by TCW | Apr 26, 2019 | Uncategorized
At Christmas my son made me a present of a lesson in horse archery and a couple of weeks ago I took myself up to Guy’s Cliffe, which seemed an appropriately ancient parish (occupied since Saxon times) to learn an ancient skill. It’s the home of the Knights of Middle England, who we’d seen displaying their considerable talents at Warwick Castle a couple of years ago and who, for a consideration, will do their best to teach the rest of us some of how it is done.
The Knights of Middle England in action
I hadn’t expected it to be that exciting. In the past I used to take archery reasonably seriously and (as readers of my old blog will know) I am fairly comfortable sitting on a horse provided I am not asked to do anything adventurous. How difficult could shooting from horseback be?
The answer turns out to be very difficult. I was told that any experience I had either of conventional archery or even of riding was more likely to get in the way than not and I was soon to learn that this was completely true.
In the course of being cruelly exposed to my limitations both as an archer and a horseman, I was given a quick lesson in the history of horse archery which raised some interesting points about archery in general.
The British, and Western Europeans in the main, have never been big on horse archery. The famous archers of Olde England used longbows and fought on foot. The longbows used at Agincourt would have been anything up to 6 feet long and it would have been completely impossible to fire them on horseback.
To fire a bow with any accuracy at all while riding at speed requires two technical elements: a short bow and stirrups. Short recursive bows are more common in Eastern Europe and Asia (the bow I was to use was made in Korea) and stirrups are also thought to have been invented in Asia, making their way to Europe with Genghis Khan’s infamous horde.
Me with a recursive bow.
The result is that horse archery is mainly practised, even today, in the Far East and in those parts of Eastern Europe where Ghengis introduced the idea.
Not only is the bow different, but the way that you shoot is different too. A modern target archer (and almost all the archers you see in films) puts the arrow on the left of the bow, and draws back with his fingers. In horse archery, the arrow is placed on the right of the bow and drawn back with the ball of the thumb. (For the purpose of this discussion, all my archers are right-handed.)
The reason for this is that if you are drawing right handed, you will have to fire on a target to the left of the horse. You can see what I mean in this photo of me trying it out on a very patient (and stationery) mount .
As you are holding the bow with your left hand, you have to load with your right hand fiddling about trying to get the arrow across your body onto the left hand side of the bow just takes too long. Once the horse is moving, speed becomes essential. It’s a completely different situation from in target archery where you can generally take as long as you want. After years of being drilled to load on the left, the logic of this didn’t stop me continually trying to do things the wrong way round, resulting in a lot of targets disappearing behind me as the horse blithely trotted on to the next one.
The thumb draw, too, is an entirely sensible response to the practical realities of shooting on horseback. As everything is being shaken about, you need your finger free to stop the arrow jumping clear of the string. Drawing with the ball of your thumb leaves your index finger in a position where it can hold the end of the arrow lightly against the thumb until the moment when it is released.
Interestingly, some people have suggested that until modern times all archers loaded from the right. It does allow loading to be done very quickly. (If you want to look into this, I really recommend you watch some of Lars Andersen’s videos. Other views are also available. Historians differ: that’s what historians do.)
After a few shots from a stationery horse, it was time to try again, but with the horse moving. Each of us had someone holding a leading rein and the horses walked obediently down a marked off corridor that they were obviously used to, but the whole exercise was still quite interesting bearing in mind that if you are holding a bow in one hand and a bowstring in the other, that doesn’t leave anything to hold the reins.
The horses are very good at responding to pressure from your legs to get them started and then, as soon as you have finished shooting, you have one hand to steer with. The horses are all trained to respond to the pressure of reins on the neck – the way you traditionally ride Western style. It means you can steer one-handed. It was another skill to master though. (You’d have thought I’d have mastered it riding in South America, but I was terrible at it there too: old habits are hard to break.)
At a walk, the business of shooting wasn’t that tricky. You took one shot at an angle as you approached the target and another with your body twisted hard to the left as you passed it.
