Christmas Every Day

Since 1942 BBC Radio has broadcast a show entitled “Desert Island Discs”, called by some the “greatest radio programme of all time”. Each week a guest is asked to imagine that he or she is a castaway on some deserted shore who is allowed to bring along a book (not including a Bible and the works of Shakespeare), 8 recordings, and a luxury item (which cannot allow one to escape or communicate with the outside world.) Much interesting chatter ensues as the guests justify their choices.

If I were to choose a single book with which to while away the months or years on my coral atoll, I would choose Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up, first published in 1621. Among its many virtues are its length (over 1,000 pages), encyclopedic scope, and its depth of understanding of the human condition.

Burton was an Oxford academic suffering from what we would call today a clinical depression. One of the ways he dealt with his mental state, and to help others with theirs, was to examine the condition in light of medical knowledge and philosophy. The result was The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The ancient notion of mind and body being governed by the “four humours” still ruled early-modern medicine. To be healthy (or in “good humour”) was to enjoy a balance of four liquids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A predominance of blood led to a sanguine personality (active, bold); phlegm to a phlegmatic disposition (cold, dispassionate); yellow bile to being choleric (prone to anger, daring); and black bile to being melancholic – a state that included not just depression but a host of other mental challenges. By examining the condition of melancholy Burton is led to discourse on innumerable topics in medicine, science, philosophy, literature, love, geography, etc. As he says: “No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,/ My subject is of man, and human kind.”

The Anatomy of Melancholy is not an easy book to read. Burton’s range of learning was vast and he was wont to cite sources unfamiliar to most scholars today. He also loved to quote in Latin, sometimes translating, sometimes not. This sentence is typical: “When I first took this task in hand, et quod ait ille, impellents genio negotium suscepi, this I aimed at; vel ut lenirem animum scribendo, to ease my mind by writing”. But after a while the eye skips over the Latin and reassembles the sentence. Here are some pertinent quotes:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, [925]no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse; envy alone wants both. Other sins last but for awhile; the gut may be satisfied, anger remits, hatred hath an end, envy never ceaseth.

[Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.

[The rich] are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors.

Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriæ, yet as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books.

Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty.

Machiavel says virtue and riches seldom settle on one man.

Every man, as the saying is, can tame a shrew but he that hath her.

Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

England is a paradise for women and hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women.

What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all them, but all they cannot comfort a distressed soul: who can put to silence the voice of desperation?

 Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayst be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, &c.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.

And yet with crimes to us unknown, Our sons shall mark the coming age their own.

As Petrarch observes, we change language, habits, laws, customs, manners, but not vices, not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same.

More precarity of life. Remember in reading this passage from Graham Robb’s masterful The Discovery of France that there are people alive today who knew people who were alive when these events occurred.

The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn. Entire Pyrenean villages of wood, like Barèges on the western side of the Col du Tourmalet, were abandoned to the snow and reclaimed from the avalanches in late spring. Other populations in the Alps and the Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April, with a hay-loft above, a stable to one side and the mountain slope behind. According to a geographer writing in 1909, “the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anemic”. But hibernation was not peculiar to high altitudes. More temperate regions, too, retreated into a fortress of sleep. Idleness and torpor cast an eerie pall over the well-cultivated parts of the Berry, where seasonal variations are slight and the temperature rarely falls below freezing. George Sand’s normally phlegmatic husband felt “something like fear” when he saw tidy land that seemed to be farmed by ghosts. The fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year. An official report on the Nièvre In 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was In and the vine stocks had been burned:

After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.

Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In Normandy, according to the diary of Jules Renard, “the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth” (1889); “in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails” (1908). People trudged and dawdled, even in summer. They ate more slowly than modern people. Life expectancy at birth now seems depressingly low: in 1865, it was a few months over forty years in only twenty départments; in Paris and Finistère, it was under thirty; the national average was thirtyseven years two months. Life expectancy at five was fifty-one. Despite this, complaints about the brevity of life are far less common than complaints about its inordinate length. Slowness was not an attempt to savour the moment. A ploughman who took hours to reach a field beyond the town was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist on the furrows and the steaming cattle against the rising sun, he was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.

A similar practice seems to have existed in late czarist Russia, according to an article in the British Medical Journal:

A practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial. At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers. This winter sleep is called lotska.

