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Can be purchased here : http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/Medieval Tiles - Hans Van Lemmen
“The labour and skill required in their manufacture meant that tiles were an expensive luxury. Perhaps most important then, they were also signs of prestige.”
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Medieval Wall Paintings – E. Clive Rouse
“It must be realized that all medieval churches in England were more or less completely painted…Far too many people merely regard a wall painting from the point of view of artistic merit. Is it a good picture? This was not uppermost in the mind of the medieval painter. He had two objects in view and they were crystal clear. He was there to be devotional and he was there to teach.”
In a largely illiterate age, where few books were available at any rate, sacred wall paintings were a way for biblical stories to be passed on to the masses. Indeed they have been called The Biblia Pauperum or The Poor Man’s Bible.
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Hello all...just back from a week of re-enacting and shopping, and I am thinking about jewelry :
As ever, this and other similar titles may be purchased at : http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/
ANTIQUE JEWELLERY : Its Manufacture, Materials and Design – Duncan James
“Much jewellery take the form a favored talisman or symbolic device related to religious faith or secular interest, and that other passion, love, has always been a major reason for the giving of jewellery. However, above and beyond all of this, jewellery has a decorative purpose-it is designed simply to adorn the individual.”
Duncan James clearly loves jewelry, and like all great loves sometimes passion reigns over sense. Not that there has to be anything wrong with that.
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Discovering Edged Weapons – J. Wilkinson-Latham
Wilkinson Sword family member (and fourth generation part of the Sword firm) John Wilkinson-Latham knows a thing of two about blades and shares them in this concise, pocket-sized volume. Few can in the modern world can claim this authors intimacy with the subject, and although a few decades old this book is a perfect start for anyone wanting to know more on this wide-ranging topic.
Discovering Ghosts – Leon Metcalfe
“The British Isles are amazingly well endowed with the presence
and evidence of ghosts of all description.”
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Discovering Heraldry – Jacqueline Fearn
“The elements of gentlemanly (originally knightly) status, individuality and distinction implied by the bearing of a coat of arms have been consistent characteristics of heraldry and key elements of survival.”
As with all of the Shire Discovery series, Heraldry is an invaluable research tool for anyone curious about a new subject or starting a related hobby. This is a wonderful jumping off point for further research, but, as with all enthusiasms, your mileage may very with the authors.
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Egyptian Scarabs – Richard H. Wilkinson
“Scarabs are the most abundant artifacts to have survived from ancient Egypt and are arguably the most important…”
Scarabs (belonging to the scarabaeidae family of beetles which are found all around the world) are technically a type of dung beetle. Wilkinson gives a nice little description of their forms and lives as an introduction to the role the scarab in Egyptian lives. Insect avoidant as I am, I still found it enlightening.
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Please visit our Egyptology section : http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/Egyptian Games and Sports – Joyce Tydesley
“As the ancient Egyptians had no direct equivalents to our modern words ‘game’ and ‘sport,’ it is not possible to state with any degree of certainty which activities they themselves would have expected to find included in this book.”
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This, and other great books, can be found here : http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/i
Later Celtic Art in Britain and Ireland – Lloyd Laing
“Between the 4th and 12th centuries AD the early Christian Celts in Britain and Ireland evolved an artistic tradition of considerable magnificence.”
“In early Irish literature ‘men of art’ are accorded special status in society…”
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Early Celtic Art in Britain and Ireland – Ruth and Vincent Megaw
“…we rarely see Celts except through the eyes of others…”
“Celtic art is shape-changing and ambiguous, showing elusive, Cheshire-cat images of humans and beasts, images with corresponded to the ‘shape-changing’ of the later Irish hero tales, or the recorded Celtic tendency to talk in riddles.”
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Irish Megalithic Tombs – Elizabeth Shee Twoling
“The earliest evidence we have for human occupation in Ireland dates to 8000 BC.”
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(available at http://crimsonbooksinc.storesecured.com/i
Victorian Tiles – Han Van Lemmen
“The Victorian era is arguably the most important in the history of tiles. It was the period when tiles were transformed from ornaments for the elite into useful everyday artifacts available to all.”
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The Victorian Schoolroom – Trevor May
“When Victoria came to the throne, some people still thought that the education of the poor was both unnecessary and dangerous. ‘What produced the French Revolution?’ asked one MP rhetorically, and the answer he gave was, ‘books’”.
