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One of the things that especially attracts me to history is reading first hand accounts â€� to hear people from the past speaking to us in their own voices. Yesterday, whilst our local history group was going through some archive material, we found a typescript of a record from the English civil war, fought between Parliament and the King Charles I. This is the petition from a soldier, John Barret, for aid from Edward Massie, the governor of Gloucester (a Parliamentary city), after the Parliamentary forces were put to flight by royalists Ìýat the town of Painswick a few miles away, in March 1644.
�The petition of John Barret, corporal in Captain Cotton his company, humbly sheweth:
Your petitioner was lately commanded out in the party went…in Painswick; and being put to flight, I was in the pursuit…taken by two of the enemy’s horse and six of their foot, of whom I was [knocked] down and left for dead; and having received ten wounds of them, [they] stripped me stark naked to the very skin; and ever since that time I have lain bedrid under the chyrurgion’s hands, and now, being able to rise, I cannot for want of clothes: therefore I beseech your honour that you would be pleased to take order that I may have some clothes (both linen and woollen) speedily that I may not perish for want thereof.
Your petitioner is in great want of firing, having received but two green willow blocks (that two men might carry) of the quarter-master since I was wounded.
Your petitioner received 7 wounds in the head, 5 of them through the skull, 1 cut in the back (to the bone) with a pole axe, his elbow cut off bone and all, his hand slit between the fingers, as Mr Paradine the chyrugion affirmeth, who hath almost cured them all, and very carefully and willingly he hath taken the pains to do it; how to satisfy him we know not; he was never the man that asked us a farthing.
And your petitioner shall pray…�
This hair-raising tale of terrible wounds and miraculous survival evidently had its effect, as the record goes on to record the governor’s response:
‘Captain Blaney,I desire you to pay this petitioner 20s. to buy him clothes.
Edward Massie�
Twenty shillings � a pound � sounds like a tidy sum in the seventeenth century and there are lots of questions one might ask about this as a piece of evidence. Barret’s wounds sound so severe that his survival appears almost miraculous. Who took the trouble to rescue him from the battlefield? And did he exaggerate the extent of his injuries for maximum effect? At any rate it’s a wonderfully vivid account � and an authentic voice speaking to us across the centuries.

Over Christmas I read by James Shapiro, a forensic study of one pivotal year in the life of William Shakespeare. I felt I was starting to read it in real time, as the book opens in London at Christmas time � on 28th December 1598, to be exact. It was a cold, snow-swept day. A group of armed men � carrying swords, daggers and hatchets � were walking with stealthy purpose through the muffled London streets. They were a troupe of actors, the Chamberlain’s Men, and the authentic weapons were the props from their bloodthirsty revenge tragedies, but they were being carried with serious intent. Amongst their number was almost certainly Shakespeare himself.
The Chamberlain’s Men were in deep trouble. They owned a wooden theatre â€� known, rather prosaically as the Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had been banned by the authorities from occupying. The ground on which it stood was leased from a landlord, Giles Allen, with whom they had fallen out. Without a theatre to play in their future was bleak â€� and there was a certainty that Allen would now claim theÌýbuilding's valuable timber for himself â€� but he was temporarily out of London for Christmas. Spotting a window of opportunity the actors decided to grab the theatre back, dismantle it and carry it away, whilst Allen was off the scene. They were armed to repulse any attempt to stop them. For Shakespeare, one of the shareholders in the company, this was a critical moment. The dawn raid had been undertaken in strict secrecy.
In a thick snow storm, and under the instruction of Peter Street, a master carpenter, they repelled all attempts to prevent them. By night fall, the enormous timbers of the frame, each a foot square and weighing half a ton, had been loaded onto wagons and wheeled away to a warehouse on the Thames. Allen returned to find an empty lot � and failed to regain the structure in a subsequent court battle.
The following spring, the Theatre was re-erected on the South Bank at Southwark, outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, and re-christened the Globe. And Shakespeare was writing furiously � new plays, new ways of seeing the world. 1599 saw Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet all brought to the light of day there, in a tumultuous year for England, London and the future of theatre.


"Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?"
Henry the Fifth

A dynamic approach to 2013. Thanks to Sidney, Hector and their human servants...

Notes from the 24th December. We’re in Kent for Christmas and today is the now almost traditional Christmas Eve walk � this year on the White Cliffs above Dover harbour. It’s a fantastically dull, dirty winter afternoon, the wind so strong on the cliffs you can lean into it; out in the channel, a green sea kicked into white horses by the violent gusts; somewhere out there in the mizzle lies the coast of France, now blotted out by low cloud. The ferries stand off from the breakwater waiting their turn to go in.
The white cliffs have a special meaning in the history of this island: a defence, a frontier, a place of departure and return, a relief to be waving farewell to or a focus for homesickness � an icon of some kind of England.
I’ve walked these cliffs many times over the past thirty years but today the tide is low and as we look down from the cliffs I get to witness something I’ve never heardÌýabout before. Far below, beached on the black rocks ,the outline of a wrecked ship, like the fossil remains of some giant prehistoric fish.