Precarity encore. In every village, town, and city, men and women – uncounted millions of them – woke up not knowing how they would survive the day. Their places in the economy were extremely tenuous, depending on their ingenuity and pluck, the charity of the Church or their neighbours, the weather, the time of year, and the mood of the authorities.

Some were day labourers with a little skill they would try to find employment for: carpenters; painters; rat catchers with trained ferrets and mole catchers; “cinderellas”, who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes; men called tétaïres, who performed the function of a breast-pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk; folk who bred maggots for anglers by collecting dead cats and dogs in the attic; women who worked as human alarm clocks; ‘guardian angels’ who were paid by restaurants to guide their drunken clients home; cat exterminators who sell the pelts as sable and the flesh as rabbit meat; renters of leeches for those who cannot afford to buy them. There were the “mud-larks” of London who braved the stinking muck of the tidal Thames for discarded wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships. There were “pure-finders” who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners.

Then there were beggars. Beggar women sold their silence to respectable people by making lewd and compromising remarks about them in the street. They borrowed children who were diseased or deformed. They manufactured realistic sores from egg yolk and dried blood, working the yolk into a scratch to produce the full crusty effect. A judge at Rennes in 1787 reported “a bogus old man” with a fake hump and a club foot, another man who succeeded in blacking out one eye to give a terrible, dramatic impression of blindness, and yet another who could mimic all the symptoms of epilepsy⁠. “Abraham men” pretended to be mentally ill and allowed out of the asylum to beg for their keep. “Idle beggar” was a contradiction in terms.

Prostitution, full- or part-time, was the resort of poor women and girls. Employment in brothels depended on government atitudes. The British outlawed bordellos, though it was estimated that 1 house in every 60 in London served that function and that the capital was home to 80,000 prostitutes. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, were passed to slow the spread of venereal disease especially by contact between prostitutes and members of the military in garrison and port towns. Women suspected of plying that trade could be detained in “lock hositals” to determine their contagion. Some English regiments reported that half their men had had to be treated for sexually transmitted disease. The French and other European countries sought to contain the public health dangers of the trade by licensing brothels and subjecting their workers to regular medical examinations.

Back to precarity. In 17^th-century London it was the responsibility of each parish to keep records of births and deaths. The birth part was easy as each child was required to be presented for baptism and its name entered. Here is how the procedure for establishing cause of death worked:

When anyone dies, then either by tolling, or by ringing of a Bell, or by bespeaking of a Grave of the Sexton, the same is known to the Searchers, corresponding with the said Sexton. The Searchers hereupon…examine by what Disease, or Casualty the corps died. Hereupon they make their Report to the Parish-Clerk, and he, every Tuesday night, carries in an Accompt of all the Burials, and Christnings, hapning that Week, to the Clerk of the Hall. On Wednesday the general Accompt is made up, and Printed, and on Thursdays published and dispersed.

Here is a sample for the years 1605-06. Note that deaths outnumbered births and that deaths caused by the plague were enormous and recorded separately.

John Graunt, a well-off London haberdasher collected such data for a period of two decades and in 1662 published the world’s first attempt at a demographic survey, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662, by John Graunt, a London haberdasher. Graunt made it his concern to examine two decades worth of parish records and “bills of mortality”. Graunt was skeptical of the Searchers’ accuracy in many cases and used statistical inference to calculate life expectancy and more reliable assessments of the causes of death.

In the 21st century we still die from apoplexy (stroke) and strangury (urinary tract disease) but few of us perish from being “cut of the stone” (operation for removal of gallstones or kidney stones)  or leprosy. Note the dreadfully high death rate of “overlaid and starved” — children being smothered while sleeping in bed with adults or dying from lack of nutrition. Graunt blamed this on “the carelessness, ignorance, and infirmity of the Milch-women” (wet-nurses). 

Three years after Graunt’s first edition, in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, London bills of mortality showed 97,306 burials, of which 68,598 were deaths from plague.

Yesterday’s post concerned antique British positions associated with the Royal Household. Today I want to talk about distinctions that are handed out by the crown, twice annually – the Birthday Honours List and the New Year’s Honours list. Chief among these are awards of the various ranks of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

There are five ranks and from top to bottom they are the Knight (or Dame) Grand Cross, Knight/Dame Commander, Commander, Officer, and Member of the order. Holders of the first two may style themselves Knight or Dame, while the others are granted postnominals (lovely word) CBE, OBE, and MBE. These honours are granted for service to the nation in the arts, sciences, and charitable organizations. The Civil Service and the Military have their own systems.

