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Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in
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 Musicians' court at Tutbury,
England, in the Middle Ages
Yesterday we looked at
the Tutbury hunters'
procession in old England, on the Feast of the
Assumption, when the wood-master and rangers of Needwood forest
started the festivities that were associated with a dinner given to
them at Tutbury Castle.
By
the way, an ancient ballad
(written before the Hood tale mentioned Maid Marion) says that Robin Hood
married a lady named Clorinda, at Tutbury ('Titbury') on August
15, some time in the reign of Henry
III (1216 -
72).
Clorinda said, "Tell
me your name, gentle sir."
And he said, "'Tis bold Robin Hood;
Squire Gamwel's my uncle, but all my
delight
Is to dwell in the merry Sherwood.
"For 'tis a
fine life, and 'tis void of all strife."
"So 'tis sir," Clorinda reply'd.
"But oh," said bold Robin, "how sweet would it be,
If Clorinda would be my bride!"
She blusht at the notion, yet after a
pause
Said, "Yes, sir, and with all my heart."
"Then let's send for a priest," said Robin Hood
"And be married before we do part."
But she said, "It may not be so, gentle sir,
For I must be at Titbury feast;
And if Robin Hood will go thither with me,
I'll make him the most welcome guest."
Over the
years, the celebration became a big one, and because the town of
Tutbury became a popular place, with many minstrels and jugglers
attending, John of Gaunt, 1st
Duke of Lancaster,
fourth son of Edward
III, ordered that
every year on August 16, there should be elected a king of the
minstrels, to try those charged with misdemeanours, and grant
licences for coming year.
On
this day, the minstrels would assemble at the bailiff's
house, where they were met by all the local dignitaries. They then
went in a musical procession with much pomp to the church where each
minstrel was paid a penny, then on to the castle where they
conducted their court, made merry, played music, and elected the new
king ...
Read on at the Tutbury page
in the Scriptorium
Greater Panathenaea, ancient Athens, in honour of
goddess Athena (c.
Aug 8 - 17)
Ninth day: torch race at night; great procession.
Heraclia in Kynosarges, ancient Greece (Aug 12 - 19)
'The great August festival', old England (see St Roch)
Folklore
Holidays, Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria (Aug 15 - 17)
Feast
day of St Ambrose of
Ferentino
Feast day of
St Angelus
Agostini Mazzinghi
Feast day of
St Armagillus
Feast day of
St Arsacius of
Nicomedia
Feast day of B.
Beatrix da Silva
Feast day of
St Diomedes of Tarsus
Feast day of
St John of
Saint Martha
Feast day of
St Hyacinth
(Belladonna lily; Amaryllus
belladonna, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Feast day of St Gerassimos
Patron saint of the Island of
Kephalonia (Cephallonia).
Feast day of B Ralph de la Futaye
Feast day of St Stephen of
Hungary (King Stephen I
of Hungary)
Saint-King
Stephen 'the Great' (Szent István király in Hungarian, Štefan in Slovak) (c. 975 - August 15, 1038), was
the first king of Hungary.
Stephen was a persecutor of people with
viewpoints that differed from his own, particularly pagans, who
resisted:
" … his methods with recalcitrant pagans were
marked by the roughness of the age and place. He established
Christianity as the state religion and severely punished
superstitious customs derived from paganism. Blasphemy and
adultery were equally treated as crimes such as theft and
murder. He both commanded all except the clergy to marry and
forbade marriages between Christians and pagans. Tithes were
commanded to support the poor and the churches. Every tenth town
was required to build a church and support a priest, and the
king himself supplied the furnishings for each. At times there
was a lively resistance, supported by his political rivals." Source
As further
attempts at stamping out the old ways, he also prohibited the use of the old Hun-Magyar runic alphabet and
making Latin
the official language of the royal court. He died at Székesfehérvár, a town he had
founded.
King
Stephen was canonised by Pope Gregory VII
in 1083; his feast
day was formerly September 2;
the feast of his translation
(the day on which his sacred relics were transferred to the city of
Buda), is August 20,
which is called St
Stephen's day in Hungary, where it is the main public
holiday in that country.
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Corso del Palio (Palio
di Siena – Race for
the Palio), Siena,
Italy
The Palio di Siena (known locally simply as
the Palio), the most famous
palio in Italy, is a
horse race held twice each year on
July 2
and August 16 in Siena, in which the horse and rider represent one
of the seventeen
Contrade, or city wards. The race is
preceded by a spectacular
pageant,
which includes (among many others) Alfieri, flag-wavers, in
medieval costumes. Just before the pageant, a squad of
carabinieri on horseback, wielding
swords, demonstrate a mounted
charge around the track.
