blue diamonds, and fringed with red ones; her buskins and sandals were of green diamonds; in her left hand she held a buckler, to signify the defence of her dominions, which buckler was made of [guess what] that sort of diamond as has several different colours; and being cut and made in the form of an arch, showed like a rainbow; in her right hand she carried a spear made of [yes, that's right] a white diamond, cut like the tail of a blazing star, which signified that she was ready to assault those who proved her enemies."

The earworm was off on the ride of the Valkyries. "Woooo-oooo-oooo-oooo-OOO! Woooo-ooooo-oooo-OOOO" it screeched in my ear.

"Quiet! This is clearly a reference to Elizabeth I, Gloriana. And now I'm reading this interesting footnote about female cross-dressing at the court of Henrietta Maria."

"Girls just wanna have fu-un," offered the earworm.

I sighed and returned to the text, whilst the earworm hummed away in the background.

"But surely, Ms Cavendish" I thought, reading on, "in the Blazing World, as you've described it, there is an infinity of precious stones and gold. More than the sands of Arabia you say. Yet, with your defence of the sumptuary laws, you would deny the ordinary man even a sniff of the smallest carbuncle, a sliver of emerald or a crumb of ruby from this blazing world. How can you support this? Aren't you aware that SOMEBODY has to dig this stuff out of the ground? Have you written a detailed defence of these ridiculous elitist laws, in what I realise is now your characteristic style blending imagination, realism and futurism together?" I ruffled through her published works. Nothing. "That's because this position is indefensible!" I muttered. Then I found something.

Cavendish wrote: "Wherefore the commons should be kept like cattle...that is not to exceed their rank or degree in show or bravery, but to live according to their qualities, and not according to their wealth; and those that will be so presumptuous should be imprisoned and fined great sums."

"I want to sleep with COMMON people," sang the earworm. "I want to sleep with common people like YOU."

"Great Jarvis Cocker impression," I conceded. "And the song has relevance."

I flung Margaret aside rather carelessly and picked up another book. "The Scottish Carter": a book about working men and working horses with fine names like Angus, Iain, Blaze and Star. And, possibly, Diamond, Ruby and Pearl.

"There aint a lady livin' in this land wot I'd swap for me dear old Duch," offered the earworm in bad mockney.

"Unless it was trade unionist Angela Tuckett and her book about Scottish carters," I said. "Much more my style. I'll get round to Margaret at some point."

"It all makes work for the working man to do," sang the earworm ironically.

"I'll stick with that. Just don't start on 'Diamonds are forever' - OK?"

It's not so much raining as teeming, pouring, lashing, pelting down. The burn is foaming yellow with earth brought down from landslips overnight. The bridge is flooded and so is part of the view from the windows. What isn't flooded, is mudded.

When I made the ten second dash across the yard to open the stable door and invite the horse out this morning, the horse just looked at me as if I'd asked him to unicycle to John O' Groats with a lobster on his head. "Uh-uh, no, thanks for the offer. But you could just bring me some hay and top up the water, oh and while you're there, can I have a few carrots in that bucket? Much obliged. See you at elevenses."

I know exactly where the expression "raining cats and dogs" comes from. It is raining cats and dogs, not outside, but inside. The cat is bored. The dog is bored. In the cat's case, this manifests itself by a sort of wall of death scenario, in which he attempts to bounce off every surface in the room, including me, the dog, the ceiling, this laptop and the stove (in which where is a log fire burning). Periodically he slams out through the catflap, only to slam angrily back in again, soaking wet, a few seconds later. In the dog's case, boredom is overcome by galloping after the cat, barking manically: "Look, look, see how really naughty the cat is being!" Occasionally, for variety, the dog dashes past me pursued by the cat, who gives him a right and then a left hook when he catches up. Paff! Paff! A gong for the inventor of the Kong, say I. Stuffed with cheese and Schmackos, the rubber Kong is the perfect doggie dummy. Other dog placation tools are available. The cat can be placated by permitting him to go and stretch out on the bed, where he lies with a smug, purring, "gotcha" look on his face. Sometimes I forget to shut the bedroom door and find the cat and the dog in there, cosily snuggled up together. They couldn't possibly be in cahoots - could they? Naaaa...

It's not just the weather. It's the knowledge that it can go on for weeks, months and, on more than one "I can't stand it one more day, I'm going mental with cabin fever" occasion, years. So you really want to work from home, huh? In a little house in the country where you can sit and watch the rain falling? Really? Really?

What sort of tasty brew can I make from a lip-puckering shrivelled up old lemon of a day like this? Other than reminding myself that I have a roof over my head, friends and relatives, bread currently baking in the oven, all the clean water I can drink or, at this rate, drown in (hah!), and my country isn't being invaded, of course. I'm not being sarcastic, those are genuinely things to be grateful about and I am grateful.

My thoughts turn to all those literary references to rain, from Shakespeare's "Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" and "hey, ho, the wind and the rain...for the rain it raineth every day" to Kipling's "weather and rain have undone it again" to Lord Bowen's "The rain it raineth on the just and also on the unjust fella: but chiefly on the just, because the unjust steals the just's umbrella".

