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. 

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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

Eighteenth Century Laundry Day

by Kathy Fischer-Brown

In my last post I discussed some of the more fascinating aspects of researching and writing historical fiction. You might even remember my mention of how incorporating details from the research into the writing helps bring the period and setting alive for me as well as for the reader. These details also go a long way toward keeping the characters in their place and time—and the author from creating annoying anachronisms. These aspects of dress, furniture, food and its preparation, travel, and accomplishing the day-to-day tasks, which we today might take for granted, are among those little motes that add to the “feel” of the time.

This has never been more true when you consider how laundry was done back in the mid- to late 1700s. Here in the early 21^st century, tossing a load of wash into a machine (top loading or the newer, more efficient front loaders), adding your choice of liquid or powdered detergent, softener and whitener is pretty much a no brainer. The cleansing agent even comes with its own handy measuring cup; temperature settings involve nothing more than the turn of a dial (or press of a button), as does the size of the load and water level. In many cases, you can even choose an extra rinse or spin. When the load is finished, the machine beeps, lest you’ve gone on to something else in the 20-or so minutes it takes for the cycle to complete and let it slip your mind. Then you toss the whole mass of t-shirts, socks, towels, and what-not, into the other machine; add a dryer sheet; set the temperature (for wash and wear, permanent press, or delicate); flip the switch; and for another 30-40 minutes you can play ball with the dogs in the yard, run to the supermarket for those much-needed ingredients for your mid-week supper, or catch up on the latest episode of the TV show you’d DVR’d the night before. (Or on my case, you research some more and/or write.)

Even with these modern conveniences as a part of my life, I hate doing laundry. But while writing the opening scene of Where the River Narrows, my contribution (along with Ron Crouch) to BWL’s “Canadian Historical Brides” series (Quebec), I realized just how lucky I am.

First, consider how difficult a task it was to schlep and heat enough water to wash bed linens, under garments, shirts, tablecloths, and a host of incidentals for a considerably sized family and their servants. Consider also that “wash day” (with these and other complications) was more likely a monthly affair rather than the two- or three-times a week event here in the present. And then consider that, even as it was an all-day, coordinated event, it had to be done, and was done in all seasons and all weather.

From an interesting site (http://www.woodvilleplantation.org/Schedule/laundry_day_18th_century1.pdf) I found when looking into this aspect of the life of Elisabeth Van Alen (the book’s heroine), I found the following:

Water would have been carried to the boiling cauldron in buckets carried on the shoulders with a yoke. Assuming that each of these buckets holds 2 ½ gallons, the laundress would be able to transport 5 gallons per trip. … The boiler used to hold the heated water generally held 20-40 gallons of water per individual load, thus requiring a minimum 4 trips per load of laundry. (Not including 10 more gallons for the scrub and rinse water!)

Fortunately for Elisabeth, her family home is situated on the Mohawk River, with a creek flowing down from the hills on the east side of their house. But this little treatise from the Woodville Plantation in Bridgeville, PA, also points out that fire was vital to heating this water, along with the trials and tribulations of amassing enough wood:

Generally on wash day, the laundress and her crew would awaken at 4:30 AM in order to gather wood and prepare the fires used to heat the water. On an average day, cooking fires would require approximately 30 large pieces of wood to prepare all three meals for the day. The amount used on laundry day would most likely be double that amount, or 50-60 large pieces of wood. Laundry fires were generally larger, and the heavier, knotty wood chunks that were unsuitable for the controlled cooking fires would have been used during the laundering process. Assuming that a large piece of split wood weighs approximately 3 pounds, an 18^th century laundress would be required to move 150-200 pounds of wood, prior to even beginning the task at hand.

Then there was the matter of soap. Or the lack of it. And getting out stains (no miracle spray leave-on-and-throw-in-the-machine wonders). 

Commercially-made soap could be bought, but it was very expensive and not always available, especially out on the New York frontier in 1774. So, this was something that was made at home (along with candles) from animal fats and the accumulated ashes from the fireplace(s). Lye was caustic and not easy on the hands, to put it mildly (no pun intended). But it did its job well. This concoction was added to the “copper,” usually a large pot that would also double as cooking vessel, which was placed over the fire built from those unwieldy logs lugged in for the purpose and those 30-40 gallons of water hauled from the creek. It was a hot and sticky job, agitating the contents with paddles, then extricating the steaming articles, rinsing and wringing them before setting them to dry. 

The favored method of drying was to spread the wash on low-lying bushes in the sun, or laying them out on the grass—something about the effects of chlorophyll. (Remember, this description is about what it was like during clement weather; imagine doing laundry in the depths of winter!) There were clothes lines back then, but the clothespin hadn’t yet been invented. And when everything was dry, there was the task of smoothing out the wrinkles.

The iron was an item that not every household could afford. And even if they could afford an iron, they would have to own at least two. These were flat-irons or “sad irons” (from the word “solid,” which is exactly what they were). Heavy, cumbersome beasts, they demanded to be kept close to the fire to stay hot. Which, in turn, led to the unfortunate eventuality of their picking up soot and grime, and…you guessed it…smearing smudge—if not burning holes—over the stuff you just spent the better part of the day sweating and and toiling over to get clean. One innovation of the time was the box-iron, which happily did away with scorching. These irons had a hinged door on the back and were fitted with an iron insert that could be kept hot and swapped out with another to prevent burning your linens. More common though—and a lot less hazardous—was the linen press: a table with a parallel board attached, which, when the screws were tightened over folded linens, did the job just right without hot slugs and scorching irons.

Starching was also done, a task that I am most thankful has lost its popularily. But they did it on a common basis. Without Niagara Spray Starch. Instead, they used water collected after cooking potatoes. (Fascinating how they made ample and varied use of pretty much everything they raised, produced, or created with their hands.)

Most well-to-do families of this period employed servants to do laundry and other menial chores, but Elisabeth’s family lives under extenuating circumstances. These compel her not only to supervise but to take charge and participate in many a mundane task, such as laundry, and organizing the family's meager staff. Qualities that will serve her well later on in the story when the American Revolution turns her world upside-down. When her home and lands are confiscated by Rebels, she and what remains of her family, is forced to flee to Canada. And as Shakespeare once said, “Thereby hangs a tale.”

I hope you enjoyed this little journey into the past. Please check out the first installments of Book We Love’s “Canadian Historical Brides” series of novels. Comments are always welcome :-)

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Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh’s Daughter, Courting the Devil, The Partisan’s Wife, and The Return of Tachlanad, her 2016 release, an epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her Books We Love Author page or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are available in e-book and in paperback from Amazon, Kobo, and other online retailers.