Eastern
Orthodox: commemoration of the translation
of the Acheiropoietos
icon which means "Not made by hands", (also known as
the Mandelion; now lost) from Edessa to Constantinople on
August 16, 944
USA: legal holiday
in Vermont for the Battle
of Bennington in 1777
(which actually took place in the state of New York)
Daimonji Gozan Okuribi, Kyoto, Japan
Tetsuya Odori Festival, Gujo-Hachiman, Gifu Prefecture, Japan (Aug 13 - 16)
Independence
Day, Cyprus (1960)
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1845 Gabriel Lippmann (d. 1921), physicist
1860
Jules Laforgue
(d.
August 20,
1887),
Uruguayan-born
French
symbolist poet
 1865 Mary
Gilmore (born Mary Jean Cameron; later, Dame Mary Gilmore; d.
December 3, 1962), Australian
poet, utopian socialist, Communist, close friend of leading
Australian socialist William Lane
and fellow poet Henry Lawson.
Gilmore was the first woman member of the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and member of its executive.
She is the woman on the Australian $10 note.
Lawson
once asked her to marry him but she gave him a "no", noting in her diary "a curious immaturity"
in him – like a "sappy twig".
When
Lane led several hundred (figures vary according to source) Australians
on the Royal Tar
to Paraguay to form a utopian community,
first New
Australia and then Cosme when they abandoned the
former, Gilmore stayed behind in Sydney, operating a New Australia
recruiting office at 111 Elizabeth St, with
Walter Head,
as single women were not permiited there until the colony was
established (the single exception being
Clara Jones, who was required as a nurse). Mary believed that
when she arrived at Paraguay she would marry
Dave Stevenson, a handsome shearer, but when she arrived she was
snubbed by him. From Paraguay she wrote back to Henry Lawson
inviting him to join her, with the postscript, "PS I didn't get
married".
She became the colony's
schoolteacher and 'newspaper' editor (the paper was read out daily
to the colonists). After her return to Australia some six years
later (she and her
husband were among the first to leave Cosme, disillusioned), she
continued to write poetry and became active in campaigns for the aged and under-privileged.
Her
works include Marri'd and Other Verses (1910), The Hound of the Road (1922),
The Tilted Cart (1925),
The Wild Swan (1930),
Under the Wilgas (1932),
Old Days, Old Ways (1934)
More Recollections (1935),
Battlefields (1939), and Fourteen Men (1954).
In her old age she told the National
Times, May 6 - 11, 1974 of an unsuccessful attempt
of Larry Petrie's to blow up Circular Quay, the main
dock area of Sydney. No date is given, but it's probably 1892.
Petrie had left a bomb in a drain at the Quay, and
some of his associates decided to remove it. While Mary Cameron (as she was
before marrying William Gilmore) watched out for police, with great trepidation
the diminutive Member of NSW Parliament Arthur
Rae (1860 - 1943)
crawled up the drain and removed the bomb, having volunteered to do so because
at 5 feet tall he was the smallest person in the clandestine operation. Rae was
Vice President of the AWU and one of the founders of the Australian Labor
Party. In 1891 he was one of the first 36 Labor members elected to Parliament;
he was later a Senator in the Australian Parliament ( 1910
- 1914, 1918
- 1935). Alongside Artie Rae
and Mary at this extraordinary occurrence was Chris
Watson (1867 - 1941),
third Prime
Minister of Australia and the first Labor PM (1904).
See also July 27,
1893 for another of Larry Petrie's bombings (on the SS Aramac), this
time successful.
Wikipedia says:
Gilmore's first volume of poetry was published in 1910, and for the next
fifty years she was one of Australia's most popular and widely read
poets, although advanced literary opinion held much of her verse to
be doggerel and propaganda. In 1908 she became women's
editor of The Worker, the newspaper of Australia's largest
and most powerful trade union, the Australian
Workers Union (AWU). This gave her a platform for her powerful
journalism, in which she campaigned for better working conditions
for working women, for children's welfare and for a better deal for
the Aboriginal
people.
Before her death at 97 she had a succession
of housekeepers, many of them leaving in exasperation. On Thursday, December 6, 1962, Sydney witnessed the first State funeral
granted an Australian writer since that of Lawson forty years earlier.
Like
her former would-be beau, Henry Lawson, her image appeared on the Australian
$10 note, or, rather images, for the banknote features an early
photograph as well as the controversial portrait painted in her
later years by Sir William Dobell
(zoom
image).
