Shadow of the Raven (33 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

Oxford Journal:
The principal newspaper in Oxfordshire was
Jackson's Oxford Journal,
published from 1753 to 1928.

commissioners:
There were usually three commissioners appointed to supervise the enclosure.

blindman's buff:
The children's game dates back to at least the sixteenth century.

hunt the slipper:
The game is described as a primeval pastime in Oliver Goldsmith's 1776 novel,
The Vicar of Wakefield
.

self-murder:
Suicide was sometimes referred to as “self-murder” in coroners' reports. It was relatively common in eighteenth-century England, so much so that the Frenchman Montesquieu once commented, “We do not find in history that the Romans ever killed themselves without a cause; but the English are apt to commit suicide most unaccountably; they destroy themselves even in the bosom of happiness.”

 

undertaker:
By the middle of the eighteenth century, undertaking was an established profession in London. Not only would they take care of the funeral, but undertakers would even sell the deceased's goods if requested.

Oxford Jail:
In the 1770s the prison reformer John Howard visited the castle jail several times and criticized its size and quality, including the extent to which vermin infested the prison. Partly as a result of this criticism, it was decided by the county authorities to rebuild Oxford Jail.

that Frenchman Rousseau:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French writer and political theorist of the Enlightenment.

 

social contract:
Rousseau's 1762
Du contrat social,
in which he envisaged a civil society united by a general will, inspired the leaders of the French Revolution, as well as many Enlightenment philosophers.

Rogationtide:
The Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday preceding Ascension Day were the traditional days for beating the bounds. The custom fell between the end of April and the beginning of June.

 

Domesday:
The Domesday Book is a manuscript record of the great survey, completed in 1086, on orders from William the Conqueror, of much of England and parts of Wales.

Milton Common:
The village marks the intersection of two turnpike roads that were built in 1770 during a time of rapid expansion in both trade and mobility.

 

intended to reassure travelers:
In 1748 the Hawkhurst gang, a notorious band of smugglers who tortured a man and then buried him alive, were executed, and their corpses were displayed in irons and chains in their own villages as a reminder of the brutality of their dreadful crimes.

 

fellow Philadelphian:
In 1745 Thomas Cadwalader (1708–1779), of Philadelphia, who had been a pupil of the famous English surgeon William Cheselden, drew attention to the similarity of the “dry-gripes” of West India and the disease called the
colica Pictonum,
most frequently found in Poitiers, France.

 

still heads and worms:
In his famous “Letter on Lead Poisoning” to his friend Benjamin Vaughan, written in Philadelphia in 1786, Benjamin Franklin cites the prohibition of leaden parts in condensers by the legislature of Massachusetts because lead was found to cause various symptoms of poisoning.

 

Sir George Baker:
A physician to King George III and a pioneer in the use of chemical analysis to solve epidemical problems, Baker was the chief investigator into a case of widespread poisoning in Devon known as Devonshire colic. After conducting several tests, he discovered that the cause was lead. The experiments cited are loosely based on those he carried out.

Hepar sulfuris:
Used today as a homeopathic remedy, this is calcium sulfide obtained by burning oyster shells with flowers of sulfur.

 

West Haddon:
In 1756 a football game was announced, but it was in fact a means to assemble a mob. During the subsequent riot, fences were torn down and burned in protest against the enclosure laws.

makeshift shelter:
Charcoal burners lived in the woods for much of the year and ate a diet of roasted hedgehog, snails toasted in hot ashes, and pheasant.

pugilistic stance:
This position, also referred to in forensic pathology as the pugilistic pose, is caused by high temperatures in fire, resulting in muscle stiffening and shortening.

blacked your faces:
Gangs of men, such as this one, who sooted their faces, both as a disguise and so as not to be spotted at night, were known as “the Blacks,” and so the legislation introduced in 1723 was known as the Black Act. Without doubt the most viciously repressive legislation enacted in Britain in the last four hundred years, this act authorized the death penalty for more than fifty offenses connected with poaching.

 

gangs in Surrey:
In 1721 a masked gang paraded through the town of Farnham with eleven deer they had killed in nearby Bishop's Park.

don the black cap:
Not really a cap, but a black square of fabric that denotes mourning at the passing of a death sentence.

 

James MacLaine:
A notorious highwayman, originally from Scotland, he was known for being courteous to his victims. Before his execution in 1750 he reputedly received nearly three thousand guests during his imprisonment in Newgate Prison, many of whom were high-society ladies.

 

Dick Turpin:
An account of the famous highwayman's execution in
The York Courant
notes his gall even at the end, recording that he “with undaunted courage looked about him, and after speaking a few words to the topsman, he threw himself off the ladder and expired in about five minutes.”

 

standing mute:
Up until 1772, a defendant who refused to plead, unless they were mute “by visitation from God,” was subjected to the ordeal of peine forte et dure, in which they were forced to lie down and have weights placed on them until they either relented or died. The law was subsequently changed so that standing mute was deemed the same as pleading guilty.