We scramble down the coastal path to investigate. There’s a narrow walk way above the beach to a row of Second World War searchlight stations, suspended on the cliff face like outsized swallows nests guarding the approaches of Dover harbour. It’sÌýat sites like thisÌýthatÌýthe British people were to be rallied by ChurchillÌýto fight on the beaches. Inside, a sequence of eerie concrete chambers from which we squint into the wind through the tattered remains of their steel shutters, which have been eroded into beautiful abstract patterns. There’s a weird, hair-raising attraction to Second World War archaeology.ÌýÌýÌý
Down on the beach, it’s possible to climb onto the remnant of the ship, whose iron ribs have become fused with the rocks, and to stand on the last remaining piece of superstructure, like the conning tower of a lost submarine surfacing from the depths for a brief hour. There’s something incredibly awe-inspiring about this beached, ruined structure, turned into a network of iron rock pools reflecting the twilight sky, with the black shingle beach and the white cliffs shining in the gloom and the wind whipping up the midwinter sea.













These are the durable remains of the SS Falcon. Carrying a volatile cargo of hemp and matches to Dover in 1926, it caught fire and was beached in the bay outside the harbour. Amazingly there’s and the crew’s rescue by the Dover lifeboat.

The days before Christmas in the English countryside have been dreary with continuous rain and low cloud, so that twilight seems to fall at about two in the afternoon. It has a charm all of its own - the point when the year shrinks back to its source and there is nothing more pleasurable than to draw the curtains as night falls, turn up the heating and settle to a book. The book, in my case, has been Chasing the Monsoon by AlexanderÌýFrater, a traveller's account of tracking the monsoon day by day across the Indian subcontinent as it travels north. It's a time of anxiety and rejoicing - anxiety that the monsoon might fail or be insufficient - rejoicing that when it does come, in full force, it ends the insufferably hot months, stirs new smells from theÌýdust and fertility from the earth.

Frater followed the monsoon in all its manifestations and his quest ended in the town of Cherrapunji in the far east of India, which receives its rain from the Bay of Bengal, and lays claim to being the wettest place on earth. This was perhaps the most mournful posting in the British Raj - unless you were a keen botanist with an interest in mosses, ferns and orchids - which many medical men and colonial administrators were.

In 1850 a doctor called Joseph Hooker spent the monsoon months in the town. He called it 'as bleak and inhospitable as can be imagined' - its climate certainly got to the British. (Frater visited the mournful British graveyard andÌýspotted aÌýnumber of tombstones with the words 'Died by His Own Handâ€�.) Hooker was astonished by the absolute and continuous deluge that bombarded the town during the months of his visit. He noted the recordings of a previous resident, Mr Yule:

" who stated that in the month of August, 1841, 264 inches of rain fell, or twenty-two feet...Dr Thompson and I also recorded thirty inches in one day and night, and during the seven months of our stay, upwards of 500 inches fell, so that the total annual fall perhaps greatly exceeded [the] 600 inches, or fifty feet, which had been registered in succeeding years."

Somehow a few wet English days in December seem quite light in comparison! Happy Christmas and New Year.

The wonders of Turkey…When I was in Istanbul in October I was introduced to a mention of the carrot townÌýof BeypazarıÌýin central Turkey, by Mary Isin who is an authority on Turkish heritage vegetables.
Beypazarı is the carrot capital of Turkey � probably the carrot capital of the world. Over half the country’s carrots are grown in the area. They hold an annual carrot and stew festival here and have many and ingenious culinary uses for carrots, including carrot ice-cream and carrot-flavoured Turkish delight.
Here’s a roundabout in the town proudly sporting Beypazarı’s iconic vegetable:

ÌýÌý
Nowadays the farmers tend to grow Dutch carrots, but what caught my attention were rumours of the almost extinct giant carrot � the historical mega-carrot � once grown in the area. Mary went to investigate and to acquire some seeds � and sent me this picture of the mighty vegetable. These are, apparently, quite average specimens � they can grow to over a metre in length�



Mary is also a historian of Turkish and Ottoman food who has just written the definitive book on the history of Turkey's love of puddings: Sherbet and spice : the Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts � part recipe book, part cultural history of a deep tradition that could produce, and I quote, ‘One hundred sculpted sugar lions, baklava the size of cartwheels a thousand layers thick, halva made in memory of the dead, rose jam in a hundred pots of Dresden china, violet sherbet for the sultan and parrots addicted to sugar…the stories behind Turkey's huge variety of sweets and puddings, valued not only for their taste but as symbols of happiness, good fortune and goodwill, are as fascinating as their flavour.� Cultural and gastronomic history from the land of the giant carrot!
On the cover, the float of the guild of sugar merchants is being pulled along in one of the flamboyant Ottoman processions in Istanbul, sugar piled high on the shelves, and in the cageÌýthe sugar-loving parrot which, Mary tells me,Ìýwas the guild's symbol.