Then there is the creepy song about the dreadful wind and rain. This is a genuine earworm of a song. It rises and falls in your mind like the winter wind eerily moaning under a door and once there, it just won't go away until it has whispered all its awful secrets to you. This is part of one version, as sung by Gillian Welch, of a very, very old song with many variants:

"There were two sisters of County Clare, oh, the wind and rain; one was dark and the other was fair, oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And they both had a love of the miller's son, oh, the wind and rain; but he was fond of the fairer one, oh, the dreadful wind and rain. So she pushed her into the river to drown, oh, the wind and rain; and watched her as she floated down, oh, the dreadful wind and rain..."

The corpse floats on the water until eventually its bones are found by a passing fiddler, who: "made a fiddle peg of her long finger bone; oh, the wind and the rain; he made a fiddle peg of her long finger bone, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And he strung his fiddle bow with her long yeller hair, oh, the wind and the rain; he strung his fiddle bow with her long yeller hair, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And he made a fiddle of her breast bone, oh, the wind and rain; he made a fiddle of her breast bone, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain..."

Brrrrr. If that doesn't freeze the blood, I don't know what does. Rain and wind is not all doom and gloom of course. There is the genius of "Anon" who wrote, sometime before the start of the sixteenth century, "Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow, The small raine down can raine. Cryst, if my love were in my armes, And I in my bedde again!" "My bedde" is just exactly where I would go to escape the "dreadful wind and rain" today; but it seems to be full of cat and dog. Things to be grateful for - the horse has not made it into the house - yet. Hmmmm....

When it comes to research, historians have all the fun. That's because anything, absolutely anything, is grist to the historian's mill. Is your passion textiles, fashion, transport, war, peace, politics, animals, nature? Or molluscs, science, daffodils, potatoes, chickens, mathematics? Perhaps it's football teams that start with the letter 'P' or non-stick frying pans or 'B' sides that made it to number one in the charts in the 1960s. Any and all of these can be turned into topics for historical research and each of them probably already has a massive amount of material devoted to it that's available to the general reader. Including the frying pans. No, I haven't checked that fact - I did say "probably".

You can combine and recombine any historical topics too, of course. At first sight, the prospect of "chickens at war" - a random pick from the above list - isn't very promising. However, a brief survey of the bookshelf quickly reveals a sad story in Jilly Cooper's foreword to Juliet Gardiner's book, "The Animals' War: Animals in Wartime from the First World War to the Present Day": "From the little glow worms that lit the soldiers' maps to the poor white hens used to detect the presence of chemical attack in Iraq, there is hardly a member of the animal kingdom that hasn't been dragged suffering and uncomprehending into our wars." Doesn't that make you want to find out more? That's the nature of historical research. You find something and then you just want to read on, make further discoveries and share them with others who have the same interest. Perhaps one day you'll be the person to write "War Hen: the book/movie/musical" and capture the imagination of the world.

Once you set forth on the history trail, life becomes a constant search for the source. What is the earliest example of this; where did that start - and why? Often, the source is never found but the trail is so interesting and has so many twists, turns and byways that it no longer matters. The journey is the thing, to travel hopefully, rather than to arrive.

If you write about history, either as fact or fiction, as well as reading and researching it, Bernard Cornwell offers some of the best advice I've found. In a recent edition of the "Writers' and Artists' Yearbook", he commented that research is the topic about which he is most frequently questioned. "How do I do it? How much time do I spend on it? The questions are virtually unanswerable. I assume no one writes historical fiction unless they first love history, and so virtually all your reading is research. I still read more history for pleasure than any other book. Of course research has to be focused, but the real danger is doing too much research," writes Cornwell.

He goes on to say that if you concentrate too much on the research when writing fiction, you'll tend to use it at all costs and risk boring the reader. I think this is great advice. You do need sufficient knowledge at the start to have confidence in your subject matter, but historical fiction is NOT the same as history and you acquire knowledge of more specialist areas when you need to, whilst on the hoof, going along the history trail. This leads you into some wonderful territory and opens whole new worlds of research.

Recently, I needed, rather than wanted, to do some research into 16th century goldsmithing. I contacted the Goldsmiths' Company in London and received a very helpful email from the librarian there with a list of recommended reading. Finding the suggested books online was a doddle. However did we manage before the internet? I don't know, kids today, you've got it made, when I were a lass there were four of us to a cardboard box in t'middle of t'road, reading by light of oil from a pilchard tin etc.etc. However, thankfully, it's still the combination of search engine PLUS very helpful and knowledgeable librarian that works best.

This contact led me to the wonders, the veritable wonders, of "Memorials of the Goldsmiths' Company, Being Gleanings from Their Records Between the Years 1335 and 1815, With an Introduction and Notes" by Walter Sherburne Prideaux. To think there was a time when I didn't know of its existence!

From the year 1419, for instance, we read of "The Case of a Rebellious Apprentice Threatening to Kill His Master - His Arrest - Examination by the Wardens - and Punishment": "...and tho the seid Wardeyns (consideryng the grete falsnesse, rebellying and cursidnesse of the seyd apprentis...) [...] askid the seyd apprentis by the desire and askynge of his master whethir he wold forswere the craft and the toun...or abyde still in prison..."