By the time we were up to a trot, though, the targets seemed to come up nightmarishly fast. Actually we had several seconds, but in that time you have to take the arrow from your belt (people with riding boots tucked them against their calves), fit it to the string (or ‘knock on’), draw, aim and fire. With practice, that should become a single fluid movement, but not less than two hours after first being introduced to the whole idea. “Just try to get all your arrows off,” I was told. With time at a premium, the thing to sacrifice was, apparently, aiming. It was explained that in war the horsemen would ride close to their target at a gallop, firing as many shots as possible as they passed. Ideally they would circle round, firing the rest of the arrows that they had, rejoining their main force where they would be handed more arrows to repeat the process. Note that the arrows would not be in a quiver where they would simply be thrown out by the motion of the horse. Any quiver placed so that arrows can be quickly pulled out and loaded means that they will also quickly be tossed out onto the ground. In fact, is likely that the whole idea of the back quiver (as featured in almost every Robin Hood movie) is entirely a Hollywood invention.
After two hours I could loose off four arrows as my horse trotted very slowly past two targets and at least some of them hit home. If it had been a packed mass of enemy troops then (provided I stayed well out of spear range) I might even have taken a couple of them down. It’s unlikely, though, that Ghengis Khan is going to recruit me any time soon.
Sadly, there are very few places you can practise horse archery in England. (One of my fellow-students, who takes it moderately seriously, had driven up to Warwick from Winchester.) It’s also terrifyingly expensive. (The horses are trained way beyond your average hack and there is one-to-one supervision as you shoot which, given that you really can kill somebody with the kit, is a sensible precaution.) It seems unlikely that I’m going to take it up. If, though, you all buy my books (probably, to be honest, several times – they make excellent gifts) I may well be travelling to Warwick again. Then, in some improbably dystopian future, I might be a useful person to have around.
by TCW | Apr 19, 2019 | Uncategorized
The Military Museum in Lisbon was, for me, one of the ‘must see’ places to visit in the city, so poor Tammy got dragged along. It is home to what is probably the finest collection of pre-20th century artillery in the world, much of which sits out in an enormous courtyard for lack of room to pack it all in inside.
In the 16th century the building housed a foundry where cannon were cast. Some weaponry was still manufactured on the site until the early 20th century. Now the foundry space houses a chronologically arranged exhibition demonstrating changes in the technology of artillery through the centuries.
The Artillery Museum was founded in 1851. As suggested by the change of name to Military Museum (in 1926), there are more than just cannon on display. Besides swords and firearms and a couple of knights in full armour, there is rather a fine display of kris, obviously particularly fascinating to me.
(Don’t know what kris are? Have look at my post about them on my old blog site.)
The place is worth a visit even if you are not that interested in the exhibits. The building itself is designed as a triumphalist memorial to Portugal’s military history. The grand entrance arch gives you a clue.
The rooms have been decorated by leading Portuguese artists to celebrate their country’s military prowess. Paintings, carvings and tapestry describing Portugal’s history. The journey through the Museum was designed as a learning experience. The military items and paintings on display are designed to teach the visitor about key moments of Portuguese history, such as the discovery of the sea route to India, the Portuguese participation in the First World War and the pacification campaigns conducted by Mouzinho de Albuquerque in Mozambique in the last quarter of the 19th century.
The effect is both impressive and simultaneously slightly mad. It hints, I think, at the psychology of the dictatorship under which much of it was developed.
The Military Museum ranks 73 out of 526 on Trip Advisor’s list of things to see in Lisbon. This says a lot for the ambivalence of modern Portugal towards this celebration of a more militaristic colonialist past. The Museum is hardly promoted at all: when we were there we appeared to be the only visitors. That’s a shame given how fascinating the place is. If you are ever in Lisbon, do go and see it.
After another ridiculously huge and delicious lunch we made our way to the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos. This was no ordinary monastery, though. The existing building was started in 1501 and paid for by the then King, Manuel I. In exchange for their subsidy, the monks were ordered to pray for the soul of the King and to provide spiritual assistance to sailors themselves from the nearby port. The monastery therefore, like the Museum, became an emblem of the power of the state and Portuguese maritime hegemony. As with the Museum, this was expressed in elaborate decoration and sheer scale. In the 16th century, though, the money available for such vanity projects was even greater than in the 20th century and the result is a building on a stupendous scale.
The church is enormous and highly decorated, but it the cloisters of the monastery are even more impressive. At first glance they really don’t look that big. This is because their proportions are so perfect that it is only slowly that you get a sense of their scale.
Maybe the view along one side of the cloister gives a better idea of the scale of the place.
The monastery was secularised in 1833 and now houses museums. It’s still used to symbolise State power, but now that Portugal is not a great international power, the State is the European Union. The Treaty of Lisbon was signed there in 2007.
