Author Archives: Graham Palmer

Not knowing… (Part 2)

When two heads are better than one

For a writer, there’s nothing scarier than a blank piece of paper or screen. It accuses you with its glare, ‘Think you can beat me, do you? Who are you kidding?’

That first scribble or tentative tap of the keys can be the most difficult. What if there’s nothing to say? Or, if there is, what if I just can’t say it?

Sometimes you just have to face your fear down. Sometimes you just have to write.

Get over it – it’s not life or death! What you write may not be any good – it almost certainly won’t correspond to the beautifully-crafted phrases in your head. Quite frankly, it will probably be rubbish. But as someone else said, you can always edit a bad page – you can’t edit a blank one.

I start with a scrap of information,  a gut feeling, much research and a few scribbled phrases. And lots and lots of walking. Mind-time: it’s one of the two things you can’t do without. (The other is a space to sit and write in.) The process is a messy one and can be infuriating. This is how one of the poems behind Cracked Voices nearly ended up in the bin, only to saved by some well-timed criticism…

A scrap of information
In the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge there’s the skeleton of a hippopotamus that was dug up at Barrington. (I know this because we chanced upon it there when my kids were small. I’d taken them into the museum to see the dinosaurs.) It was discovered during the Coprolite mining rush that swept across south Cambridgeshire in the 1860s and 70s. Both the hippo and the diggers are now largely forgotten.

A gut feeling
Apart from the obvious, there must be something deeper that linked this hippo to the fate of the men who mined the ground. These people needed their story digging up!

Much research
A search on Google threw up the works of Bernard O’Connor who has written extensively on the coprolite quarries (along the way rediscovering the words of a folksong written at the pits in the 1870s by one of the diggers), Royston Museum came up with a copy of Richard Grove’s book from 1976 and a search through the British Newspaper Archive came up with name upon name of men who had been killed digging out the fossils. It was shocking to read how so many men were crushed to death, quite literally buried alive. Further research in the censuses showed that it was not unknown – probably out of economic necessity – for the widow of a digger to marry one of his workmates. Louisa Seabourne at Bassingbourn thus became Louisa Sell and then Louisa Starr.


It was about this time that the Sedgwick Museum came back to me with some serendipitous news. The hippo was not a hippo at all. Bones from several hippos had been stuck together. This was a composite animal.

A few scribbled phrases
the ground demands its fill / a man of many parts / like the bones of the hippo they found in the pit, it’s a puzzle to know where each scrap of you fits

Mind-time
On a walk it came to me that this should be a two voice poem. One voice should be that of a dead coprolite digger (based around the skeleton of the folk-song) and the other that of his wife or lover. The fossiler would sing for all the dead diggers and give them a composite voice.

Drafting
Some of the works of art that I love most have never been finished. There is something in their incompleteness that is deeply satisfying. When I was Inter-railing I chanced upon Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves in the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze. They are breath-taking as they struggle to free themselves from the blocks of marble. Drafting is just like that. You take an idea – a plan often only sketched out in your head – and then you start tapping away at it, incorporating the imperfections into something that may end up far better or, in most cases, far worse than what you originally had in your head. But gradually something emerges…

Michelangelo's prisoners or slaves

Image courtesy of Accademia.org

The novelist Tim Winton (two-times Booker Prize nominee and four times winner of the Miles Franklin Award) refuses to type, claiming typed drafts look too much like the finished thing and fool you into thinking you’re done when you’re not. Instead he writes the old fashioned way in order to slow himself down enough for the idealised words in his head to translate into real words on the page, not with a pen but with a pencil. The marks a pencil makes are more tentative, easier to cross out or erase. I do both interchangeably…tending towards the computer as the final few drafts emerge…and one of the things I have learned, is not to be too precious. Just look at the drafts of Wilfred Owen’s poems, with Siegfried Sassoon’s scribbled alterations. Sometimes the writer is too close to the original. Sometimes two heads are better than one.