Why is this important? Firstly, it reminds us of What Standardisation of English and the Spellchecker have Done for Us. Secondly, it tells us that, contrary to popular belief, justice in medieval times was not always a case of hanging, drawing, gouging of eyes and rack-stretching, all accompanied by the mad bwahahas of a comedy executioner with a black sack on his head, and a good thing too, string 'em up and give 'em all the birch afterwards. No. This apprentice, who had lain in wait to murder his master with a spiked implement used for opening and closing the windows of the shop, was given the option of prison or - oh, um, er, just go away and don't bother us any more. Unsurprisingly he chose the "go away" option and went off jingling twenty shillings in his pocket, which had been given to the master when the apprentice was indentured and which the master honourably returned.

Then there are the brief but evocative reports of raids carried out by the wardens on London shops and fairs, where they searched for "deceitful wares". On one occasion, "The Wardens report that they found much opposition, and were denied the search by sundry persons. The names of those who denied the search are given." On another, the "Wardens and Divers Assistants proceed on a search in Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Fenchurch Street, Lumbarde Street, and Cheapside" in "cloakes by reason of the stormy and tempestuous weather" and the "wares seized comprise rings, thimbles, silver medals, bodkins, tobacco stoppers, tooth and ear picks, seals, an open picture in an oval and crown, Turkey and garnet rings..."

Where will history take you? I know where I'll be going next. Watch out for my forthcoming series, "Codpiece and Cockayne, 16th Century Trading Standards Investigators." "No, I don't think that is your mark, sir, and I'm taking this fishknife into custody as evidence..." No-one expects Codpiece and Cockayne, bwahahaha!

November, It's not surprising that you are so completely delinquent. You are the neglected stepchild of the whole year, here in the north. They couldn't even get your name right, not since they moved the New Year from March to January a couple of hundred years ago. Ditsy October has come and gone with firework displays of leaves and pumpkins and all that "mists and mellow fruitfulness" stuff; we've long forgotten why we like autumn, because now we don't. November, by contrast, is an uncoloured woodcut of horses ploughing a field, bounded by leafless hedges set against a pale grey sky.

Perhaps it's not surprising that we want to start Christmas earlier and earlier. I remember how, as a child, I used to keep a Christmas countdown diary right through the autumn, checking off the days as the wonderful evening approached. Christmas Eve was the magical time. Rarely, if ever, did Christmas Day live up to its promise.

November has hidden charms, though. As Findlay the dog carefully places one of his three frisbees on my knee and looks at me appealingly, I know there will be rewards. Geoff and I put on yet another pair of leaking wellingtons or still damp boots and tolerate November's jeers as it throws a bucket of horizontal rain over us. The first reward is the flight of birds from the feeders. They come back almost immediately and ask for a top-up. The next is the heron separating himself from the yellow flood to swirl around over the tops of the trees and then return to his original spot, waiting for our return, when he will take off again. Then there is the wind. Bracing is a great word, covering a multitude of sins. Bracing it is.

There probably won't be much to see in the way of wildlife this morning because they are, sensibly, mostly at home and some of them, the wisest perhaps, are heading into hibernation. But there are a few flocks of finches and siskins flying about and the dog finds plenty of trails to follow, despite the torrential rain of the past few days. He gallops under the leafless ash trees, up a steep slope that is red brown and purplish-black as old bracken alternates with dead willow herb. The colours and shapes at this time of year are stately and Baroque. The dog collects his frisbee, throws it triumphantly in the air and catches it. I think about the fungal disease that threatens the ashes and wonder whether it will reach our part of the forest. The dog certainly won't be spreading it because he has no chance of entering the house or the car without having his feet washed, wherever we go. He's splattered with mud and completely exuberant about it.

The ashes are remarkable trees, with their straight, smooth, greyish trunks and gorgeous rippling leaves from spring to autumn. The leaves arrive much later than they do on other trees but they are also the last to go, hanging on until some particularly violent autumn weather - usually in November - finally strips them bare.

The archetypal literary image of November is, of course, Hood's poem: "No sun - no moon! No morn - no noon! No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day," culminating in "No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!"

Today though, I have a beautiful, haunting tune in mind as I'm walking. It's "The January Man" by Dave Goulder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Gou... - no connection with the film of the same name, as far as I know) and it includes the line: "The poor November Man sees fire and wind and mist and rain and winter air." The version I can hear playing in my mind, a wonderful accompaniment to the walk, the grey sky and the few remaining leaves as they whirl past, is by harpist Wendy Stewart. I can hear it as plainly as if I were wearing earphones, but I'm not. It's just there, for me, evoked by the landscape and the weather.

That's November's gift. November challenges and dares more than any other month of the year, but if you accept the challenge and get out into the wind and rain then there is a present for you. It's the reminder to be thankful that you can walk, that you do feel invigorated afterwards, that there is a fire waiting for you when you get home and some hot soup and someone or something to cuddle. Also, a sense of virtue that means you are entitled to spend as much time as you can curled up on the sofa with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book this month.