Looking back through some photographs I took in Lisbon during the spring I was charmed and delighted to remember my visit to the National Museum of Azulejos. Azulejos â€� from the Arabic for ‘small stonesâ€� â€� are the decorative tiles that are a distinctive feature of Portuguese art and architecture, visible everywhere - in churches, on the facades of buildings, cafes and public spaces â€� a rich tradition that stretches back to Moorish times. You find ceramic pictures everywhere in Portugal. They can be pious, historical, abstract, surreal - or just funny. This simple iconÌýprotectedÌýan alleyway in the old quarter of Alfama (above right),ÌýwhilstÌýa shop was adorned by an inquisitive monkey: Historical personages were popular in the National Museum. Here's Catherine of Braganza, married to King Charles II of England (looking rather saucy),Ìýa curious armless Napoleon,

and, a more modern take, a version of a famous sketch of Portugal's great poet, Fernando Pessoa, beadily reading the paper:

AÌýseventeenth century fantasy depiction of a leopard hunt particularly caught my fancy - animals andÌýthemes from Portugal's colonial adventures seem to have provided rich subject matter for the tile artists. The hunters set out in pursuit of some rather portly leopards, who look as though they've spent too long eating pastries in Lisbon's cafes. The hunters are armed with nets and traps to snare their prey:


But their most cunning device is the mirror trap. The leopard approaches the trap, sees a rival leopard in the mirror, and presumably maddened with rage, springs into the trap to attack - the lid is snapped shut and the leopard is taken!

Rummaging around the internet as one does, I found the of a Second World War German U-Boat, U-35, which my father helped to sink very early in the war, whilst serving on a destroyer. By the standard of the times it was quite a gentlemanly sort of affair. Depth charged, the submarine popped up to the surface - to my dad's horror HMS Kashmir was cleaning out its active gun at that moment and was totally incapable of mounting any challenge to this sudden surprise, should it come to it. Luckily U-35 was too crippled to offer any resistanceÌýand the whole crew was captured alive. The U-Boat officers were treated as guests aboard the ship â€� as long as they promised not to escape â€� and their captain signed the visitor’s book with the comment ‘Wish you all the best of luck except against German U-Boats!â€�. After the war there was a long-term friendship between some of the German officers and Louis Mountbatten, captain of the destroyer squadron, until he was killed by an IRA bomb in 1979.
But what amazed me most about this find was to discover a grainy photograph of the captured crew being unloaded at Greenock in Scotland and in the background in his officer's cap I can see the unmistakeable features of my father as a young man - facing the camera behind the Scottish soldier standing to attention in profileÌýby the gangplank. The wonders of the internet!

I'm deep in the history of cartography and exploration at present for the book I'm writing about the in Asia. As they worked their way down the coast of Africa in the middle years of the fifteenth century, their discoveries were avidly followed by the mapmakers, noting each successive bay or cape as it was named. By the end of the century Lisbon was the go-to place for cartography. Maps were knowledge and power. The Portuguese tried vainly to prevent their leakage to foreign powers but fifty years earlier, when Venice was the clearing house for everything that was known from travellers' tales, the King of Portugal, Afonso V, commissioned a map of the world from a monk on the island on Murano.

Fra Mauro, who had been a soldier and adventurer before taking to the cloister, produced a remarkable image, summarizing all that was reasonably known about the world, and annotating it with his comments and judgements. The map was orientated with south to the top, but is here rotated to make us feel more at home with ways of seeing the world. It includes tantalizing information - the idea that the Chinese had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope - but what was revolutionary, apart from its scepticism about the ideas of the classical authors who had dominated thinking for so long, was that it clearly presented Africa as a continent that could be circumnavigated to reach India. (There was a widely prevailing view that the Indian Ocean was probably a closed sea.)


The Mauro Map was a powerful incentive for the Portuguese kings to continue investing in voyages down the coast of Africa to seek a seaway to the east, which would end with Vasco da Gama's arrival on the shores of India in 1498.

The Portuguese map has disappeared, but the Venetians also had a copy. ItÌýhangs in the Biblioteca Nationale Marciana in Venice. It's reported that when the doge saw the mapÌýhe complained to the monk that he'd made Venice disproportionately small for its importance. 'That's the size it is' came back the reply - Mauro was not to be budged from his notions of objective truth. By the time the Portuguese had stolen some of Venice's spice trade after Vasco da Gama, it might have seemed still smaller.

There's a good little on the significance of Mauro's map produced by the British Library.