Since the lockdown things have changed for us at Northumberland Archives. My usual routine was jump out of bed after a bit too long of a lay-in; a rushed breakfast and then a 30 minute car journey; shouting at drivers for doing silly things; getting wet when we clock-in; then opening and closing the gates behind us. A full day’s work in an office looking at white walls, no windows, then home in the dark, getting wet opening and shutting the gates behind us, then clocking out!
Before the enforced lockdown lots of work was done behind the scenes to make sure we all had enough work to keep us going whilst home working.
Now my day consists of rolling out of bed, a leisurely breakfast and a nano second journey from lounge to dining room. Logged in and ready to go at the same time it would be, had I driven to work. Reduced carbon footprint.
The peace is interrupted as my new colleagues appear one by one. The dining room has become a new office space with both my wife and eldest daughter; all working from our little hub. The youngest daughter appears around midday having finished school abruptly. What no GCSE’s this year? She informs us that she is still alive and hungry.
My work day now allows me to see out a picture window. The green grass of home and bright blue skies. I have been working through my emails as I have amassed 26,000. I’m sure I don’t need all these so the delete button has been pushed over 2500 times so far.
We have lists that have never gone onto our electronic catalogue to input; reports for research to write up; social media posts to research and pass on; emails to reply to; work to secure for when we return to normal; and, of course, keep in communication with the rest of the team. I am also using the opportunity to catch up on all the work my volunteers have transcribed since ‘Northumberland at War’. They are like prisoners of war that never went home as they love the place too much. And every now and again a video conference to see how things are going with the Head of Archives which reminds me of the Eurovision Song Contest – Gosforth is calling to give the vote of the Gosforth jury.
Life hasn’t changed too much, just the environment and work colleagues; although adjusting to working on a small chrome book has had its challenges. Work continues we just had to adjust to the type of it; no old books or lost treasures to look at.
Stay safe out there and let’s hope we can get back to normal sooner rather than later.
Traditionally, the beautiful game was brutal and riotous. Before the rules and regulations introduced by the Football Association (founded 1863), traditional football was a free-for-all that the authorities tried to ban on numerous occasions. The first recorded attempt to ban or curtail the playing of football dates from 1314, when the City of London decided that too much damage was being caused by the game.
In the Middle Ages football was played when people weren’t working, this meant Sundays and holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). Whole cities, towns or villages divided up into opposing teams, sometimes geographically (the north versus south) or according to marital status (married versus unmarried). Needless to say, squads were somewhat larger than today’s eleven players and could even run into the hundreds.
There were few, if any, rules – the ball could be handled and thrown, as well as kicked. Goals were often local landmarks and play could continue until nightfall, or even over several days. Play wasn’t usually confined to a pitch, as today, but was carried on through the town or village streets. It was a full contact game – think of a medieval Vinnie Jones, Nobby Stiles or Stuart Pearce without the constraints of an umpire, or rules. It is doubtless that many scores were settled during games.
A glimpse of the brutality of the game can be gleaned from the records of the Northumberland Quarter Sessions of 1680. Ralph Lowrison of Choppington appeared before a Justice of the Peace to complain about a football match that had taken place on the Tuesday after Easter at Bothal. He claimed that he was set upon by Bernard Smith and William Jackson, one on each side of him. (Just pass on to the next paragraph if you are squeamish…) Ralph claimed that Bernard and William had so violently bruised him that he did “…spitt blood from his Bowills…” and that a bone setter was needed to reset his arm and put his shoulder back in its socket. It isn’t clear why Ralph came in for such treatment – perhaps because he was an “outsider” or perhaps he was just at the wrong game at the wrong time.
QSB/1/28
It is therefore a bit of a surprise that the traditional game has survived at all, but it is still played in a handful of places throughout the country, usually on Shrove Tuesday. In the northeast, Sedgefield and Alnwick play a version of the traditional game.
At Alnwick, the game is now played on a field (an innovation of 1828), thanks to the Duke of Northumberland, who was probably fed up of the town getting smashed up every year. Originally, it seems that the married men of the village played the unmarried men, but that the division of the town into two parishes in the nineteenth-century lent itself well to the forming of teams; now St Michaels play St Pauls. Two “hales” are set up on the field as goals and are decorated with greenery. No handling of the ball is allowed; kicking only, but play is physical and opponents tackle each other to the ground (bone setters aren’t generally called upon, though.) Once the game is over (after three “hales” or periods have been played) the ball is lobbed into the River Aln and whoever dives in and retrieves it keeps the ball as a trophy.
NRO 3536/9
Northumberland Archives are lucky enough to hold a copy of the minute books of the committee that has organised the Alnwick game since the nineteenth-century. The older of the two volumes contains posters, photographs and sometimes a short comment about that year’s game. Some of the posters advertising the game are of particular interest as they also list the “bye-laws” or rules of the game. The more recent volume (1954-1973) contains descriptions of each game, who scored goals, who played well and the weather conditions under which the games were played.
M C Balfour County Folklore Concerning Northumberland, 1903
Gavin Kitching ‘From Time Immemorial’: The Alnwich Shrovetide Football Match and the Continuous Remaking of Tradition in The International Journal of the History of Sport, April 2011
Northumberland Archives Alnwick Shrove Tuesday Football committee minutes (bound photocopies), 1954-1972,1871-1985 NRO 03851/1-2
Edwarde Potter’s Booke of Phisicke and Chirurgery[1]* is a manuscript from the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Newcastle Antiquaries’ collection at Northumberland Archives. It contains about 1500 recipes, mostly medical but with some others as well. It is bound together with an eighteenth century manuscript, mainly of recipes, which we may look at in a future blog. Digital images of the whole book can be found on the Antiquaries’ website, along with transcriptions of every page, done by a group of volunteers.
