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liberty born in a swamp!

6/15/2015

Today marks the 800th anniversary of the western world's concept of liberty. The idea was born in a swamp.

On June 15, 1215, in a place called Runnymede, King John signed the Magna Carta, the Latin name for the Great Charter that Daniel Hannan calls "the most important bargain in the history of the human race." Not only did the charter formalize the notion of freedom of an individual against the arbitrary authority of a despot, but it instituted a from of conciliar rule that was the progenitor of England's Parliament and America's Legislative Branch.

The Magna Carta was written by a group of rebellious barons who wanted to protect their rights and property from the overzealous taxation of the cash-poor King John. Before he was king, England's coffers were emptied by those seeking to ransom John's brother, Richard the Lionheart, who had been captured by a German prince on his way back to the Holy Land. Once crowned, John threw himself into battle with France in an attempt to regain the lands traditionally held by his family, the Angevins. John was not a good military leader, and suffered a series of staggering blows that resulted in the loss of all French lands for he English crown

When the defeated John returned from the Continent, he tried to rebuild his coffers by demanding scutage, a fee paid in lieu of military service, from the barons who had not joined him in war. The barons refused, and 40 joined in open rebellion. After they captured London, the barons forced John to meet with them at Runnymede and put his seal to the charter that protected their feudal rights.

Attribution: WyrdLight.com

Runnymede isn't really a swamp, but a water-meadow in what is called the 'Thames Basin Lowland.' 20 miles south and west of London, this area of gently rolling hills and vales is filled with ponds, meadows, and heath.

Its name comes from a combination of the Anglo-Saxon word 'runieg,' which means regular meeting, and 'mede,' which means meadow. During the time of Anglo-Saxon rule, from the 7th to 11th centuries, the Witan, or King's Council, met in the open air at Runnymede. It is not surprising, then, that John's Barons would choose this site to reassert their ancient rights and privileges.

The Barons didn't really care about the interests of the common man when they had John place his seal on their charter. But two principles expressed in the Magna Carta resonated with the founders of America. Both "No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land" and "To no one will We sell, to no one will We deny or delay, right or justice" sound awfully American to most ears.

For a translation of the Magna Carta in to English, click here.

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Thunder reverberates

6/10/2015

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Towards the end of the school year I was visiting with a fellow teacher when I noticed a book on her book rack. The cover was so intriguing that I had to borrow the book and take it home to read.

The book was entitled Thunder at Gettysburg, and it was written by Patricia Lee Gauch in the 1970's. Ms. Gauch went on to become a prominent and very influential editor. During her career she edited three Caldecott books: Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, illustrated by John Schoenherr, Lon Po Po by Ed Young and So You Want to Be President by Judith St. George, illustrated by David Small. She authored 39 book of her own. And although I'm sure she doesn't remember it, she rejected my manuscript for The Bent Reed, my Gettysburg novel intended for a slightly older readership, back in 2004.

Thunder at Gettysburg is a simple little chapter book written for elementary-age students who have mastered easy readers. It is tells the story of one girl's experience and is based on the memoir of Tillie Pierce, who witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg when she was a young girl. More than 20 years after the battle, she wrote her memoir, which I read as part of my research. Tillie actually shows up in a crowd scene in my book: she is named in a group of girls who went to the ladies seminary,which was a finishing school, and are waving flags during a Union parade through town. I got the description of the parade from her memoir.

It's fun to read two works based on the same primary source. When you do so, if you come across a scene or turn of phrase that is common to both, it's a safe bet that the words or the scene came from the original material. Ms. Gauch's main character is Tillie, and her book is not a work of fiction but a retelling of the biography on a very simple level. My book is a work of fiction. The McCombs family doesn't exist, although most of their neighbors did. I set the fictitious family's farm right in the thick of the action, between two real farms that took a beating with actual artillery. Almost everything that happened in The Bent Reed actually did happen, but to other, real people. One of those people was Tillie Pierce.

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Medieval Women Knights

5/11/2015

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A friend recently posted a link on my Facebook page to an article entitled Could a Woman Become a Knight in Medieval Times?

The article stated that when a knight died, his land passed to his wife or daughter. The woman was then responsible for the duties that went along with the land, including a certain number of days on campaign, if called up.

What the article didn't say was that usually the lady in question either hired knights to fulfill her obligation, or, even more regularly, married. Often, her liege lord would tell her who it was she would marry and she would have no say in the matter. (Birgitta finds herself in a similar situation in my medieval novel On Fledgling Wings.)