So hats off to Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Helen Mirren, and Sir Mick Jagger and the host of others who have deserved well of the commonweal and have been invited to Buckingham Palace where they were invested by the Queen or another member of the Royal Family.

A large number of British notables have refused the offer of such honours for various reasons. Winston Churchill, for example, turned down a dukedom because it would mean his having to leave the House of Commons for the House of Lords. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) declined a knighthood out of anger  at what he saw as British betrayal of the Arabs, while George Bernard Shaw turned up his nose at the Order of Merit believing that an author’s merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.

Others who more recently declined to accept an honour include Henry Moore (sculptor), Francis Bacon (painter), Francis Crick (scientist), Roald Dahl (author), Lucien Freud (painter), Robert Graves (author), and Aldous Huxley (author). CS Lewis turned down a CBE in 1952 because he thought it  “too political”.

The prize for the most determined decliner was the artist LS Lowry who refused an OBE, a CBE, a knighthood, and (twice) being named Companion of Honour (an exclusive award limited to 47 Britons). Lowry’s excuse was a severe case of anti-monarchy.

Others chose to make a spectacle of their refusal. John Lennon, who with his Beatlemates received an MBE in1965, returned his medal with a note to the Queen: “Your Majesty, I am returning this in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” The band’s George Harrison apparently declined a mere CBE because Paul McCartney had been granted a knighthood.

The poet Benjamin Zephaniah turned down an OBE, saying in his poetical way “No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly antiempire. … It reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.” The tiresome left-wing scold Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was moved by his example and returned her insignia, saying, “I was stupid once and allowed myself to accept an MBE, partly to please my mum. Then Benjamin Zephaniah shamed me. I returned the lovely object and have had to put up with scorn ever since, some deserved.”

One of the great things about the English is that they cling fiercely to the past (a commodity of which they have more than North Americans.) Just watch the opening of Parliament by the monarch or debates in the House of Commons to see countless relics of days gone by. Why can’t the Queen enter the lower house? Why does she have to summon the Commons to the House of Lords? Why is the distance between the front benches of the ruling party and the Opposition greater than two swords’ length?

As every schoolboy knows, English swans are royal birds, formerly supervised by the Keeper of the King’s Swans and four swanherds, but now under the care of the Warden of the Swans and the Marker of the Swans. These worthies are responsible for the annual Swan-Upping.

Did you know that English coronations up until the reign of William IV were proceeded by a challenge from the King’s Champion? Here is the last version, used in 1820. “If any person, of whatever degree soever, high or low, shall deny or gainsay our Sovereign Lord George, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, son and next heir unto our Sovereign Lord the last King deceased, to be the right heir to the imperial Crown of this realm of Great Britain and Ireland, or that he ought not to enjoy the same; here is his Champion, who saith that he lieth, and is a false traitor, being ready in person to combat with him, and in this quarrel will adventure his life against him on what day soever he shall be appointed.” When King Charles III is crowned in a few years look for the Royal Standard Bearer: he will be by law a descendant of the hereditary King’s Champion.

Did you know that at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Grand Falconer  was forbidden to enter Westminster Abbey unless he swapped his live bird for a stuffed one?

Excerpts from the Peloponnesian War

For a historian one of the most interesting passages comes from the attempt by Thucydides to date the moment that the war started. The ancient Mediterranean lacked a universal calendar and you can see in this excerpt the problem that caused:

Thucydides in context

There is a pleasant story told by Hobbes that says that when young Thucydides, son of Olorus, heard Herodotus giving a reading from his Persian Wars in Athens, the lad burst into tears. The old historian is said to have complimented the boy’s father on having a son who had shown such a natural gift for learning. We don’t know if this tale is true but we do have some facts about the life of the man who was to become the second great historian.

Thucydides was born before 455 BC to a rich Athenian family related to the famous political leaders Miltiades and Cimon. He rose to a position of wealth (owning gold mines in Thrace) and considerable political power himself in his native city, being elected to the Board of Generals in 424 BC when Athens was in the midst of its great war with Sparta, a war which Thucydides had already begun to record. Unfortunately Thucydides failed in a military mission by being unable to save Amphipolis from the Spartans and as a punishment he was driven into exile. He spent his 20 years in exile writing his history of the Peloponnesian War and spent part of this exile among his old enemies which allowed him to see the viewpoints of the Spartan side. The details of his death are uncertain. In some accounts he dies at sea after leaving Athens in disgust at the rule of the Thirty Tyrants; some say he died in Thrace; some say he was murdered in Athens shortly after the end of the war. What we do know is that his Peloponnesian War was unfinished at his death and unpublished. It soon became well known and three Greek historians all tried their hands at finishing it: Xenophon, Cratippus and Theopompus.

