Category: History

The Nottingham Goose Fair

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Not quite a goose, but a duck

The first Wednesday of October is the traditional date for the Nottingham Goose Fair, which today is a huge pleasure fair. But as its name suggests, in former times, one of the main goods being sold at that fair were indeed geese.

The time around Michaelmas (also known as the Feast of the Archangels or the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels) on 29 September was traditionally a time for goose-eating in England — according to legend, because Queen Elizabeth received news of the defeat of the Spanish Armada on Michaelmas Day, just when she had sat down for a meal of roast goose. She thus declared (again, according to legend) roast goose should forevermore be eaten on Michaelmas day in celebration of England’s might.

The truth is a bit more mundane: by the Tudor age, goose eating had already become connected to Michaelmas – probably because it is one of the old quarter days, marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the new farming year. Incidentally, spring geese are big enough to be slaughtered by the end of September and thus, a goose became a customary gift of tenants to give to their landlord when they were paying the rent on Michaelmas Day.

Not surprisingly then, at a lot of fairs held around the country around Michaelmas the wares that were being sold included geese. Most of these goose fairs have been long forgotten, but Nottingham Goose Fair is one of the few exceptions.

The fair has a very long tradition: in some form or another, it might have existed even before the Norman Conquest, and it had received its name, “Goose Fair,” by 1541. Originally, the main event of the far was indeed the selling of geese. An article from the September 1871 issue of Golden Hours: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine for Family and General Reading mentions that a “street on the Lincolnshire side of Nottingham is said to be called Goose-gate from the numbers which were driven through it for the annual goose fair, when from 15,000 to 20,000 of those birds were brought from the Lincolnshire fens, each flock attended by a goose-herd with a crook, wherewith to catch and lead out any goose which a possible customer might desire to examine more closely.”

By the 19th century, it was considered lucky to eat goose on Michaelmas Day: according to a proverb, you’d never lack any money if you ate goose on Michaelmas Day. And in 1813, in a letter to her sister, Jane Austen writes, “I dined upon Goose yesterday — which I hope will secure a good Sale of my 2d Edition” (i.e., the 2nd edition of Sense and Sensibility).

Today, only the name of the Nottingham Goose Fair and the sculpture of a giant goose in the town serve as reminders of the old purpose of the fair, which by now has become a giant pleasure fair.