But there were women during the Middle Ages who were warriors. In "The Woman Warrior: Gender, Warfare, and Society in Medieval Europe," Women's Studies, 17, 1990, Megan McLaughlin says that women warriors were certainly more common" during the Middle Ages "than has usually been assumed,"

One example of a medieval woman warrior is Sichelgita of Salerno, a twelfth-century noblewoman who fought side by side with her husband, Robert of Hautevilleon.

Oderic Vitalis, a twelth-century historian, says that Isabel of Conches, daughter of the knight Simon de Montfort, rode armed as a knight among the knights and showed courage far greater than her husband.

Oronata Rodiana, an Italian woman who died in 1452, was an artist who fought off a young nobleman who attempted to rape her. She escaped to the mountains, where she joined a group of mercenary soldiers. She died defending her town, Castelliono, years later.

Want more on women warriors? Try here.

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A short History of Windmills

4/26/2015

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Nashtifan, the ancient city of windmills

No one knows who first acted on the idea of using wind to grind grain.

We do know that there were windmills in Iran by the 7th century. These windmills had a long, vertical drive shaft around which rotated six to twelve rectangular, reed-covered sails. This type of device is called a "panemone" windmill.

The first windmills in Northern Europe date from the 1180s and have a very different design. They are called "post" windmills because of the large upright post on which the mill's main structure, the "buck," is balanced so that the mill can rotate to catch the wind when it comes from different directions. The mill was moved using a tailpole or tiller beam that extended from the rear of the body. The picture below, from a 14th century manuscript, shows a post windmill. The two prone figures to the right make me wonder if this illustrates Chaucer's Miller's Tale, but I might be wrong since the text is in Latin and Chaucer wrote in Middle English.

Fourteenth century windmill image licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

This is the kind of windmill that Nathan Marsall had to wrestle into position in my middle grade medieval novel, On Fledgling Wings.

It has widely been suggested that returning Crusaders brought the idea of windmills back to Europe with them. While the timing is right, the huge difference in design suggests that this might not be the case, and that windmills might have been designed independently in Europe and the Middle East.

How do windmills work? Inside the mill, a shaft attaches to the sails, and called a windshaft for obvious reasons, moves a large wheel. This is called the brake wheel because it has a large wooden friction brake around its outer edge that could slow or stop the milling process. The brake wheel transferres power to a smaller gear at right angles to it. This smaller gear, called the wallower, shares a vertical shaft with a spur wheel, which drive the millstone.

By the 1300s, those who could afford it build tower mills. This type of windmills has a rotating cap that holds just the roof, the sails, the windshaft and the brake wheel while the body of the mill remains stable. They are built from stone or brick, and therefore can be built taller, allowing for larger sails and greater power. However, they were also expensive to produce.

Photo by Francis Franklin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Dutch developed a better windmill in the middle of the sixteenth century. Smock mills, named after the dress-like peasants' clothing they resemble, these were large enough to be powerful, yet less expensive to build. (photo by Uberprutser (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)]

Windmills were a major source of power in Europe from the 1300s to the 1800s. They went out of favor with the development of steam power, and for two hundred years they have languished. However, the trend for organic and non-manufactured foodstuffs has shifted the economics slightly back in their favor once again.

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Not a Spring Chicken

4/16/2015

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Last fall I visited my mother and entered the house to the luscious, comforting smell of roasting chicken.

On the three hour drive home the next day I kept thinking about that chicken and what I could do with the leftovers. Enchiladas. Crepes. Pot pies. Tetrazzinis. Soups. My mouth watered and my mind wandered all the way home.

The next time I bought groceries I bought a chicken, but then the inevitable business of life got between it and getting it into the oven. One night I got home too late. Another night we ate out. I began thinking that maybe I needed to put it in the crock pot, but my mornings proved just as harried as my evenings.

The chicken languished in my fridge for a while. A week? Two? I'm not sure. Over time, I forgot about the chicken in the bottom bin of the fridge. What finally brought it back into my consciousness was a smell. The smell wasn't overpowering. It was just a teensy, tiny bit off, but it was definitely off.

Here I will admit that most of you are smarter than I am. Most of you would have known what to do if you'd have taken one whiff of a chicken that's sat in solitary confinement for so long. Your offending chicken would have gone directly into the trashcan. But not mine.