 Unlike Herodotus of Halicarnassus whose city had been occupied by, and cooperated with the Persians, Thucydides was a man of mainland Greece and its most powerful city Athens, the saviour (in its own eyes and those of Herodotus) of Greek civilization. The notion of the polis or city-state was the dominant political idea in the Greek world: few Greeks could conceive of a higher loyalty than to one’s own city and the disunity of the Greeks, so harmful during its war with the Persians, continued after the Persian menace receded in 479 BC. The short-lived and touchy wartime cooperation between Sparta and Athens soon began to erode. Athens went on to establish, at the instigation of Aristides in 477 BC, a confederation with smaller cities and Greek islands whose intention was to recapture control of the Aegean and drive the Persians out of Ionia, liberating the Greeks of Asia Minor. The confederacy was called the Delian League because its treasury and assembly were held on the sacred island of Delos. What started as an alliance, before long became an Athenian empire. The commanders of the military force were Athenians; Athens decided who was to provide ships and who was to provide money; and Athens decided how that money was to be spent — in fact much of it would come to be spent on rebuilding Athens and strengthening the democratic forces in the city. The League muscled Sparta out of Byzantium, chased the last Persian garrisons back across the Hellespont and drove the Persians back from their Mediterranean bases in Ionia. At the same time Athens kept its so-called allies on a short leash and allowed them little independent action; they were particularly discouraged from seceding from the League. The leadership of the Greek world was thus passing from conservative, land-based Sparta to democratic, sea-based Athens. The Peloponnesian War was a result of the tensions this new situation engendered.

Herodotus set himself the task of determining the cause of the conflicts between the Greeks and the eastern barbarians which had recently manifested itself in two Persian invasions of Hellas. The first had been repelled at Marathon in 490 BC by the Athenians, and by a combined fleet at Salamis in 480 BC and by a united army at Plataea the next year. Thus, his book is known variously as The Persian Wars or The Histories (from the Greek for “inquiries” or “researches”.)

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and barbarians from losing their due portion of glory; and to put on record what were the grounds of the feud.

I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.

Now these Egyptians had done their guard duty for three years, and no one released them from it. So they took counsel together, and by general decision they all deserted and made for Ethiopia. Psammetichus heard of it and pursued them. When he came up with them, he entreated them mightily; he would have them, he said, not desert their household gods and their wives and children. At this, it is said, one of their number showed him his prick and said, “Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.” So they took themselves off to the king of the Ethiopians and surrendered themselves to him, who gave them a gift in return.

In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.

For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them of all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best.

It is better to be envied than pitied.

If the Greeks were given side dishes, say the Persians, they would never stop eating. They are very addicted to wine, and it is forbidden to vomit or make water in the presence of anyone else. They keep very strictly to this practice, too: that they are wont to debate their most serious concerns when they are drunk. But whatsoever they decide on, drunk, this the master of the house where they are when debating proposes to them again on the next day, when they are sober. And if they like it, too, when sober, they act on it; but if they do not like it so, they let it be. And whatever they debate, in preliminary fashion, sober, they give to final decision drunk.

The Spartans fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs.

[The Spartans] made it plain to everyone, however, and above all to the King himself, that although he had plenty of troops, he did not have many men.

This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.

The Scythians take cannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.

Who was the Father of History?

Historians have pondered this question for centuries. I’ve always favoured Herodotus who seems to have been the first to ask an important question about the past, undertake research to establish the truth, and to publish a book of his findings. There were many before him who wrote of past events, usually the deeds of kings or religious figures, but they lacked the inquisitorial method and first-hand observations of the man from Halicarnassus.

Thucydides has his partisans. He was certainly less credulous than Herodotus and omitted any reference to the supernatural in his writings. On the other hand, his reconstruction of what Greek leaders might have said is nothing I would applaud in historians working today.

Nevertheless, both of these guys are of enormous value to our understanding of the past and both are, in their own ways, charming writers. (And I have busts of both of them.) For the next couple of days I’ll feature chunks of their works for those of you who have not had the pleasure of their acquaintance.