Sculptors Claudius, Castorius, Symphorian, and Nicostratus refused to carve a ‘graven image’ of Aesculapius (the Greco-Roman god of Medicine). They were condemned in the reign of Diocletian (AD 284-305), placed in lead barrels, and drowned in the Danube.
Their story is more confused than most, there are a total of 9 Crowned martyrs in a group of five and a group of four. Four soldiers were killed for refusing to worship Aesculapius, and five sculptors refused to carve a statue. Or vice versa, or its all a mix up. To cap it all their Saint’s Day has been changed from November 8th to the 9th. I’ll let you look it up!
Patrons of sculptors, stonemasons, stonecutters; against fever; and for a reason, I have not been able to find out: cattle.
Recent discoveries from Pompeii are being reported in a timely fashion on an interesting website – one of the recent posts is about the discovery of a Roman Electoral Poster. Please enjoy the read! electoral-inscriptions-discovered-in-pompeii
Below, I enclose a short section of my book ‘In Their Own Words – A Literary Companion To The Origins Of London‘ on Roman Elections, which might be of interest. But first, I have updated and republished my Almanac of the Past Blog posts for November 4th and November 5th, which you can see my following these links:
Extract from ‘In Their Own Words – A Literary Companion To The Origins Of London‘ about Roman Local Politics.
The forum in a Roman town was the central meeting place, used for offices, shops, market, meetings and political elections. Inscriptions show that the Londinium forum was the home of the provincial assembly, and that local government in London continued down to the ward (vicus) level. Surviving political `posters’ and graffiti from Pompeii provides some idea of the concerns of the Roman citizens:
Neighbours! Vote L Status Receptus for duumvir. He is fine. Posted by Aemilius Celer Vicinus.
A Plague on any wretch who scrubs this out!
Vote for M Casellius Marcellus ,a good aedile. He will grant great Games!
Bruttius Balbus for duumvir. Genialis supports him. He will conserve the treasury.
Trebius for aedile! The barbers support him.
M.Cerrinius Vatia for aedile! All night drinkers back him. Vatia for aedile! The pick pockets back him!
Spend for the public welfare! Keep the rates down!
— John Morris,‘londinium’22
A duumvir was the chief magistrate of the town, the equivalent of the Consul in Rome, and he was helped by `junior’ magistrates including aediles. As magistrates, they were expected to fund public works and entertainments from their pocket, so they had to be independently wealthy or backed by wealthy interests.
In addition, a property qualification could be imposed. A surviving charter provides:
A councillor of Tarentum…shall possessa buildingwithin the borders of the territory of Tarentumthat shall beroofedwithno fewer than1,500tiles.
Voting was strictly controlled, with returning officers, supervision by independent witnesses, and ballot boxes.
In Their Own Words – A Literary Companion To The Origins Of London‘ D A Horizons, 2009. Kevin Flude
To buy Kindle version click here. To buy paperback click on the paypal link below or email kpflude AT anddidthosefeet.org.uk
The 9th Month of the Roman Calendar 9 being ‘novem’. Now it’s the 11th because of reorganisation of the Roman Calender.
In Welsh it is ‘Tachwedd’ which means the month of slaughtering. Blōtmōnaþ (Blotmonath) in Anglo -saxon – the month of blood. These reference the fact that this is the month when the surplus animals are slaughtered or as the historian, Venerable Bede has it, ‘the month of immolations’.
Kalendar of Shepherd’s November
The image shows some of the aspects of November – star signs Scorpio and Sagittarius, Pigs are fattening up on the acorns in the forest and then being fattened, slaughtered, smoked or dried to preserve them through the hard winter. The text of the Kalendar gives a good summary of what early modern life in November was like. In summary, the day when the ‘poore die through want of Charitie’.
Chrysanthemums Flowers for the Dead (K Flude’s back garden!)