Call me over optimistic. Or cheap. Or stupid. Or a combination of all three, but I didn't throw away my smelly chicken. I decided that maybe, just maybe a day in the crockpot would kill whatever was making that chicken smell bad.

Instead, I came home that evening to a house filled with a stench that made me want to retch before I even got in the door. The crockpot had helped that smell multiply a thousand times over. I took the crock out and dumped its contents into the garbage, opened every window in the house and turned on every fan. We ate out that night.

A chicken is just a chicken unless you're a writer or a teacher. Then, it's liable to become a metaphor or an object lesson. What part of your life is just a teensy, tiny bit off? What failures are you holding onto in the hopes that someday you can make good on them? Sometimes it's smart to recognize that a situation or relationship isn't going to get any better, and it's time to s

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The Crusades: the Middle Ages for Middle Graders

4/1/2015

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By Anomyme (Livre d'heures, Londres, British Library)

For many middle grade readers, the Middle Ages were exciting times! Knights on horseback! Damsels in distress! Dragons! (Forget the dragons. Contrary to popular opinion, there were no more dragons in Europe during the Middle Ages than there are now.)

Grateful Jews accept Crusader protection.

One of the most exciting of times for readers of Medieval fiction is the Crusades. In 1095, Emperor Alexius I of Byzantium asked Pope Urban II for help in fighting the Seljuk Turks. Urban's call received a tremendous response from western Christians. One reason so many wanted to go was the promise of an indulgence: the forgiveness of sins for any who accepted the mission. Not only was this a free pass for anyone who wanted to act badly, but a "get out of purgatory free" card for those who wanted continued amnesty from consequences in their next life.

Historians aren't completely sure what Urban asked of Europe's Christians. Many people wrote down their remembrances of his call to arms, but not until many years later. Perhaps he just asked for Europe's warriors to help Alexius repel the Turkish threat. Perhaps he asked for more. Whatever he asked for, those who went on Crusade decided that the recapture the Holy Land, especially the holy city of Jerusalem, from the Moslems was their primary focus. The Holy Land remained the central battlegrounds of the Crusades until 1291.

The Third Crusade (1187-1197) is the one that receives the most literary attention. This is primarily due to the star power of Richard the Lionheart, whose tall frame and handsome face helped him become known as the noblest and most chivalric of England's kings.

Richard's primary opponent was Saladin, an extraordinary Moslem leader and war lord who managed to rally the disparate Arab and Middle Eastern Tribes into one united force even though he was a minority Kurd.

Add to that the mystique of the Knights Templars. These men were a heady combination of warrior knight and religious monk, and, because their order was both widespread and wealthy, also became the chief financiers and bankers of the Middle Ages. The favorite figures of conspiracy theorists (think Da Vinci Code!), the Templars show up in almost every work of literature about the Crusades.

Want to read more about the Crusades? Check out these works of historical fiction.

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Corned Beef: As American As Apple Pie

3/15/2015

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By Father.Jack from Coventry, UK (corned beef selection Uploaded by Fæ) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day, which means many households in America will have corned beef and cabbage stuffed into their crock-pots. Here in America, we think corned beef and cabbage is traditional Irish fare, but we are wrong. It is as American as apple pie, fortune cookies, and chow mein.

The word corned comes from an Old Germanic word, kurnam, which means a small kernel of something. Corned beef is beef that has been cured by packing it in barrels with coarse grains (kernels) of salt, which dried the meat out, preserving it from spoilage. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word corned was around as early as 888 AD. Curing meat with salt is much older; there is evidence that the Greeks were dry salt curing meat by 900 BC.

Corned beef was a major industry for the Irish port cities of Cork and Dublin by sometime in the 17th century, and it continued to be their chief export until 1825. First shipped in barrels, the Irish began canning their corned beef after the process was discovered in the late 18th century. French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously said that an army travels on its stomach, offered a cash prize to whomever developed a reliable method of food preservation. Nicholas Appert, who invented the process for sealing foods into bottles, won that prize. The Englishman Peter Durand took the process one step further and developed the process for sealing food into unbreakable tin containers. During the Napoleonic wars the British army literally lived on cans of corned beef from Cork.

But just because the Irish were producing corned beef didn’t mean they were eating it. Most Irish, if they owned a cow at all, raised it for its dairy products. Cows were sources of butter, cheese and cream and were only slaughtered and eaten when they were no longer good for milking. Sheep, too, were not often eaten, but were raised as a source of wool. Only pigs were raised for consumption. Except for those in heavily touristed areas, Irish pubs and restaurants are more likely to offer a stew of cabbage, leeks and bacon than corned beef and cabbage.

