Where does all this dirt come from? It’s hard for us, particularly in the over-crowded parts of the world, to imagine a pre-industrialized world. But what about the poor, were they squalid? On screen, there’s a sort of generic pauper, cwho thrives from the ancient world to the Edwardian era - fitted out with multiple rents and patches, ragged beards or exposed bosoms, gap-toothed of course, hair stiff with dirt, generally plaste red with grime. Of course, they were playing courtiers, the upper classes. So - I could tell my actors - wear your doublets with pride. If you survive your first five years, you are likely to live a span roughly comparable to modern people. The months after you are born are the most perilous. But epidemics carry off golden lads and lasses.
#Fantasy general 2 iron maiden skin
It’s true your elaborate clothes can only be brushed and aired, not washed - but they never touch your body what you wear next to your skin is frequently-washed linen. You don’t know how disease is transmitted, but you do know enough to associate sickness with dirt. And neither your king nor yourself throw your chicken bones on the floor - table manners are strict and they are more complex than they are today.
You do eat up your vegetables, in season. You are not, as one theory has it, exceptionally violent because you are driven mad by vitamin deficiency. And unless they have been knocked out, you probably have most of your teeth. I needed to tell them this: despite what people say about the dirty past, when you live in the 1500s, you are not in fact squalid, you are not flea-ridden. When the Royal Shakespeare Company began the process of adapting my Tudor novels into plays, I felt my job was to give the actors some sense of dignity. Look, for example, at how we imagine the Tudor era - which, for the English, plays so central a part in their national story. We hear the facts, and our brains print the legend. Our mental pictures are soft-focus, and yet curiously adhesive. The process seems collective, mysterious, emotional as much as intellectual. In this lecture I should like to ask how our pictures of the past are formed. And third, that a myth is not a falsehood - it is a truth, cast into symbol and metaphor. Second, that you should check your dates. But I learned three things from the drowned village.įirst, how totally the past can vanish. People were seeing it ten years after it was gone. It was a myth.ĭerwent’s church was blown up in 1947.
But they did tell me that in dry years, you could see the steeple of Derwent church standing above the waters. When I was a child I used to think that the villagers had five minutes warning of the flood - that an alarm rang, and they grabbed their possessions and scrambled uphill, with the water swirling about their knees as they ran for their lives. Some of his family lived in a small Derbyshire village called Derwent, which became a drowned village - it was one of the places that were flooded in the late 1930s, to make a reservoir.
This second Catherine O’Shea married a man with the robust English name of George Foster. Catherine had ten children, and my grandmother, who was named after her, was almost the youngest. In my first lecture in this series, I talked about my great-grandmother Catherine O’Shea, and how she lived when she came to England.
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