How the Celtic festival that marked the beginning of Winter became All Hallows is not clear. Some say the Church set up its own festival independent of the Northern European traditions, but it is as likely that the Church adopted existing pagan festivals, and gave them a Christian spin.
Samhain, on October 31st, was, for Celtic religions, not only the beginning of Winter but also the beginning of the Year. The Festivities began on the evening before the day because Celtic and Germanic traditions began their day at Dusk. So Halloween is not, in fact, the evening before, it is the start of the day of the festival.
Facebook Image
The Church adopted the Roman tradition of the day beginning not at Dusk but at Midnight. So the festival of All Hallows is on November 1st not October 31st. But the Church mimicked the old ways of doing things by celebrating the evening before as the Vigil of All Hallows’ Day which was called All Hallows Evening or Halloween.
For the Celts, Samhain is an uncanny day when all the sprites and spirits are alive and in the world. The Church took that, and span in on its heads, so it became a ‘hallowed’ holy day when all Saints are celebrated and alive to us, and celebrated on October 31st and November 1st.
A celebration of All Saints was originally in May in the Church but was changed to the 1st November in the 7th Century by Pope Boniface, later swapped back to May, and in the 9th Century fixed on the 1st November. It is followed on the 2nd by All Souls’ Day.
So on the 1st November, those celebrating the pagan festival would be in full swing after a hard night of celebration. The embers of the Fire would be still burning, stones left around the fire would be inspected for the prophecy they told of the future. Each person had a stone, and if it was still intact it was good luck, if it had disappeared the future was not good.
In France, All Hallows or All Saints is called La Toussaint, and flowers such as Chrysanthemums which blossom in late October, were put on the graves.
In Spain, it is Dia de Todo Los Santos and is a national holiday upon which people put flowers on the graves of the dead.
In Mexico Dia de los Muertos celebrates Holy Innocents on the 1st – Dia de los Inocentes. People create altars to the lost ones, with their favourite flowers, toys, food stuffs,, photographs. People argue about the pre-colombian aspects of the festival as there are similarities to European All Saints Days celebrations but Quecholli, was a celebration of the dead that honored Mixcóatl – the god of war. It was celebrated between October 20th and November 8th.
My correspondent in Mexico has sent back these pictures of the festivities in Mexico.
Day of the Dead in Mexico. Photos by Sylvie Morice
The female figure to the left is La Catrina. This image was popularised by an early 20th Century design by José Guadalupe Posada and developed in a mural by Diego Rivera. For more details click here.
July is the month of Haymaking, as you can see from the July image in the Kalendar of Shepherds. To find out more, have a look at my 2022 post on haymaking, which I have revised for you to read.
July is named for Julius Caesar. Originally, it was called Quintilis, as it was the fifth month of the Roman calendar, which originally started in March. Caesar reformed the calendar in 44BC and the Senate renamed the month after him.
It is called Lúil in Irish and Gorffennaf in Welsh. In Anglo Saxon July was Æfteraliða, or “after-mild;”, Liða, means “mild” or “gentle,” or the period of warm weather around Midsummer. June is Arraliða, or “before-mild”.
It is on average the warmest month in most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the second month of summer. The star signs for July are: Cancer (until July 22) and Leo (July 23 onwards),
‘
From the Kalendar of Shepherds comes this description of July.
Easter is a Germanic name, and, the only evidence for its derivation comes from the Venerable Bede, who was the first English Historian and a notable scholar. He says the pagan name for April was derived from the Goddess Eostra. The German name for Easter is Ostern probably with a similar derivation. But this is all the evidence there is for the Goddess, despite many claims for the deep history of Easter traditions.
Philip A. Shaw has proposed that the name of Eastry in Kent might derive from a local goddess, called Eostra and that the influence of Canterbury in the early Church in England and Germany led to the adoption of this local cult name for the Holy Week in these two countries. Otherwise, the name for Easter in Europe derives from Pascha which comes from the Hebrew Passover and Latin. In French it’s Pâques’ in Italian Pasqua, Spanish Pascua; Dutch Pasen, Swedish Påsk; Norwegian Påske and so on.