So why do we Americans associate corned beef with the Irish? One theory is that Irish immigrants in New York City found that the corned beef sold in Jewish delis was a less expensive substitute to bacon. Corned beef was a favorite, inexpensive food of the working middle class during the nineteenth century, when refrigeration was not yet widely available.

But corned beef was not just a favorite of the working man; it was also a favorite of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, the Great Emancipator chose corned beef and cabbage for his inaugural luncheon on March 4, 1861.

Go ahead and have your corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day. Wash it down with a green beer, if you want to. And celebrate a meal that is distinctly American.

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Dancing With Death

2/27/2015

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By Toffel (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When Nathan Marshal ap Tewdr, the protagonist in my new middle grade historical novel, On Fledgling Wings becomes a page for Sir Terence Newcombe, he finds that the knight is not at all what he expected. Sir Terence is paunchy, with shaggy, unkempt hair and a strange, almost staggering gait that looks as if neither foot knows where the other is headed. At dinner he fumbles with his quaking knife. He drools. He also has an irascible temper, flailing out violently when angered.

Susanna the poultry woman explains that Sir Terence’s clumsiness and his temper are part of a family curse: a curse known as St. Vitus ’ Dance.

According to Christian legend, St. Vitus was a Sicilian who died in 303, during the persecution of Emperors Diocletian and Maximian. People celebrated the feast of Vitus on June 15 by dancing before his statue. This dancing became popular, and the name "Saint Vitus Dance" became connected to any malady that involved rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements of the limbs. It also led to Vitus being considered the patron saint of dancers, actors, comedians, epileptics, and, incongruously, he is said to protect against lightning strikes.

No one in the Middle Ages knew about bacteria, viruses, DNA or hereditary diseases. There were no microscopes or throat swabs or blood tests to determine what ailed a body. Therefore, diseases were diagnosed purely on symptoms. It is clear to us now that the symptoms of St. Vitus Dance were caused by not just one malady, but many. Sometimes if afflicted just one person, as it afflicts Sir Terence at Farleigh. Other times, whole towns were caught up in a frenzy of jerking, erratic, frenzied behavior.

In Sir Terence’s case, the symptoms point to a hereditary disease now known as Huntington's disease. This neurodegenerative genetic disorder affects muscle coordination and leads to mental decline and behavioral symptoms. The disease begins with subtle problems with mood or cognition. This is followed by a lack of coordination and an unsteady gait. Uncoordinated, jerky body movements and mental abilities increase, often ending in dementia. Physical symptoms can begin at any age, but usually begin between 35 and 44 years of age and develop earlier at a younger age for each successive generation, a bad sign for Terence’s son Tobias.

Another disease that was once called St. Vitus Dance is Sydenham's chorea, which is most common in children. 20-30% of children who’ve had rheumatic fever will have a bout of trembling limbs six months later.

The larger outbreaks of St. Vitus Dance, those in which entire towns participated, are more difficult to diagnose. Ergot poisoning, caused by a fungus that grows on, has been blamed for hallucinations and convulsions accompanying the dance mania, but not all outbreaks of St. Vitus Dance occurred during the wet growing seasons that ergot requires. Interestingly, ergot poisoning has been blamed for the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials as well.

Other food poisonings may have contributed to some of the outbreaks. This is certainly one theory held by the sufferers themselves, who sometimes accused Jews of poisoning their wells and drove them from town in a misguided attempt to stop the malady.

Surely a few participants were hysterics, epileptics or mentally disturbed. Other modern researches have suggested that sufferers were afflicted with a mass hysteria that was more psychological in nature. Others believe that sufferers were actually participating in some cult, and that St. Vitus Dance was more akin to a Bacchanalian ritual than a malady. Perhaps all of the above is true at different places and times. The Middle Ages were a long period of time.

My third middle grade historical novel, On Fledgling Wings, is now available for preorder in ebook form at Amazon. If you would like to be notified when it is available in paperback, sign up for my emails.

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The Right Wright

2/8/2015

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I’m working on back material for a middle grade novel set in the thirteenth century. I’m creating a glossary because my beta readers, the kind volunteers who read my last draft of the novel, asked for it. Too many of them stumbled over words they didn’t know. Many of those words were occupational: quistron, pindar, hosteller, hayward, wainwright were a few that puzzled my readers.

