The reign of Queen Anne Stuart, 1702-1714.by Rosemary Morris

 Purchase these books written during the riegn of Queen Anne Stuart, and more books by Rosemary Morris by visiting her Books We Love author page:  http://bookswelove.net/authors/morris-rosemary/ 

I have written three historical romances, with strong themes, set in the reign of Queen Anne Stuart, 1702-1714. Tangled Love, Far Beyond Rubies and The Captain and The Countess.

When Queen Anne Stuart, niece of Charles II, ruled from 1702 to 1714 attitudes towards children and their education were very different to those in the 21^st century.

Childhood and Education. Gentlewomen

     in early 18^th century England.

Little is known about the nursery, in which babies were fed pap instead of either their mother’s or a wet nurse’s milk. To entertain infants, those whose parents could afford them, babies had coral rattles with bells.

Little girls played with dolls, which were called ‘Babies’. An advertisement read: On Saturday, last, being the 12^th instant, there arrived at my House in King Street, Covent Garden, a French Baby for the year 1712.  Some dolls were made of wax, but these were the most expensive and so were those in Widow Smith’s raffle, large jointed, dressed Babies. It is possible that, dolls were girls’ only toys.

Although most girls were educated at home some of them attended boarding schools. . In Tangled Love, the heroine’s young sister attends one owned by *Mrs Elizabeth Tutchin in Highgate, where young gentlewomen could be soberly educated and taught all sorts of learning fit for young gentlewomen.

It was considered very important to instil sobriety into pert girls, who probably ogled men, were always on the lookout for a potential husband and flirted with fans. For example: *A fan placed near the heart sent the message “You have won my love.” Hiding the eyes behind the fan. I love you. Twirling the fan in the left hand. We are being watched.

In addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, plain sewing and embroidery, town bred pupils were taught to dance, sing and play the virginals, spinet and guitar. Other instruction might include painting on glass, wax work and drawing. They also learned culinary arts - pastry, sweetmeats, sauces and liqueurs.

A clue to country-bred girls’ education is in the dialogue between characters in The Sowrers by Shadwell, from which I quote some snippets.

Priscilla. Did she not bestow good breeding upon you there?

Clara. To see cow’s milk’d, learn to Churn, and make Cheese? (Presumably neither Clara nor the other young ladies were expected to milk a cow.)

Eugene And to learn the top of your skill in Syrrup, Sweetmeats Aqua mirablisi and Snayl Water.

Priscilla. Ay, ay, and ‘twere better for all the Gentlemen in England that wives had no other breeding, but you had Musick and Dancing.

A good housewife was valued. An aunt tells her niece.…she spent her time in better learning than you did. Not in reading flights of battels of Dwarfs and Giants; but in writing out receipts for Broths, Possets, Caudles, and Surfeit Waters; as became a good Country Gentlewoman.

If girls could not learn the art of making pastry at home, particularly for raised pastry, there were the forerunners of Cookery Schools.

Whatever else a gentlewoman’s education lacked it was not dancing. She was taught how to hold her head, heave her breast, and move with her entire body. If she didn’t learn to do so correctly, she was threatened with never finding a husband. A young lady was also expected to learn how to behave at the Tea Table, to present her snuff box and how to place patches on her face to the best advantage.

Poor children could attend Sunday School, where they were taught to read, not for entertainment, but to study the Bible.

At charity schools orphans were trained to wash, iron, clean, sew and knit as well as write and cast accounts. The older girls assisted the housekeeper, and made and mended the children’s clothes. By the time they left they had been trained to become domestic servants and, if they were fortunate, to become good housewives.

 

*Elizabeth Tuchin’s brother, worked for the Observater.

*The Language of The Fan by Micki Gaffney.

Mediaeval Novel

 Yvonne, Lady of Cassio, 

set in the turbulent reign of Edward II. Publication date to be announced.

Available as e-publications and paper backs.

 Early 18^th century novels by Rosemary Morris

Tangled Love,

Far Beyond Rubies

The Captain and The Countess

Regency novels

False Pretences

Sunday’s Child   Heroines born on different days of the week. Book 1.

Monday’s Child Heroines born on different days of the week. Book 2

Tuesday’s Child Heroines born on different days of the week Book 3

www.rosemarymorris.co.uk

http://bookswelove.net/authors/morris-rosemary/

 

Let’s Go Fishing by Katherine Pym

Release date July 1, 20017

I wrote “The End” on my first draft of Pillars of Avalon, a story of 17^th century Newfoundland, Canada. When I first started this project, I thought this would be difficult since settlers in the New World struggled to stay alive. They hunted, fished and peeked over big boulders to see if wild savages lurked in the distance, waiting to scalp them. 

How could I write a full novel of almost 95,000 words on episodes of crude survival that would numb the reader over time? It would make them think: Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live then. What a pain!

Then I came upon Sir David & Lady Sara Kirke. They were wine merchants living in London. King Charles I gave David and his brothers carte blanche (in the form of a letter of marque) to pillage and destroy French settlements along the Canadian coast. 

I thought, Oh good. A pirate story. I’ve always liked heroes with a slightly wicked bent. If one is too good, he/she is boring. 

But David Kirke was more than a king sanctioned pirate. While he pillaged and set ships afire along the St. Lawrence River, he was also a businessman. He saw opportunity wherever he went. One of those places was Ferryland, Newfoundland, where the fishing was supreme-o.

Fishing on the grand banks NL with icebergs

Men returned to England after a season along the grand banks and enthused how the waters teemed with fish. The cold waters were so crowded that to breathe, the fish jumped into fishing boats just to get away from the overwhelmingly packed seas. 