Wilfred Owen

My initial plan for this poem was to echo the form of the original folk-song (which has a young man thumbing his nose at his previous employer) but also make it a conversation between two people who aren’t really listening to each other…a sort of delayed call and response. Once I had it nearly finished, I shared a draft with my nearest and dearest as I had niggling doubts – it was not quite there. My son was to the point, ‘The first bit feels a bit like a middle class parody of a folk song!’ He was right. Despite being only slightly altered from the original nineteenth century song, it didn’t feel authentic. I went back and rewrote it (still not right) and then sent it winging through the ether to Jenni. ‘I know it’s a duet,’ she replied. ‘One thought that immediately popped into my head was to make the male and female parts work together, so the last two stanzas could be repeated together – what do you think?’ I looked again. Whether she knew it or not she had hit the nail squarely on the head. It was not just the last two stanzas that needed to work together…it was the complete thing. By cutting up the two monologues and pasting them together it became a dialogue with some unusual linking. Instead of a parody it had become a modern composite and somehow, along the way, the blank paper had spawned a poem. Job done.

 

Not knowing… (Part 1)

The cat, the witch and other myths…

Curiosity killed the cat.

If you believe some blogs, the cat was first killed at the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia claims that the saying first appeared in print in 1873 but a brief search of the British Newspaper Archive reveals it was in common usage in Ireland well before that.

So what does that prove? Not a lot. Just that you shouldn’t take things you read at face value (not even this)…and that’s the most important thing any would-be researcher can learn.

A lot of what we take for granted about the past is – well – alternative facts. It’s not so much fake news as misremembered myths. Just as in the children’s game of Chinese Whispers, the history that gets passed on subtly alters with each retelling. By the time we finally hear the story it has little resemblance to the one that was first told but that doesn’t make it essentially untrue.

Take the Royston witches. As far as I know, they didn’t have a black cat, nor did they boil up animals in a large cauldron or fly through the air. Since I rediscovered them for Creative Royston in 2014, this however has become the dominant picture people have of them, largely due to an image created for an art trail at the time.

Royston witches

Royston witches

Let’s return to the whisper I first heard in 2014. I had not set out to search for witches. I was looking for something else entirely when I came across a reference to Royston in a book. That book (Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618) reprints part of a pamphlet from 1606 called The most cruell and bloody murther committed by an Inkeeper’s Wife… A copy of the original pamphlet is held at the British Library in Euston and anyone can access the original there (for anyone interested, it’s also transcribed here). Like so many other cheap chapbooks, it was not printed to provide an accurate report of recent happenings but rather to ensure they were sensationalised in a way that would confirm the readers’ prejudices, increase sales and make the publisher and street-sellers a fast buck.

After dealing with the Hatfield murderers, the pamphlet goes on to tell another story – that of Joan Harrison and her daughter, two women from Royston who were executed for witchcraft that August. Or does it?

The chapbook is full of accusations and intriguing detail but gets the basic facts wrong. Its writer may not even have been in Hertford for the Assizes but possibly only heard the story second hand. If you trawl through the court records held at the National Archive in Kew you can go back to that first whisper. In the indictments for the Hertford Summer Sessions (NA, ASSI 35/48/2)* the Royston women are named as Alice Stokes and Christiana Stokes, not mother and daughter but both spinsters (possibly sisters). So how much else in the pamphlet is actually accurate? And why were Alice and Christina suddenly singled out in 1606?

witchesKing James of Scotland had come to the English throne only three years earlier. On his journey south he had stopped in Royston and taken note of the good hunting to be had on the extensive heathlands. This was a man who was fascinated with witchcraft, who had previously written a book on it called Daemonologie. This was the year of Shakespeare’s new play Macbeth – where witches haunt the heath – and, apart from hunting, James himself also participated in a number of witch-trials. The king had recently established a bachelor pad in Royston, so what could be more politic for the locals than to furnish him with two women to hang?

Of course, this is all pure speculation as no contemporary account has been found to support or refute it. That’s the problem with history. It’s a bit like Schrödinger’s cat. Sometimes you think you’ve got it and then you find out you haven’t!

Are you still curious? Is that cat still breathing?  Why don’t you do your own digging and try to prove me wrong?