The Nottingham Hidden History Team has a picture of said sculpture as well as a few pictures of the fair in earlier centuries.

~~~

In other news: A couple of days ago, I sent my latest WIP to my editor. “The Centurion’s Choice” is a spin-off novella from my Roman series and will be ready for release at some point in November. (And poor Lucius doesn’t have any nipples in this picture. *sigh* Sandra Schwab, forever forgetting to give her male digital models nipples.) (He totally will have nipples on the finished cover!!)

Posted in Food, Former Riskies, History, Regency, Research | 4 Replies

Voices from Old London

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

The Strand, with Somerset House and Mary-le-Strand church. Published by Ackerman, 1836 (from Wikipedia)

This year I’m back in Victorian London, and as it so happens I’ve got a couple of new research books, among them Voices from Dickens’ London by Michael Paterson from 2006 (republished as Inside Dickens’ London). Right in the introduction Paterson makes a claim that I found both daring and electrifying:

“The city of Dickens is a place lost to us beyond recall. It is difficult to imagine its dirtiness and dnager and its extremes of wealth and poverty. Its people did not look, speak, smell or behave like us. The ways they dressed, the times at which they ate, the slang they used and the accents in which they talked, the ways in which they worked or celebrated or took their amusements, often bear no resemblance to our experience” (10).

As somebody who has walked through London several times, often with the specific intention tracing the sights and buildings of the early 19^th century, I found Paterson’s claim rather outrageous at first. After all, isn’t it our shared human experience that allows us modern readers to connect to characters in the literature of the past as well as to characters in historical fiction?

Today’s London is noisy and dirty and smells of exhaust fumes. Add to that the stink of piss and garbage in the back streets. How much worse could 19^th-century London have been? There would have been different smells, of course, not of exhaust fumes, but of horses and…

Open sewers.

Cess pits.

A river that stank to heaven and spread illness and disease.

The smell of this old London, Paterson writes,

“must have been overwhelming. First, there was the smell of coal fires.. The vast forest of reeking chimneys filled the air with smoke, which covered buildings with unsightly layers of soot and left dirty black smuts on clothes and faces. There were the multifarious stenches of industry: breweries, foundries and forges, chemical works and, worse than all of them, tanneries […]. There was also the aroma of horses, on which so much of London’s transport and commerce depended — the smell of a stable multiplied millionfold. There was the scent of hundreds of thousands of people, whose tightly packed lives did not allow them opportunities to keep themselves, their clothes or their homes clean” (18).

And as to the noise —

“However noisy today’s traffic may be, it is insignificant by comparison with the din that filled the city in Dickens’ time. Countless iron-shod wheels rattled all day over cobbled streets behind clopping horses. Shouting was constant as, without any form of traffic control, drivers relied on aggression to push their way through the crush of vehicles. The sounds, thrown back by the walls of narrow streets, was so loud that it would not be possible to hold a conversation on the pavement, nor to leave street-facing windows open in summer” (17).

An exaggeration? Perhaps, for after all, the street sellers were still able to hawk their wares. And there were street musicians, too — Italian boys with barrel organs or harps — and street performers of every kind.

No Big Ben, of course.

Some of the things Paterson considers strange — like the closure of all shops and museums on Sunday — don’t seem quite so strange to those who have a different cultural background than the author (in Germany, shops are closed on Sunday).

And yet, the London that emerges from the pages of Paterson’s book is indeed very different from the London of today. It also differs markedly from the London you get to see in most of those pretty TV adaptations of 19^th-century literature (with Dickens adaptation being the big exception).

As the title suggest, Voices from Dickens’ London relies heavily on primary texts by Victorian journalists, authors, and everyday people, which are quoted extensively (though not always quite accurately: ellipses are often unmarked). This makes Paterson’s book both fascinating reading material and a rather fantastic source — one I can highly recommend.

I wrote this post yesterday. Today, London was once again hit by catastrophe: This morning, a devastating fire started in Grenfell Tower in Kensington and killed and injured many people. My thoughts are with all those affected by the fire.

Posted in Former Riskies, History, Places, Research | Tagged London | Leave a reply

In Search of Braces on the Bookshelf

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Like everybody who writes historical fiction of any kind (I imagine), I have collected a surprising number of research books over the years. Some are exactly the kind of books you would expect to find on my shelves – like the books on English country houses and those on the history of London; others are a bit more… shall we say “eclectic”? There’s a book on medieval warhorses (bought in 2001 when I was in Galway as an exchange student), a very comprehensive book on elements of castle building (bought in 1998 when I was still writing fantasy fiction), a book on secret orders throughout history, a catalogue of the Museo La Specola in Florence (a museum of historical anatomical waxes) (why, Sandy, why?!!?!?), and more than one survival guide.

I started collecting research books for my writing in my late teens, so some of those books I’ve had for over twenty years. (And one book has… um… wandered from my parents’ shelves to my own.) I have always loved knowing that I can probably find a book on whatever I want to look up on my shelves. Of course, with the internet, the game has changed completely. Still, I like to have the books on my shelves — just in case.

Now, when you write the kind of historical fiction where your main characters happily shed their clothes on a regular basis throughout the story, it’s always helpful to know how many layers they have to get out of and how these clothes work. For some reason, though, I had never dwelt much on the exact workings of male clothes, except for the obvious, like, if it’s Regency, you want him to pull off his shirt over his head.

That kind of changed when I started to write m/m.

So after doing some intense research on woolen jumpers, there I was in the middle of getting my two Regency guys out of their clothes, when suddenly it occurred to me, “Oh my gosh, what about braces!?!?!?”

What followed were several minutes of me staring intently at the aforementioned bookshelves, scanning my fashion books — only to realize that while I own a good number of books dedicated to female fashion (like Cunnington’s English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century or Bradfield’s Costume in Detail 1730-1930), I don’t own anything that is solely dedicated to male fashion.