Eleanor Parker in her lovely book ‘Winter in the World’ gives a lyrical insight into how the dates were chosen because of the belief that God would only choose the perfect time for the Creation and the events of Easter. The Creation began with the birth of the Sun and the Moon, so it was fixed to the Equinox, when the days were of equal length, and the fruits of the earth were stirring into life. But Holy Week also needed to be in harmony with the Moon and so was tied, like Passover, to the first full moon after the Equinox, which is also when the events take place in the Gospels.
The quotations Parker uses from early English religious writing and poetry shows a deep interest in nature and the universe which is very appealing. It seems to me that this is something the Church, to an extent, lost in later times, and replaced with fixation with dogma and ‘worship’ of the Holy Trinity.
At the time fixing the date of Easter was very controversial as the kingdoms in Britain had a different calendar to the Roman Catholic Church and therefore Easter fell on a different day. The King of Northumberland, for example, celebrated Easter on a different day to that of his wife. Oswiu was exiled to Ireland where he was influenced by Celtic Christianity while his wife, Eanflæd, while also being from Northumberland, had been baptised by the Roman Catholic missionary, Paulinus.
Oswiu, became the ‘Bretwalda’ of all Britain, and encouraged a reconciliation, culminating at the Synod of Whitby (664AD), between the two churches where the Celtic Church agreed to follow the Catholic calendar and other controversial customs. After her husband’s death Eanflaed became Abbess of Whitby.
King Alfred’s law code gave labourers the week before and after Easter off work, making it the main holiday of the year. Ælfric of Eynsham gives a powerful commentary on the rituals of the Church over Easter, which was full of drama and participation including Palm leaf processions on Palm Sunday, feet washing and giving offerings to the poor on Maundy Thursday. Then followed three ‘silent days’ with no preaching but rituals and services aiming to encourage empathy for the ordeal of Jesus. Thus the night time service of Tenebrae, when all lights were extinguished in the Church while the choir sang ‘Lord Have Mercy’. The darkness represented the darkness and despair that was said to cover the world after Jesus’ death. Good Friday was the day for the adoration of the Cross in which a Cross would be decorated with treasures and symbolised turning a disaster into a triumph.
It seemed to me that I saw a wondrous tree Lifted up into the air, wrapped in light, brightest of beams. All that beacon was covered with gold; gems stood beautiful at the surface of the earth,….
The Dream of the Rood quoted in Eleanor Parker’s ‘Winter in the World’
The days before Easter Sunday are known as the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ which was a very popular theme in the medieval period (featuring in Piers Plowman for example). Jesus went down to hell to free those, like John the Baptist, who had been trapped because the world had no saviour until the first Easter. The Clerk of Oxford Blog provides more information on the Harrowing of Hell on this page, including that the name ‘Harrowing’ comes from ‘Old English word hergian ‘to harry, pillage, plunder’ which underpins the way the event is depicted as a military raid on Hell.
I have just realised that the Clerk of Oxford Blog is by written by Eleanor Parker, and started ‘in 2008, whilst an undergraduate student at Oxford. The blog won the 2015 Longman-History Today award for Digital History‘.
The above is but a very poor précis of Eleanor Parker’s use of Anglo-saxon poetry and literature to bring Easter to life. So if you are interested to know more or would like to have a different viewpoint on the Anglo-Saxons please get a copy of her book.
This is one of the most exciting advances I have read about for a long time! A pile of burnt scrolls survive from the Villa dei Papiri, Herculaneum. They are being examined by several teams from American Universities including the University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky. They are just beginning to read fragments of the texts, using all the scientific techniques they can throw at it including AI. The AI has begun to learn to read fragments of the tightly rolled scroll.