And while you’re doing so, don’t forget these five key questions:

  • How reliable is this account? Was it written by an eye-witness? Was it written at the time? Did the author really understand what they were writing about?
  • Why was it written? Was it just to make money or to curry favour? Was it meant to persuade people of something?
  • Who was it written for? Was it for public consumption? Was it intended to be read at all?
  • What was the context? How does it fit in with what was happening at the time? Do the words still mean the same thing?
  • Can you find anything that backs it up? Do other primary sources support your interpretation?

All very curious…

 

Notes
*Transcribed in Witch Hunting and Witch Trials: The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records of the 1373 Assizes Held for the Home Circuit AD 1559-1736 (1929) edited by C. L’Estrange Ewen, p.197

Three ancient riddles of the Icknield Way

As a follow-up to my post on naming things, I thought it might be fun to have a brief look at three intriguing place-names from the area that provides the backdrop to our Cracked Voices project…especially as they are a bit of a riddle and involve chiefs, gods and a very slight whiff of controversy.

Therfield (home to an unwelcome Viking)

The name Therfield has developed over time from ðereuelde to Thyrefeld to Tharfield and can be interpreted in at least three different ways.

At the time of the Domesday Book it was known as ðereuelde / Furreuuelde, which can mean ‘village of the furrowed fields’, hinting at the tantalising possibility that the strip lynchets (terraces) cut into the chalk scarp of Fordham’s Wood (at Scald Hill East and West) and also to the west at Scald Bank predate the Norman invasion and may go far much further back to the time of the builders of the prehistoric barrows which litter Therfield Heath.

Scald Bank
Image © Graham Palmer 2017

The second interpretation is…well, a bit boring! It is a very dry place (the only water came from the village’s ancient man-made ponds) and it is the highest point for miles (and used to host one of the county’s three beacons). This is the ‘village of the dry (or high) field’.

The third is based on the fact that Norman scribes often changed the Old English y into e when they were writing things down. ðereuelde might really be Thyreuelde, meaning Thyra’s Field. Now Thyra is a Viking name and the feminine form of Thor, whose Anglo-Saxon equivalent was the god Thunor. Given that flint (which abounds in the local fields) was intimately associated with the god of thunder (a subject I will return to in a later post), this may not be so far-fetched…especially as more than one thunderbolt (flint axe) has been found locally.

 

Thriplow (home to a Bronze Age chief)

It is thought that that the name of Thriplow (more correctly pronounced Triplow) has much simpler origins.

Thriplow Village Sign

In the Domesday Book it is Trepeslai (or, substituting y for e, Trypeslai). The lai (or low) came from Old English hlaew meaning barrow or round mound. Like Therfield Heath, the area was rich in prehistoric barrows (at least fourteen, now all ploughed out) including the nearby Chronicle Hills and Tryppa’s barrow which stood to the south east of the Parish Church. Tryppa is believed to have been the name of an ancient chieftain who at one time lay buried in the barrow. In the 1780s Dr Bernard ‘attacked this tumulus…with ten men’ and apparently found nothing. In the 1840s Richard Cornwallis Neville (the man behind Saffron Walden Museum) reported that there were still persistent rumours that two Bronze Age swords had in fact been discovered but, sad to say, they have never been heard of since.

 

Royston (home to a rather peculiar stone)

Royston, where a trackway (now the dual carriageways of the A505) crossed the Roman Ermine Street (the A10), is unusual in that it was not recorded in the Domesday Book. The question is, did it exist? At the time it did not have its own parish or manor so, for tax-raising purposes, it is just possible that any settlement at Royston was considered irrelevant by the Domesday information-gatherers. Certainly, both Baldock and Therfield were far more significant, but the important crossroads must surely have been marked in some way.

The enigmatic Roysia Stone at the heart of Royston

In other place-names ton often just denotes a settlement (from the Middle English toun). Here the Roys may refer to a wealthy woman named Roysia who was believed to have erected a cross, on top of the large boulder known as the Roysia Stone. That was certainly the belief of the historians writing in Elizabeth I’s time but it is questionable whether the indentation on the top of the stone is deep enough to hold a cross steady. Similarly, though the first known reference to the place (1184) is as Crux Roaisie, the Crux may simply refer to the crossroads which is still known as the Cross.