A sort walk along the banks of the Tagus (feeling very chilly as the freak heatwave is ending and it’s already dusk) and we get to the Belém Tower. Built in the early 16th century in the same style as the monastery, the tower is mainly famous for being very pretty. It was originally designed as a defensive fortification from which cannon should have been able to protect Lisbon against ships travelling up the Tagus but it’s far too close to the shore and never really offered any serious defence.
by TCW | Apr 16, 2019 | Book review
At the end of last year I reviewed ‘Dear Laura’ by Jean Stubbs. It was presented as a detective story, but I said in my review that I felt that it was more of a psychological thriller, so when the publisher (Sapere) offered me a sequel featuring the same detective I was intrigued as to what sort of a book I would be reading.
‘The Painted Face’ is, again, more an exploration of the mind of one of the protagonists than it is a conventional detective story.
Carradine is an artist: a man gifted with great technical skill, but unable to express himself as he would wish. In both his painting and his personal life he is unable to give vent to any real feelings. His emotions are trapped as the child he was when the step-sister he adored was killed in a train crash and his stepmother (Gabrielle), for whom his feelings were practically oedipal, subsequently died of grief.
He decides that the only way he can move on is to understand the mystery of his sister’s death. The circumstances had never been properly explained. Why was the child, whose mother was devoted to her, travelling apparently alone on a train from France to Switzerland? Why was the mother’s maid summarily dismissed soon after?
Inspector Lintott (from the previous story) has retired, but Carradine hires him to dig up the past. They travel together to Paris, where Gabrielle’s family had lived and where she spent much of her time with them. It was from there that Odette, the sister, had set off on her fatal journey.
The dedication of the book mentions Paris and the city is clearly a character in the book. It’s 1902 and Paris is at the height of its fin-de-siècle splendour (as Carradine would see it) or degeneracy (as Lintott definitely suspects, at least initially). The book is a celebration of the honest enjoyment of good food, good company, and good sex which Stubbs ascribes to the Paris of the period. She does the food and the company rather well and the sex, where discreetly touched upon, is nicely sketched too, but there is a gaping hole where Paris ought to be. There are no smells (though the sewers then were presumably even more odiferous than they often are now); there is little sense of the noise of a busy city full of cobbled avenues. We do not gaze through the windows of the shops of the Champs-Élysées and, although there are often descriptions of individuals encountered on the streets, we get no sense of the hustle and bustle, the colours or the swirl of movement.
In ‘Dear Laura’ Stubbs showed herself mistress of the domestic. Almost all the story takes place in one house and the mild claustrophobia of the setting adds to its strength. The best bits of ‘The Painted Face’ are also those which take place in quite intimate settings: the painter’s studio; a mistress’s boudoir; even the attic of Carradine’s home. The attempts to paint on a broader canvas – a journey across a peculiarly anonymous France; the walks around Paris – these simply distract from a story that is really about Carradine and his attempts to come to terms with his demons.
In the end Lintott solves the mystery and Carradine does find closure. It’s not really a detective story at all – most of the mystery is solved when he reads Gabrielle’s diaries which Carradine, despite going to the trouble of hiring a detective, has never thought to read himself. And the story is finished neatly by a series of improbable coincidences which would have embarrassed Dickens – surely the father of improbable literary coincidences. The final twist, too, is rather pat and predictable, but it does provide a satisfying ending.
This is a well-written story with some nice characterisation. Not only the tormented artist and the apparently stolidly conventional detective are well-drawn but so are the minor characters: the garrulous old lady who provides a vital clue tucked away in her apparently unending reminiscences; the restaurant owner who helps Lintott negotiate his way through a menu he cannot read; the servant with an active fantasy life who, in the real world, is constantly falling pregnant.
There is much to enjoy, but, taken as a whole, I felt it didn’t quite work. That may be just me: in any case, the time spent reading was not wasted and you may well enjoy it more than I did.
by TCW | Apr 12, 2019 | Uncategorized
We’re back to my Iberian expedition today. (Almost finished, honest.) By now we are at Lisbon.
Lisbon is a small city but it’s been around for a long time and there are remains from the Romans through the Moors to beautiful medieval buildings. Much of it was destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave in 1755, so there are grand squares and avenues that date from the late 18th century – an excellent time to be rebuilding.
My main interest was in the Military Museum which features a lot of weaponry from the Napoleonic era and I’ll be writing about that in a later blog, but I’m starting with something much older just because I found it fascinating and I hope you do too.