Burnt Scroll
The scroll they are working on appears to be a piece about Alexander the Great and his legacy. It is an unknown text or to put it another way, it is potentially a brand new source of information for this period of time. It has been suggested that it might possibly be a copy of the lost diary of Alexander’s secretary, Eumenos or may have been written by a friend of the general Antigonos. Either way, potentially eye witness accounts. Or not, as perhaps, they may be asking too much from the first investigation. It may be more prosaic. Time will tell.
The implications, however, are so exciting! Just as the amazing excavations at Stonehenge (and indeed in London) have revolutionised our knowledge of these places, so AI could introduce completely new insights into the past. There are many rolls that were burnt in the collection, but now AI is beginning to read them. what insights we might get even from small fragments? One of the scholars involved is particularly excited to imagine the discoveries that could be forthcoming from the Middle East
‘While others would love to see some of the lost work of the ancients, what I’d like to see is evidence of the turmoil that was happening in the first century around the development of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition as it was evolving.’
Brent Seales, University of Kentucky
Part of scroll unfolded
But those ‘lost works of the ancients’. There are so many that would rock history: Tacitus’s ‘Annals’ missing missing the last two years of Nero’s reign. Pytheas ‘On the Ocean’ with its first references to Britain in writing. 6 Plays of Aeschylus, 9 Books of Sappho and the list goes on. Have a look at Charlotte Higgins piece in Prospect Magazine for a little more detail.
Another feature of the study is that the teams have released images to the cloud and are encouraging others to ‘have a go’ at reading them. This shows the strides that Citizen Science has made, and how, scientists acknowledge that, in the days of big data, cooperation pays huge dividends.
My source of information is the marvellous The Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter (Salon) which ‘is a fortnightly digest of heritage news‘ and for more information look at Issue 509.
I’ve relieved of the necessity to search for the Town Walls of Amsterdam without prior research by the fact that I am here to see my daughter who has recently broken her ankle, so she has an excuse for refusing to go on forced forced marches around the City.
I haven’t yet had a good look at a map, but the pattern of Canals circuling the centre is amazing and it seems possible there was no need for walls, when the centre is protected by so many rings of water.
I don’t know much about Amsterdam, but it reminds me of the surprising fact that Holland was a major power in the 17th/18th Century. I discovered this on a visit to Kerala in India where I realised that Portugal had a vast empire which was largely taken over by the Dutch in the 17th Century and then taken over by the British in the 18th Century.
It was one of the major pivots in world history. These three countries were small peripheral seafaring nations of no great importance in Europe until the Age of Discovery. Portugal set up trading systems (perhaps rather systems of exploitation) first down the coast of Africa and then to India and beyond. The Dutch then took over the trading stations and took control of the spice routes. Then the British took over.
Previously the spice routes from the East came through Egypt, Greece, Rome, Carthage and later the Ottoman and the Venetian Empires. This made the Mediterranean the richest place in Europe, both north and southern coasts.
The new ocean routes led to a major shift in power from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, leading to the current situation where the Mediterranean is no longer the centre of the world. Greece, Southern Italy, North Africa now under performing economies. A Roman would find this hard to believe.
Portugal, then Holland followed by Britain rose to the status of world power which would, itself, have been inconceivable before the 16th Century.
Holland was in the perfect geographic position astride the trade routes that lead to the heart of Europe. The entry point was the major river systems around the Rhine/Danube axis including the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Waal, and the Amstel. Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam developed from regional trading towns to global Cities. They spawned a self confident set of merchants who set the foundations of modern capitalism with foundations in spices and slaves.
Central to this was the Dutch East India Company. The first organisation in Europe where an investor only risked their investment rather than the shirt off their back in the event of bankruptcy. This let the shackles off investment, took money out of gold in the bank vaults and multiplied it around the economy.
