General

Warning: some description of severe injuries

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.

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.

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.

The Origins of Football: The Game That Couldn’t Be Banned

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51445310

https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/ne1000000086166/

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeares-deadly-game-football/

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/people/new-book-chronicles-history-alnwick-shrovetide-football-tradition-1886756

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 16^th, early 17^th 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]

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.

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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

Moses Roper remains an unknown figure in the twenty-first century, despite his immense impact on the transatlantic world during the Victorian period.

For the last 6 years, I have been following the journeys of formerly enslaved African Americans to the British Isles, in an attempt to understand why women and men like Roper crossed the Atlantic, to find out where they visited, who they stayed with, and how they lectured on the Victorian stage. During the nineteenth century, numerous black activists spoke in large cities and small villages across the nation, to educate British audiences about the brutal and inhumane system of American slavery. As escaped fugitives, many sought temporary reprieve from American soil, while others remained in Britain permanently for the rest of their lives. Some gave lectures to raise money for specific antislavery societies on both sides of the Atlantic, or concentrated on raising money to legally purchase the freedom of enslaved family members, or even themselves. Others sought work with varying degrees of success. Black men and women made an indelible mark on society by holding lectures in famous meeting halls, taverns, theatres, churches, and the private parlour rooms of wealthy patrons across the country. They wrote and published narratives, stayed with influential reformers and ensured millions of words were written about them in the Victorian newspapers.

I have attempted to map some of their journeys on my website, www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com. As you will see from Moses Roper’s map, he travelled far and wide, crisscrossing through the rural villages of Cornwall and Wales, all the way to the Scottish Highlands. Nine hundred and eighty-five speaking locations have been mapped for Roper between 1838-1861. Between 1837-1848, he spoke in Baptist, Independent, Methodist and Quaker churches as well as town halls in nearly every county in Britain; in 1844, Roper wrote that he had lectured in over 2,000 towns throughout the country and sold over 25,000 English copies of his narrative, as well as 5,000 in Welsh. According to his listeners, “they [had] never heard a lecture more calculated to enlighten” the public on American slavery.

Roper was born enslaved in North Carolina in 1815, as a result of his enslaved mother’s rape by her white slaveowner. He suffered from extreme acts of torture and violence, and tried to escape (by his count) between 15-20 times; every failed attempt led to severe punishment, and he was thus described as an “unruly slave.” Roper’s courageous resistance eventually paid off, when he finally escaped from a Florida plantation in 1834 and travelled to New York.

Shortly afterwards, Roper came to Britain and conducted extensive lecturing tours until the 1840s, in part making a living by lecturing to audiences about slavery. During his performances, Roper highlighted the cruelties of slavery as well as the hypocrisies of American society. In one lecture, he stated: “You have heard the slave-holders’ story 250 years ago. Now, I think it is time for the slaves to speak. I have published an account of my sufferings and escape, and I have sent a copy of that book to every slave-holder whose name is there mentioned.” (The Leicestershire Mercury and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties, May 19 1838, p.2)

Roper believed it was time for enslaved individuals – and African Americans in general – to tell their side of the story by any means necessary. He had a duty to write and speak on the subject of slavery and convince others of its cruelty, and even took the bold move to send his former slave owner a copy of his autobiography, a symbolic gesture that simultaneously represented his liberty and his desire to shame all those connected with slavery.

Moses Roper in Northumberland

During the early to mid 1840s, Roper spoke in Northumberland several times to packed audiences about American slavery. In February 1846, Roper lectured in Belford, and the local newspaper correspondent wrote that:

“Mr. Moses Roper, an escaped slave, delivered a lecture in the Presbyterian church, Belford, on Wednesday evening week, on the subject of slavery, as existing in the United States of America. The audience was large, and during the delivery of the address, which occupied nearly two hours, the most breathless attention was given while Mr. R. related the monstrous cruelties which he himself had endured in a country professing to be the freest on the face of the earth.” (Berwick and Kelso Warder, 28 February 1846, 3)

In another lecture, the local correspondent described how “the greatest interest was manifested by the audience in the heart-stirring pictures drawn by Mr. Roper of the misery and suffering endured by that unfortunate class of human beings…” The correspondent ended his article with:

“Altogether, considering his bearing and address, and the horrors he has endured in his own person, he excites the greatest interest; and should he give another lecture in Berwick, we would advise our readers who have not yet heard him, to be present. We understand that a narrative of his adventures and escape will in a few days be published, and may be had at the booksellers.” (Berwick and Kelson Warder, 28 February 1846, 3)

The correspondent refers here to Roper’s autobiography. By 1846, Roper had published multiple editions of his slave narrative, first published in 1839. The book was ground-breaking for its use of visual images to depict slavery, including illustrations of chains and instruments of torture that had been enacted upon Roper himself. You can read the 1848 edition of Roper’s narrative online here, which contains a list of some of his speaking locations at the end.

After his last tour of Britain in the early 1860s, Roper returned to America and still lectured sporadically into the 1870s and 1880s. He suffered from illness towards the end of his life, and was found one night at a train station in Boston with his loyal dog by his side. He was taken to hospital, but died shortly afterwards in 1891. We should remember him through his relentless activism against slavery and white supremacy, together with his courageous desire to earn and defend his liberty.

Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray

University of Edinburgh

With thanks to Jane Bowen for her help and support with sourcing documents at Northumberland Archives for my research, and for a short article in the local newspaper.