The term ‘wright’ comes from an Old English word from about 700 AD. ‘Wyrhta,” originally meant shaper of wood, but over time came to mean anyone who worked with wood, and then anyone who worked with his hands crafting something. It frequently was combined with the word for what was being crafted, creating compound words like shipwright, a person who builds ships, wheelwright, a person who builds wheels, or cartwright, a person who builds carts.

The word ‘wainwright’ is a combination of two archaic words; ‘wain,’ which is a large wagon used for farming, and ‘wright.’ While many small manors might have employed a cartwright, only a large or enterprising household would have employed a wainwright. A master wainwright would have built larger and sturdier wagons than a cartwright. His bustling shop would have employed wheelwrights, blacksmiths and painters.

The word ‘wright’ has persisted into the present predominantly as a surname. You may not know someone who works as a cartwright or a wainwright, but you may know someone who signs his name Cartwright or Wainwright. It is likely that an ancestor worked with wood or ships or wheels sometime in the distant past. Wright is the sixteenth most common surname in England.

In 1066 William the Conqueror brought the Normans into power in England, and Norman French words began infiltrating the English language which had been primarily Germanic, or Anglo and Saxon. The word ‘carpentier’ over time replaced ‘wright,’ and was gradually replaced by the simplified spelling ‘carpenter.’

By the mid-19th century, the use of wright as an occupational title had pretty much died. I can think of only one word in which it is still commonly used; playwrights are still crafting plays.

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The "What ifs" of History

1/27/2015

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New York : Published by E. Anthony, 501 Broadway, [ca. 1846]

New York : E. Anthony [ca. 1846]

In February 1861 the lieutenant colonel in command of the 2nd U.S. Calvary Regiment stationed at Fort Mason, Texas received orders to report to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott in Washington D.C. for reassignment.

When the officer's stagecoach stopped over in San Antonio, he was accosted by three secessionist army commis-sioners. Texas sided with the south, but as there had been no formal declaration of war, the policy was to allow federal soldiers to march out of the state unimpeded.

The commissioners announced that the U.S. garrison at San Antonio had already left, and that the city was under Confederate control. The lieutenant colonel must declare himself in favor of the Confederacy, or the commissioners would detain him as a prisoner of war.

The officer drew himself to attention and proudly stated that he was not a Texan, but a Virginian, and that he would decide for himself which side to take. His brave comportment must have cowed the commissioners, because they chose not to press the issue. He continued his journey eastward.

When he arrived in Washington D.C., General Scott offered the man the top field-command position in the Union Army. The lieutenant colonel declined, choosing allegiance to his state over his country.

Had those commissioners in San Antonio imprisoned that lieutenant colonel, the Civil War would have been a very different. That lieutenant colonel was Robert E. Lee, and his decision to align himself with the south profoundly affected the course of American history.

What if Robert E. Lee had moldered in a Confederate POW Camp for the entire period of the Civil War?

Such 'what ifs' are the fodder of alternative histories, those works of fiction in which events play out differently than actually happened. In these novels, the South wins the war, or slaves revolt on their own and now fight both North and South, or Europe intercedes for one side or the other. The stream of history jumps its course and nothing is as we know it.

But not all 'what ifs' are in the realm of alternative history.

What if you woke one day to find an enemy army camped on your property?

What if your house became a field hospital for one side, then the other?

What if your crops were trampled, your animals slaughtered and your fields littered with bloated corpses?

These were some of the questions I asked myself when I was writing The Bent Reed, my historical novel set in Gettysburg.

I found the answers in journals, memoirs and newspaper articles from the period, and in secondary sources that quoted the personal remembrances of people who had lived through the battle. I then created a fictitious family plunked their farm down right where armies would collide. I made them suffer through many circumstances that had happened to real people. The stream of history stayed in its channel and ran its course, even if it flowed over rocks that I had imagined into place.

Historical novels help readers put themselves into the swirling events of history. By reading them, we begin to ask our own 'what ifs.'

What if I were present at the Battle of Gettysburg? How would I have reacted to the violence or its aftermath? What lessons can I learn from those who have gone before me?

The answers not only help us understand the past, but help us to proceed into the future.

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liberty born in a swamp!

Thunder reverberates

Medieval Women Knights

A short History of Windmills

Not a Spring Chicken

The Crusades: the Middle Ages for Middle Graders

Corned Beef: As American As Apple Pie

Dancing With Death

The Right Wright

The "What ifs" of History

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