But not only did it take away the risks of the consequences of investment the Dutch East India Company, set up in Amsterdam in 1602, was given quasi state power, with the ability to fight wars and impose laws on subject populations. This template was copied by the British East India Company which conquered and ran India, setting the seal for the British Empire and Capitalism.
The Harper Road Burial Southwark (museum of London web site)
I’ve had a draft of a piece on he Harper Road Burial awaiting a suitable occasion to publish it. And today, International Women’s Day is, perhaps, that occasion. International Women’s Day began, as an idea within Socialist organisations in 1909/1910. Following the February Revolution in Russia and women gaining the vote, March 8th was chosen as the day to celebrate. The wider feminist movement adopted it in the 1960’s followed by the UN in 1977; since when it has been a day to celebrate women’s achievements and campaigns.
The Soviet Union 1949 CPA 1368 stamp (International Women’s Day, March 8. (Wikipedia)
My post was about the Harper’s Road burial, which came up in Dominic Perring’s new book ‘London in the Roman World.’ He uses it to establish that Southwark was a place where people lived both before and after the Roman Conquest in 43AD. The burial was found in the 1970s’ dated to 50 – 70 AD but recent scientific analysis has shown that the burial was of a woman (21 – 38 years of age) with brown eyes and black hair who was brought up in Britain. She was of some wealth by her grave goods. She had both imported Roman pottery and British made objects: a bronze necklace (a torc possibly of Catevalaunian or Trinovantian origin) and a mirror. Dr Rebecca Redfern & Michael Marshall (Human Osteology Curator & Museum of London Archaeology) on the Museum of London’s website make a case for her being: a ‘Powerful women in late Iron Age London’. It’s well worth reading. They make a case for the mirror being ‘used by women for divination and magic, and were a source of knowledge that only women could command. Being able to use and read the mirror meant that the woman was highly regarded by her community.’
Iron age burials are often found either with a sword or a mirror and the thinking is that the mirror reflects an equivalent status to a sword. I think we can say that the finds do reflect someone of standing, but as to the use of the mirror that must be speculation. Divination using a mirror is called ‘scrying’ and the British Museum has John Dee’s scrying apparatus. You can buy scrying mirrors on etsy. https://www.etsy.com/uk/market/scrying_mirror.
Melanie Giles & Jody Joy in ‘Mirrors in the British Iron Age: performance, revelation and power published in 2007 (and available to read here) conclude:
‘Iron Age mirrors, whether made of iron or bronze were beautiful, powerful, and potentially terrifying or dangerous objects. They were used in the preparation and presentation of the body and prestigious displays, but may also have been associated with powers of augury and insight into the past, or access to ancestral or spiritual worlds.’
The evidence we have for iron communities is for a powerful role for women in contrast to the Romans. The Romans dismissed women when they wrote that Boudicca was ‘uncommonly intelligent for a women’. In fact, she nearly forced the Romans to abandon their conquest of Britain. We also know that Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes had executive power in the North of Britain. The Britons also worshipped the three Mother Goddesses, which focussed on the value of woman as maidens, mothers, and grand-mothers.
A book to order today is ‘Patriarchs’ in which Angela Saini investigates when the Patriarchy took over. I heard her talk about it and it seems an excellent summary.
I am working on a new season, and these are the walks for the first six months – but more to come.
The Archaeology Of London Walk Sunday 2nd April 2023 11:15 Exit 3 Bank Underground Station To book Jane Austen’s London Sat 2.30 pm 2nd April 2023 Green Park underground station, London (north exit, on the corner). To book Chaucer’s Medieval London Guided Walk Aldgate Tube Sunday 16 April 2023 11.30pm To book Chaucer’s London To Canterbury Virtual Pilgrimage Sunday 16th April 2023 7.30pm To book The Peasants Revolt Anniversary Guided Walk Aldgate Underground Sunday 11th June 2023 10.45am. To book The Peasants Revolt Anniversary Virtual Tour Sunday 11th June 2023 7.30pm To book