The work of a seventeenth century Danish antiquary (with the wonderful name of Olaus Wormius) may throw some light on the town’s name. He described an ancient tradition of cremations (or roiser) and how the ashes were buried in an earth mound (or roise). Given the number of prehistoric burial mounds on the nearby Heath, some historians have questioned if the Roysia Stone (in Middle English stone is stōn) may have once stood on its own mound at the crossroads.

Moving the Roysia Stone (Photo courtesy of Royston Museum)

The stone is strange in itself. As there is no other rock of its size for miles around, it would have held special significance for early man, and it is no accident that it became a waymarker on the Icknield Way. It started off somewhere in the Pennines and was carried to Royston by a glacier during one of the Ice Ages but there is no evidence as to where it initially came to rest. Wherever it was, in June 1786 we hear of it being moved from the crossroads to Market Hill and since then it has been moved three further times. It currently sits on a plinth to the south side of the crossroads, surrounded by benches and remains the enigmatic heart of the town.


With such ancient riddles to build on, it is not surprising that the area has thrown up a whole mound of stories…just a few particles of which are going to form the basis for Cracked Voices.

Cracked voices, thingmebobs and whatchamacallits…

The fraught art of naming things

Naming things is fundamental to us. It’s how we define the world and ourselves.

Words are always dangerous and, as any playground bully knows, names are the most dangerous of all. They can scar us for life.

Ask any soon-to-be-parent who’s ever puzzled their way through a book of baby names. Just what do you choose? Is it John or Jon or even Juan? Isobel or Isabelle or Issy?

Names matter. They label us and stick much longer than post-its. They are full of magic.

In past times, many people believed in invisible beings such as fairies but using the name was extremely unlucky. Instead they were ‘the wee folk’, ‘the Gentry’ or ‘the Hidden Company’. More recently, JK Rowling hit the nail (or was it a tack, brad or pin?) squarely on the head with ‘He-who-must-not-be-named!’

Tolkien, the master of naming things, based Bree on the Buckinghamshire town of Brill. Now Brill is a lovely place, built on a hill with its own windmill. I visited it once and was treated to a slap up tea by the ladies at the Methodist Church there – but that’s a different story.


Brill on the Hill © Copyright Bill Nicholls and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Brill’s first inhabitants (or at least the first who fixed its name) called it Breg, literally ‘hill’ in the local Celtic language. When the Anglo-Saxons invaded they asked a local what this large lump in the ground was called and were told Breg. Now in Anglo-Saxon a lump in the ground was a hyll, so naturally enough the newcomers now started calling the place Breg Hyll. Eventually this was shortened to Brill. Now, since most of us no longer speak Common Brittonic or Old English, naturally enough locals in the twenty-first century refer to the lump in the ground that the town is built on as Brill Hill.  So over time the place has become Hill Hill Hill. Names are so difficult!

Names always carry hidden messages from the past. Have you ever wondered why we kill a cow (from the Old English) but eat beef (from the French boeuf). Could it have anything to do with the Norman Invasion? After 1066 it was the local Anglo-Saxons who slaughtered the animals but the rich French-speaking Normans who ate the meat. (No, this has nothing to do with Brexit!).

But what has all this got to do with Jenni, me or song cycles? Well, a Pinnock is a dialect name for a hedge sparrow – Palmer, the Anglo-Norman for a pilgrim: creatures whose habitats have over time been eroded by both carelessness and lack of care. But that’s not it!

What could we call a song cycle about people whose stories and names have been forgotten? People who lived on the edge and had fallen over it. There was only one choice really:

cracked
adjective
1. damaged and showing lines on the surface from having split without coming apart.
2. informal. crazy; insane.

voice
noun
1. the sound produced in a person’s larynx and uttered through the mouth, as speech or song.
2. a particular opinion or attitude expressed.