Who was
Edward Potter?
When we began work on the
document we had no idea who Edwarde Potter might be. However, there were some clues in the text. The front page is dated 1610, and there is a
date of 1594 inside, at the beginning of an inventory of Edwarde’s books, all
of them bibles and Protestant commentaries on the scriptures. The other clue that Edwarde gave was that he had
taken some remedies from a book “found in the Parson’s study of Warlingham”. We found the village of Warlingham, on the
Surrey-Kent border.
So it appeared that Edwarde
Potter was a literate man, living in the late 16th, early 17th
century. He had a library of books and knew a clergyman, the Vicar of
Warlingham, from whom he has had remedies for common ailments that are included
in his book. With these facts in mind,
we searched the Probate and Wills section of an online genealogy subscription
site (findmypast.co.uk).
And there was an Edward Potter who appeared to fulfil the criteria! He was a clergyman in Tatsfield, a small village on the Surrey/ Kent border five miles from Warlingham, who died in 1612. He possessed, by the standards of the day, a large collection of books. In his will he gave two of his daughters 20 books each and left the residue of all his printed books to be divided equally among his sons.[2]
The church of St Mary’s at Tatsfield; though much Victorianised, its nave dates back to the 11th century, though much altered since.
According to The Clergy of the Church of England database (theclergydatabase.org.uk) he was installed as Rector of Tatsfield in 1571. Until 1595 the Vicar of Warlingham was Richard Redworth, then William Parker was appointed Vicar. When Potter died in 1612, William Parker succeeded him. These men would undoubtedly have known each other.
Edward’s will, together with those of his wife Joan[3] and son William[4], has allowed us to construct a family tree of 3 generations. Edward was married to Joan and they had three sons, Thomas, William and Edward and three daughters, Mary, Elizabeth and Theophila. So from a name, Edwarde Potter, a date 1610, and a village in Surrey we have been able to trace the likely owner of our document.
What the
book contains
Each of the seven sections of the book contains a series of recipes, neatly numbered and laid out – until the last few pages, when someone else has evidently taken over and it is all much more slapdash. Some of the recipes are for cookery, especially for sweet biscuits and for preserving cherries, quinces, or damsons. Others are household hints – how to perfume gloves or make ‘washing balls’. A few verge on the magical – do you want to know how to get out the precious stone which, apparently, every water snake has in its belly? Mostly, though, they are medical remedies for a wide range of ailments, from migraine to bladder and kidney complaints, the ‘French pox’ (syphilis), melancholy (depression) and a woman’s heavy periods.
A few of the remedies are very
simple, using one or two herbs, milk and eggs; one for a cough is an egg
custard with rosewater. But most of them
are complex, using a whole variety of ingredients, and often several stages of
preparation, and are the sort of prescriptions you might have obtained from a
physician, if you could afford one and if there were any nearby. They would have been hard work to prepare,
with herbs and spices being ‘stamped’ (crushed) in a mortar, ‘seethed’
(simmered) over a fire for a long period, and often finally distilled into what
was seen as a pure and concentrated form, in the same way as wine is distilled
into brandy.
As for the ingredients… many
contain a dozen or more herbs, but also spices, chemicals and minerals which
would have had to be bought from one of the London
apothecaries’ warehouses. Newly discovered
plants and trees from the New World of the Americas also make their appearance,
alongside mercury and vitriol (sulphuric acid). More startlingly to our eyes, there are also
animal parts, animal waste, and human blood, milk, and urine. This is not unusual in the medicine of the
time; some of the ideas were carried over from ancient times, and there was a
school of thought that God had put everything on the earth for human use, and
so it should all be used for curing humans.
How much good would recipes like
the Reverend Potter’s have done? Not a
lot, and in some cases positive harm. Quite
a few of these remedies are very nasty indeed, and in the ‘don’t try this at
home’ category. But we have to bear in
mind that when someone vomited up the medicine they had been given, that was
seen as a sign that it was working and ‘purging’ them of the disease, rather
than being an unpleasant side-effect!
There is a lot to be said for
modern medicine!
This blog is a collaboration between Kath Smith from Explore Lifelong Learning in Newcastle and Sue Ward from the Society Antiquaries Newcastle Upon Tyne.
With thanks for help and encouragement with this project to Dr Marie Addyman; Reverent Vincent Short, Vicar of Tatsfield and his wife Veronica; Chris Broomfield, Kent Archaeology and David Rymill, Hampshire Record Office.
[1] phisicke’ means medicine and ‘chirurgery’ means surgery
[2] Surrey & South London Will Abstracts, 1470-1856 Surrey Archdeaconry Court. V8 Register ‘Berry’ 1608-1615. Abstract reference: SW/8
[3] Kent Wills and Probate Indexes 1328-1890: Rochester Consistory Court: Document Ref: DRb/Pw24
[4] Surrey & South London Will Abstracts, 1470-1856: Surrey Archdeaconry Court Vol. 9 Register ‘Stoughton’ 1614-1621: Abstract reference: SW/9_593