"When she met Lane in 1892, Mary was a
schoolteacher in Sydney, a tall, young eccentric-looking woman
with herauburn hair chopped extremely short.She was deeply
impressed by Lane whowas recruiting for his dream of asocialist
commune in Paraguay, wherethere would be no bosses — except
himself, as it turned out. Mary loved people with a good brain
and William Lane was a remarkable writer and a charismatic
figure. He was happily married; there is no suggestion therewas
any sexual involvement between them. She joined Lane's New
Australia Movement and after school would head into their city
office and help edit their journal. It was here she met a tall,
handsome, swashbuckling Queensland shearer called David Russell
Stevenson. Like a lot of bushmen at that time, Stevenson was
self-educated and used to carry Shakespeare in his saddlebag.
Mary became absolutely infatuated withhim. At the same time
Henry Lawson was absolutely infatuated with her and begged her
to marry him and come with him to Western Australia. But once
she'd met Stevenson, poor Henry, who was two years younger than
Mary and a puny specimen compared to Stevenson, was forgotten,
except as a wonderful friend who she could talk to about
writing.When the colonists sailed off in 1893, Mary couldn't go
because single women weren't wanted until the colony was
established. The one single woman taken, a Queensland nurse
called Clara Jones, was needed because the NSW government said
they couldn't go without a nursing sister on board. Clara and
Stevenson fell in love on the voyage. Lane, who put a stop to
their flirtation, told her Stevenson was engaged to Mary.
Thinking Stevenson had lied to her Clara married the first man
to come along. Before Mary arrived, the first colony had broken
up because of Lane's dictatorial behaviour and Lane had formed a
second colony over 100 km away. Because the schoolteacher had
remained with the original mob, Lane wrote to Mary and begged
her to come out. She had just turned thirty, the age at which
she believed she would become an old maid, a future she devoutly
feared. So she packed up, putting in eight yards of white muslin
suitable for a wedding dress, and at the end of 1895 off she
went. First of all a little sailing ship to New Zealand, then a
tramp steamer and the perilous voyage around Cape Horn up the
east coast of the continent to Montevideo. From there she had to
negotiate her way without any Spanish onto a paddlesteamer and
travel 1600 km up the great rivers to the capital of Paraguay.
From there she took a steam train and got off at a siding. She
had expected Stevenson to meet her but it was Lane's brother who
met her for the thirty-mile ride to the rough little colony,
just thatch huts and a jungle clearing. They had a welcome dance
for Mary that night and Stevenson didn't dance with her once.
Humiliated and embarrassed Mary wrote to her old swain Henry
Lawson saying, 'Why don't you come over after all?' But Henry
had just married and didn't respond. Mary went to the colony not
just for love, but for its ideals on gender equality. What she
didn't realise was the colony had scrapped the clause about
gender equality. As a single woman, she was in a pretty
embarrassing situation. Before long she was reading to a man
called William Gilmore who was in the colony hospital. He was
nearly illiterate, but he was a good, kind, handsome man and
before long an engagement was announced. I speculate that Mary
may have prodded Gilmore towards a proposal because he was so
shy, and although not in love with him at that time, I think she
did fall in love within the marriage. I think their physical
relationship turned out to be a wonderful excitement for Mary.
There is a rash of quite sensual poems that she writes at that
time."
From 'Bluestocking in Patagonia'
by Dr Anne Whitehead:
PDF
&
HTML
Papers of Dame Mary Gilmore
Bluestocking
in Patagonia
reviewed
Shop
Mary Gilmore More
More
And
more Yet more
William Lane, New Australia and
Cosme, in the Book of Days Mary
Gilmore
Australian labor history in documents
A
short history of the Australian labor movement
Letters
of Mary Gilmore Mary
Gilmore: Verse for Children Selected
Poems by Mary Gilmore
Lawson & Co:
associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson The
Notes of New Australia
1868 Bernarr McFadden, publisher
1884 Hugo
Gernsback, editor and publisher
1888
Armand J Piron (d. 1943), jazz
musician
1894 George
Meany (d. 1980), labor union activist
1898
Jerome Iriving
Rodale (JI Rodale; Jerome Rodale; d.
June 8,
1971), American
playwright, editor, author and
publisher, pioneering advocate of a return to
sustainable agriculture and
organic farming.
Rodale's
death was unusual: he died while participating as a guest on
The Dick Cavett Show.
1895 |
reetings from Australia.
How it works
Feast day of St Roch (Roche; Rock; Rocco;
Rollox; 
Roch's name might have given the English an old saying,
'sound as a roach'.