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The Victorian & Edwardian Sportsman by Richard Tames and The Victorian Domestic Servant by Trevor May
“Britons invented tennis, rugby, squash, table-tennis, badminton, netball, water-polo and competitive diving; reformed, regularized and updated horse-racing, archery, boxing, bowls, football, athletics, angling and weightlifting; and imported croquet, polo, snooker, gymnastics, cycling, roller-skating, lacrosse and canoeing.” - The Victorian and Edwardian Sportsman – Richard Tames
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Victorian & Edwardian Prisons by Trevor May and The Victorian Public House by Richard Tames
“Throughout history those who do not conform to certain social values have been removed from society.” Trevor May
The role of prisons has changed drastically. The original purpose for a lockup was to hold people before their trial, with actual punishments taking a more extreme form: torture, mutilation, slavery, etc. But, in the Regency era and moreso during the Victorian, as the state intervened more and more into private life the prison became its primary agent of fear and control.
Much like insane asylums, up to this point most prisons were privately run. With little or no regulation, conditions such as overcrowding, poor food and filth, lead to as many prisoners being discharged by death rather than the end of their sentence. But, as with the asylums, reformers, lead by Quakers and a newly evangelized Church, stepped in to regularize conditions and persuade the government that they must take a role in lives of prisoners.
For the first time, there was concern over what lead to crime. Was there a predisposed “criminal class?” Or was crime a result of environment? If environment was the problem then surely removing a criminal from such surrounds would, in time, lead his better nature reassert it’s self. This idea of the basic goodness of man lead to the penitentiary system that dominated Britain and America at the time. Ideas such as compulsory solitary confinement for all crimes, or the silent system (where prisoners who lived and worked together were expected to never speak) came out of a desire to improve a criminal’s character by forcing him to contemplate his crimes and his soul.
Another idea that gained popularity was the public works prison, where the prisoner literally worked off his debt to society. Some of the completed projects included the construction of the sea defenses at Portland and the reclamation of moorlands in Dartmoor.
Around twenty percent of prisoners were women. Their sentences tended to be much shorter, and some women even looked at a few days in jail as a ‘free wash and brush up.” Female criminals were viewed as having committed a crime as much against her own feminine nature as against society, and as such were treated more like lunatics than convicts.
If the prison was the main agent of social control of the working class, the Public House was their main refuge in an era that became more and more oppressive and disapproving.
“Beer! Happy produce of our isle,
Can sinewy strength impart,
And wearied with fatigue and toil,
Can cheer each manly heart!” (from Beer Street, William Hogarth)
The Pub is a direct descendant of the Medieval inn, which began as a dormitories run by monks for pilgrims. These were quickly converted into professional eating and drinking establishments, but laws forbade locals from frequenting them. Taverns, exclusive to local trade, sprang up wherever an inn already existed.
By the mid-nineteenth century tavern life had been all but abandoned by the newly home-loving middle class, leaving them to the lower classes and the self-consciously Bohemian. As a result the ‘pub’ became the prime bastion of Victorian working culture.
What had once been small rooms dispensing only beer, by this time beerhouses offered simple food (or cooking service for those without a kitchen), a public bar and a large saloon area.
At the same time the duty on spirits was greatly reduced. In London this lead to a new kind of drinking establishment: the Gin Palace.
Sheet glass manufacture lead an innovative design for these urban centers, and gas lighting made them visible on even the darkest, foggiest nights. While from the exterior they might look warm and inviting, on the inside conditions were kept stark and uncomfortable to discourage lingering. Quick drinking and a high turnover made these businesses wildly profitable.
Meanwhile, as London spread and suburbs sprang up, developers built public houses that became cornerstones (often literally, as there placement established where the first major street corner would be) of the new communities.
With more public houses came more public drunkenness. When fines were found to do little to curb this growing problem the police were given wide license to deal with drunks. By 1876 forty percent of non-indictable cases brought to the magistrate were for public drunkenness. Increased poverty could also be attributed to the spread of the pub. Many foremen paid out wages at the pub, which lead to more drinking on pay day, and kickbacks from the publican who had arranged everything.
But drink and drunkenness was not all that the public house offered. The offered entertainments, such as singing and storytelling, lead to the development of the music hall. And the pub served as a meeting place for those members of the working class who wished to organize. Reading rooms and schools were viewed as being under control of anti-union, middle class forces, but pubs allowed anyone to speak as long as they drank.