On our first day in Lisbon we headed up to the castle, pausing only to look at the remains of a huge Roman theatre built into the hillside so as to take advantage of the incline for the auditorium. There’s not a lot of it left, so we had to use our imagination a lot, but chunks of drainage channels, passageways, and seating gave an impressive idea of the scale that it must have been built on.
The castle looks great from a distance but close up it is a bit of a disappointment. The Portuguese dictatorship used to be more enthusiastic about the idea of Portugal’s proud past than the historic detail of it and the “restoration” work at the castle has definite elements of Disneyfication.
The archaeological work being carried out to see what was there before the medieval castle is much more interesting. There’s a bit of Roman stuff that’s pretty meaningless except to a professional eye, but there are there clear traces of a couple of Moorish houses which are fascinating. The buildings had small bedrooms leading off the main sitting room and in one the remains of an internal dividing wall are still clearly visible.
In the picture above you can just see signs of painted plaster in the bedroom area. In the other house a remarkable amount of the painted plaster is still in situ.
There is even a little bit of the decorative frieze from the sitting room where you can see the same paint has been applied in a very different pattern.
These buildings date from the eighth century and seeing the remains was a little bit special.
The small child in me was particularly impressed with this.
It’s an eighth century toilet – unusual because it is connected via the sloping drain on the right of the picture to a drain in the street outside. You can even see traces of the original tiled floor.
It wasn’t what we had expected to find in Lisbon castle but I was fascinated to get this glimpse into everyday life almost 1,500 years ago. I hope you have enjoyed reading about it too.
We spent the rest of the day exploring a lot more of Lisbon, but I’m not going to make you jealous with our descriptions of the food or the beauty of the place. I will leave you though, with a picture from our evening. Yes, almost everywhere we go we take our tango shoes and we can usually find somewhere to dance. Lisbon was no exception.
Next week: the military museum and more cannon than you can shake a bayonet at.
by TCW | Apr 5, 2019 | Uncategorized
It is said that Jane Austen casts a long shadow. Some commentators suggest that any works of fiction set in the Regency period and containing an element of romance are inevitably in Austen’s shade.
Well, I’m not so sure.
First, I will come clean and say that I love a well-written Regency novel — I’ve even written a couple of my own. But when I’m reading one of these, I am not comparing them to Austen. Rather, I’m weighing them on their own merits, and asking myself whether the writing makes me feel I am reading about the past. Providing the author has not included jarring anachronisms, such as wolves running wild in 18th century England (I’ve seen that), or similar, and the writing is good, then I’m happy.
Yes, Austen is acknowledged as the foremost exponent of the Regency novel, but, let’s not forget, what she was writing was, for her, contemporary. Everything she wrote about happened at the time she put pen to paper. Her readers thought her work fresh and reflective of the period in which they were living — one of the reasons, no doubt, that her novels were successful at the time. As the years passed of course, other reasons for regarding her work as the epitome of perfection came to the fore: the elegance of her prose, her sharp observations, her ability to create memorable characters.
Importantly too, Austen would not have considered her works to be romances, certainly not in the way we understand the word today. Her books were about relationships and feelings, it is true, but they weren’t concerned exclusively with romantic love. She explored not only the relationships between men and women, but also the links between husband and wife (Mr and Mrs Bennett, Admiral and Mrs Croft), sisters (Elizabeth and Jane, Elinor and Marianne), and the social hierarchies of the society in which she lived. Her writing subtly conveys the realities of life in the 1800s in a way which would have been easily understood by her contemporaries, but which requires a lot more work for modern readers.
In my opinion, anyone writing a Regency novel today cannot hope to compete with Austen, mainly because it is not a level playing field and I’m not even sure they are in the same game. A modern writer may have all the prose skills to convey the characters, the witticisms, the engaging plot lines… but what they do not have is the innate knowledge that Austen had about the time in which she lived.
I believe that a contemporary writer can undertake any amount of research to understand and add detail to their historical novel, but the result will always be their interpretation of life in the past, not an accurate recreation. I’m not saying this is a bad thing by any means. I believe it is important that a reader or writer who wants to understand a particular period or subject should read and research as much as possible, and build up their own picture.
To go off the point a little, this is pretty much how historians work. They do not examine one account of a person or event, but as many as they can get their hands on. They consider all the primary sources. They also research other historians’ interpretations, with which they may agree or disagree, before coming to their own conclusions. A perfect example of this is the biography. Two biographers may have access to the same primary sources and documents, but it is rare for them to paint exactly the same picture of their subject.