Oh dear. (= A very British way to imply a crisis of epic proportions.)

But luckily, Johnstone’s Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail (bought in 2008 in the V&A) came to my rescue. Though for the most part covering female fashion, it still has a few entries on male clothes. Hooray!

As the title implies, the book focuses on details of fashion and includes close-up photos of specific parts of clothes (even though you always get a sketch of the whole piece as well). Moreover, the notes give information about the construction of the depicted pieces of clothing in question, which is really helpful for understanding how these clothes were worn and how beautifully made they were. (I might have said “Ooooohhh!!!!” a couple of times in response to photographs of gorgeous ruffles down the sleeve of a dress or of the intricate embroidery covering the hem of a dress.)

And then I stumbled across these pantaloons.

Aren’t they GORGEOUS? (And yes, braces. Look at the two top buttons on each side.)

Pantaloons, the accompanying text informs us, “were a form of close-fitting trousers or tights introduced into fashionable dress during the 1790s. They complemented the close-fitting lines of early nineteenth-century men’s coats as they were shaped to the leg, often ending just above the ankle where button fastenings or straps kept them in place. Although difficult to cut and put together without causing creases or wrinkles when the leg was moved, they could look extremely elegant. […] Pantaloons also brought the glamour of military uniform into men’s fashionable dress, especially when teamed with Hessian boots.” The decorated front, however, is unusual, which makes the author conclude that this particular pair might have been for military use.

Still, by that point, I had thoroughly fallen in love with that embroidered front (and all the possibilities it offered for some… eh… playfulness), so I decided they would be exactly the kind of thing my grumpy earl would wear if he wanted to impress somebody special. 🙂

And speaking of the grumpy earl: I got the revision suggestions back from my editor (who loved the story — wheeee!!!), so this morning, my desk features a new, crisp printout of the manuscript, all ready for me to get started on those revisions. Wish me luck!

Posted in Clothing, Former Riskies, Regency, Research, Writing | 6 Replies

Advertisements in Newspapers & Magazines

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

When you look at surviving copies of 19th-century periodicals (typically bound in volumes) today, you will perhaps notice a distinct lack of advertisements. Ads were printed on the wrapper (the cover) of single issues as well as on additional pages, and when periodicals were privately bound into volumes, the wrappers and the pages with ads were typically thrown away. Some magazines, like PUNCH, released annual or bi-annual volumes of their publication as special keepsakes – and these didn’t contain any ads either.

So imagine my delight when earlier today I stumbled across a volume of PUNCH on Google Books that not only consists of individual issues bound together, but has also retained most of the wrappers with ads.

*squee*

The issues are all from 1874, which means that thanks to changes in taxation and technological improvements, the ads all look very different from what you would have found in periodicals in the early decades of the century. By 1874, many ads came with pictures or with interesting typography.

There wasn’t any particular order to them, so Howard’s Parquet Flooring stood side by side with anchovy preparations, the latest novels (such as TAKEN AT THE FLOOD by Mary Elizabeth Braddon), or Thomson’s Unbreakable Corset Busk.

In the early decades of the 19th century, by contrasts, ads tended to be text only, and they were very short and to the point. The reason for this was the tax on paper and the tax on ads. The latter was a reaction to social unrest: the government believed that there was a connection between ads and politics. On the other hand, most periodicals couldn’t survive without the income from ads. Indeed, it is thought that the majority of radical publications folded due to a lack of advertisers.

As the political climate changed, the tax on ads was first reduced in 1833 and was finally abolished in 1853. The tax on paper, however, remained in place until 1861, keeping paper expensive and forcing publishers and advertisers to be economical with the space on paper. Hence, illustrated ads as seen in the examples here in this post, only started to appear with regularity after the repeal of the paper tax, and the following decades are often referred to as the Golden Age of advertising.

Posted in Former Riskies, History | Tagged Sandy and the Periodicals | 1 Reply

Winter in London, or All the Town’s a Slide

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

“All the town’s a slide,
And all the men and women merely skaters,”

rhymes PUNCH in 1850 (with a nod towards the Bard), and indeed, 19th-century Londoners were keen skaters: when during a strong frost in January 1850 all the ornamental lakes in the parks of London froze, people turned out in their thousands to slide or skate along the ice. THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS talks of 12,000 people assembling in St. James’s Park alone to enjoy the wintry spell.

The Serpentine in Hyde Park was another favorite with skaters, and one of Richard Doyle’s illustration from “Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe” depicts the crush.

Apart from the bodies of water, the streets themselves often froze over, no doubt helped along by the many child workers out and about, who, PUNCH suggests, took joy in turning the main thoroughfares of London into giant slides:

But of course, Mr. Punch has already come up with a brilliant solution to this particular problem: “As slides in public thoroughfares, during the frost, are now ‘great facts,’ which the police officially recognise, there is only one thing to be desired, namely, that some little order should be observed on the foot-pavements, so as to make a slide a convenient and rapid mode of transit. […] By the present system, under which slides are merely tolerated, and are only partially carried out, some of the public who are unprepared for them, keep tumbling about in a very awkward manner. A well-regulated routine of slides, under the control of the police, would be an understood accommodation for all, and order could easily be preserved by sending policemen up and down each series of slides at proper intervals.” 🙂

After all, tumbling about is not nice, as some of the PUNCH contributors know only too well: this little initial letter is “drawn from experience”:

What about your town? Has winter already come to where you live? (Frankfurt turned into a Winter Wonderland on Sunday, and we’ll probably get more snow toward the weekend.)

Posted in Former Riskies, History, Places | Tagged Illustrated London News, Life in London, Punch, Sandy and the Periodicals | Leave a reply