Along with the rise of the pub came the rise of the temperance movement, which began in 1829. Religious leaders, moralists and politicians put there support behind this powerful group, but in spite of pamphlets, protests and preaching, by the end of the century the public house outnumbered the coffeehouse fifty to one.
The Victorian Workhouse by Trevor May and The Victorian Asylum by Sarah Rutherford
“The Victorians loved a biblical text but they did not always seem too concerned about using it in context.” The Victorian Workhouse – Trevor May
In the popular imagination two of the most defining institutions of the Victorian era are the workhouse, filled with the undeserving poor, and the asylum, filled with the mad, bad and dangerous to know. By 1900 there were over 120 asylums in England, and workhouses numbered over 400 at the height of their popularity in the 1860s. Many of the inmates of both were children, or had a physical disorder, such as epilepsy, that made society uncomfortable.
But what, apart from some Dickensian scenes and a few black and white photographs, do we really know about either of these institutions?
Two books, both concise, well-written and lavishly illustrated, cast light on these dark corners of the Victorian experience. Moreover, if Trevor May and Sarah Rutherfords’ books are to be believed, we can say with some conviction that during Victoria’s reign it was far better to be insane than to be poor.
May’s work (one of his many books on this time) moves easily between exhaustively informed and wryly cynical. He carefully brings the reader through the stages that lead to how the poor were viewed by the British, and why the reformers of the time chose to deal with them in a way that, to modern eyes, seems plainly cruel.
The Victorians loved distinctions, and new Poor Laws that were were meant to help the indigent (those who had nothing), while doing nothing those that we would now call the working poor. The indigent were looked upon as having failed personally, either because of a lack of character, or pure laziness. In order to claim to be helping them (and their families, who were required to enter the workhouse as well), and to encourage them to chose honest labor, which they were thought to be shirking, the workhouses of the era were designed.
While poor houses had existed before this time they tended to be small, parish run homes, much like any other village cottage or farmhouse. The modern workhouses, informed by Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism, were modeled after American prisons of the era. Within their walls families were broken up, and the men in charge were expected to treat those living their much like prisoners. What care the sick received was from young doctors just beginning their careers and female inmates who were often rewarded with gin, and needed only to know how to read to qualify for the work.
Basic schooling was sometime provided for the very young, but most often time was spent performing numbing, repetitive tasks in the hopes that it would become so unbearable that, apparently, the inmates would suddenly decide not to be poor any longer.
While the workhouse was a prison that the prisoners could choose to leave, the Victorian asylum was a hospital modeled on the country estates of the aristocracy.
“The asylum was essentially a holding ground for difficult patients.” The Victorian Asylum – Sarah Rutherford
In Sarah Rutherford’s illuminating history we learn that, up until the Victorian age, most asylums (with the great exception of Bethel hospital) were privately run, with little regulation. The inmates were often put on display for the amusement and enlightenment of the masses, and treatments were little more than tortures designed to drive the person sane.
During the later eighteenth century a movement called “moral treatment,” was spearheaded by the Quakers, who believed that inmates could be cured by learning self-restraint and discipline, and that physical treatments could not work on what was seen as mental weakness. They also refused to take part in the site-seeing aspect of asylum life.
This approach that found favor with Victorian reformers. The 1845 Lunatics Act (what a wonderful name) regulated, for the first time, how patients were to be admitted and released, as well as standardizing food, clothing and shelter requirements.
One way, as we learn, in which the workhouses and asylums were most alike, is that the great architects of the era vied to build them. In the case of the asylum using them as a sort of advertisement for the work they might do on great estates and townhouses. There were certain requirements that they all had to meet: elaborate gardens and sporting fields, airing courts with shelters to allow the patients to spend time outside all year round, and a warm, homelike atmosphere to encourage healing. Architects also found ways to use modern technologies, including running water, electricity, and gas heat.
The inmates here were also expected to work, but unlike their counterparts in the workhouse, it was meant to help them learn discipline and a useful skill for when they were discharged. Patients were also allowed to mingle with the opposite sex at dances, and were encouraged to engage in artistic pursuits, such as painting and theatrics. The staffs were often made up of families, and they formed societies with the society of the asylums, creating sporting teams and musical bands to entertain each other and the inmates.
Over time new theories on poverty and mental illness emerged that made these two institutions obsolete, the last workhouse closing in 1948, the last asylum repurposed in the 1990s. As depressing as these subjects may be these two works will leave anyone with an interest in this era with a fuller, richer and more complete view of who the Victorians were, and why, in many ways, they are still with us.