Think how many books there are about Henry VIII or Elizabeth I, and how many different interpretations there are of their respective characters. Henry was either a ruthless despot, determined to get himself an heir, regardless of the cost to the people around him, or he was a deeply religious man who believed the birth of his daughters was a judgement on him for marrying his brother’s widow and then casting her off for another. Elizabeth was a wily, intelligent woman who managed in a man’s world or she was a vain, manipulative egotist. All are valid conclusions.
You may be surprised to know that I do not consider Austen to have ever written a ‘Regency’ novel; she wrote novels set in the Regency because that was when she lived. For me, the originator of Regency novels as we know them, is Georgette Heyer (1902-1974) — a writer I discovered many years ago in my early teens, and some years before I was ‘forced’ to study Austen. At the time, I would never have thought to put the two in the same category, even though their works were set in the same time period. No, for me, every modern Regency novel should be compared to Heyer, and sad to say, not all come up to scratch.
Georgette Heyer was the only daughter of George and Silvia; she was born in Wimbledon and had two younger brothers, George Boris and Frank Dmitri. Her writing career started at the age of nineteen when she published The Black Moth, a story begun several years earlier to amuse her brother George during his convalescence from a recurring bout of illness (he suffered from haemophilia). Her oeuvre, consisting of fifty-seven titles, spanned fifty years and were best-sellers. Not bad for a writer who shunned publicity, so much so that her real name was a secret kept from her fans until after her death — one thing that she had in common with Jane Austen, whose own readers were not apprised of her name until Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1817 by her brother Henry Austen.
Heyer was meticulous in her research — her depiction of the battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army, was required reading for officers at Sandhurst, according to her biographer, Jane Aiken Hodge. However, Hodge also points out that Heyer’s Regency world is a carefully selected, highly artificial one. With a few exceptions, Heyer, like Austen, does not often mention the poverty, the civil unrest, and the pervading air of paranoia about possible revolution, that existed at the time.
Also like Austen, Heyer’s works are written in elegant prose, witty, with memorable characters… but they are not the same. Heyer was recreating a world she had no firsthand knowledge of, while Austen was writing what she knew and lived.
To come back to my original point, I do not believe that today’s writers of Regency novels should worry about emulating Austen; they are not under her shadow. Do authors of biting social satires worry about comparisons with Dickens? I think not. They say that comparisons are odious, in this case I have to agree. Modern writers of Regency novels should not be compared to Austen. It is unnecessary and unfair. Austen is most definitely in a category of her own.
Reference
The Private World of Georgette Heyer, Jane Aiken Hodge, 1984, The Bodley Head.
Penny Hampson
Having worked in various sectors before becoming a full time mum, Penny Hampson decided to follow her passion for history by studying with the Open University. She graduated with honours and went on to complete a post-graduate degree.
Penny then landed her dream role, working in an environment where she was surrounded by rare books and historical manuscripts. Flash forward nineteen years, and the opportunity came along to indulge her other main passion – writing historical fiction. Encouraged by friends and family, three years later Penny published her debut novel A Gentleman’s Promise.
Her second novel, An Officer’s Vow, has just been released.
Penny lives with her family in Oxfordshire, and when she is not writing, she enjoys reading, walking, swimming, and the odd gin and tonic (not all at the same time).
Visit Penny’s website and blog at: http://pennyhampson.co.uk/
Follow Penny on Twitter at: @penny_hampson
Find Penny’s books here: viewauthor.at/Pennysbooks
An Officer’s Vow
The future looks bleak to Major Nate Crawford. Depressed after being sent home from the Peninsular Campaign as unfit for service, he contemplates ending it all. Then an unexpected opportunity for adventure beckons in the shape of a delightfully intriguing runaway heiress. He will prove his worth as an officer and a gentleman by offering his help. He has a plan…
Lottie Benham is desperate. Her life is in danger and she needs a place of safety until her next birthday. The unexpected proposal from this attractive, but intimidating officer could be the answer to her prayers. Not normally a risk-taker, she decides to gamble all by placing her trust in this charismatic gentleman, who she suspects might be more in need of help than she.
But the best laid plans…
Caught up in conflict, danger, and deception, will Lottie and Nate survive to find the perfect solution to their problems?
An Officer’s Vow is the second in Penny Hampson’s Regency-set Gentlemen series, following the exploits and misadventures of a loosely linked group of friends.