London and Dartmouth merchants leased ships of sail and traded goods like wine, clothing, and farm implements from England in exchange for dry salt fish and cod-oil. No money was to exchange hands. To transport money was illegal. Everything was traded, or supposed to be. When you see or read pirate stories, their chests filled with silver and gold coins, (if they are law abiding fellows) the money would have come from Spain or Portugal, France or any port of call in the Mediterranean. 

But I digress: 

Crude Fishing Equipment

Closer Look at one end

Boats with 5 men fished daily in the late spring to early autumn months. They were expected to haul in over 300 cod a day using the most primitive of tools. (In high summer, 1000 fishing boats could be in the water at the same time.) Cod could be as heavy as 120 lbs (54.43108 kg). Nets were apparently not used. Seins were used for the smaller schools of fish, like herring. 

Depending on the day and who did what, a fisherman would use this primitive device to haul upward to 100 fish per day. One would think the hemp line would slice through a leather glove and cut your hand. 

Every day, fish would be brought ashore to be processed. The fish would be gutted and beheaded by men called ‘Headers’. Cod livers would be thrown into barrels for cod-oil. The Header pushed the gutted fish to the ‘Splitter’ who opened the fish and removed the spine.

Notes have come down through the ages how quickly this could be done, up to “24 score in half an hour”.  If a team of gutters and splitters processed fish for 10 hours, that’s 9,600 fish per day—that’s one team. 

After the fish were gutted and salted, they were washed off in sea water, then laid flat on a rocky shore or flake. A flake is a low table covered with pine boughs or such which allow air to pass around the fish and dry uniformly. Boys would stand by, waving a large enough object to keep the flies away since maggots would destroy a dry salt crop.  

Fish Flakes covered with Cod

The calculations are like this: 

In the summer months, a period of 8-10 weeks, a crew of 5 would be expected to catch and cure 200 quintals (quintal=112 lbs or 50.80234kg of salt fish). That is an amount of 22,400 lbs/10,160.47kg of fish in a season. At 11 shillings per quintal (17th century prices), the merchants would garner several thousand pounds sterling per fishing boat per season. If a merchant owned several fishing boats, the numbers are staggering. 

Sir David & Lady Sara Kirke saw the potential and eventually went into the "sack" trade, where goods were traded for fish. They exploited this when they moved to Ferryland in 1638, and by the time of Sara's death in 1684 or 1685, she was a wealthy plantation owner. 

So, that’s one story line, but how many fishing tales are good for a long novel? Well, I found a whole bunch of other stories that filled the breach, which I will relate in another blogspot post. Very exciting.

 PILLARS OF AVALON will be released July 1, 2017. 

~*~*~*~*~*~

Many thanks to WikiCommons, public domain and

Pictures of fishing lines, page 26, Fish Into Wine, The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century by Peter E. Pope (University of North Caroline Press, 2004

CROSSWORDS=CROSS WORDS for Priscilla Brown

For more information and to purchase this contemporary romance,

visit http://a.co/3DBVpuF

In Hot Ticket, Olivia deciphers four cryptic crossword clues in the four minutes Callum takes to make her latte;she is the only character in my novels whose crossword interest is even peripheral to the plot. In a couple of my other stories, newspapers open at the crossword page appear in characters' living rooms, but merely as detail adding to their lifestyle background.

Personally, however, I am seriously challenged by cryptics. As a writer, words are my tools. Why, therefore, can't I come anywhere near to solving these brainteasers? I'm confident I have a good vocabulary and general knowledge, and straight or quick crosswords don't usually cause me to metaphorically tear my hair. But my cryptic failure annoys and frustrates me. In an effort to overcome this, I attended a four-hour course for beginners on tackling the beasties. Seventeen hopefuls braved the outside 40 degree (Celsius) heat to welcome the inside airconditioned classroom, where only our brains began to fry.

I always thought 'wordplay' was what I did with my writing, playing with words, moving them around, adding, amending, deleting. This attempt to construct or reconstruct a sentence, paragraph, chapter, and the whole novel manuscript into sequences of words is intended to best convey the story line in my head, and to offer significant emotional experiences for readers. I learned that in the cryptic crossword world, 'wordplay' is in itself a kind of puzzle which presents assorted techniques useful as guides to the solutions. So that is a bit like how I work as a novelist.

Our excellent tutor in this class took us through these techniques, with comprehensive handouts including mini crosswords each exemplifying a different technique. Of course, in these, we knew which was required; in real crosswords, solvers may be able to make an educated (or more likely in my case, uneducated) guess as to which the compiler is utilising, but nothing can be said to be certain. Not terribly helpful!

During the ten-minute tea break, we discussed conundrums we had come across in cryptics,and all were relieved to know we are not stupid and not alone in our ineptitude at unscrambling clues which appear utterly meaningless.

After the class, I finished the small crosswords remaining in the handouts (with answers); instead of trepidation and bafflement at the sight of a cryptic, I am beginning to apply what I learned. I have a long way to go before I can make sense of clues like rotten egg - take it back which initially indicates to me that I should reverse the order of the letters, resulting in nonsense. In fairness, there was more to this clue concerning hens, who surely do not want any egg back.

I need to work on a different way of thinking, to suspend the habit of thinking like a 'quick' puzzle solver and to re-orient my brain into a lateral direction. But right now I'm going to return to my novel in progress, where the wordplay is in control!

Successful puzzling from solver-in-training Priscilla

http://bookswelove.net/authors/brown-priscilla

https://priscillabrownauthor.com