Serendipities

A watch is stolen from the room of Mary and John Beaumont. The proceedings of the court case at the Old Bailey contain two versions of the theft. One of them has to be a fiction, but which one? Even the cat in this court case is fictional…

On 27 February 1734, the carpenter William Collins was brought before court for the stealing of a silver watch from John and Mary Beaumont. The watch according to the record was stolen from John Beaumont, although he was not at home at the time of the theft. The informative ‘historical background’ section on the Old Bailey website explains that only an eigth of the prosecutors at the Old Bailey were women, since theft was the most common crime prosecuted, and most marital property was considered to be in the property of a husband: “Thus, even if a woman’s clothes were stolen from her home, if she was married her husband would have been labelled as the victim of the crime.” Another explanation for the lack of women prosecutors, the historical background section suggests, is that women on their own were reluctant to prosecute cases in the male-dominated environment of the courtroom. What is more, “there is some evidence that juries treated women more sceptically than men when they appeared as witnesses.” Whether this is the case here, I’ll leave the reader to judge.

Interestingly, it is Mary Beaumont who speaks for her husband and herself, and tells the court how the silver watch was stolen on the 25th of January that year. The couple lodge in a room on Windmill-hill, and Mary is an industrious and frugal housewife. She has noticed that carpenters are fitting up other rooms in the house where they lodge, and she goes to them to ask for some shavings of the wood, presumably to make a fire with. When William Collins, one of the carpenters, later knocks on her door, she is busy making a shift. The carpenter notices an expensive watch hanging by the chimney, and asks her about it. According to Mary Beaumont, he asked her “in case you was afraid of being robb’d of this Watch, where would be the properest Place to hide it?” — rather a suspicious strategy for a thief, perhaps. Interestingly, she also adds that he spoke smutty words after asking her this. Mary Beaumont is not thrown however, and tells him that the watch is very important to her and her husband, since it would get them through financially if either of them should fall ill. William Collins then proceeds to distract her attention from the watch, and this is where the cat comes in. She testifies that:

He stood a while, and then pointing to the other End of the Room, he cry’d, God damn the Cat. I turn’d my Head to see what the Cat was doing, but there was no Cat there. Then the Prisoner went to work in the next Room, and in eight or nine Minutes, (before any body else had been in the Room) I mist the Watch.

John Beaumont’s only contribution to the court case is this statement: “I left the Watch with my Wife, at three in the Morning, when I went to work.” The prisoner, William Collins, retorts with an unexpected question: “Are you married to her?” To which the husband answers “yes.” This exchange between husband and suspect puzzled me, but things become more clear when the prisoner and his fellow carpenters relate their side of the story.

According to these men, Mary Beaumont came to them not to ask for some shavings, but to plane a board with their tools. William Collins objected to this, thought she should pay for planing the board, and followed her to her room to ask for a Dram in return. Moreover, another man was in the house that day, the carpenters claim:

While she was in our Room her little Dog bark’d, and up came an old Gentleman, who look’d to be about sixty. Says she, My Dog knows my Customers. So she and the old Man went in and shut the Door. I thought some Game was going forward, and so I looked at the Key-Hole, but something was hung before it within Side. Then we found out a Crevice, and through that we could see ‘em plainly. She was sitting in a Chair, and he stood before her. He thrust his Hand down her Bosom, and then up her Coats; she took out what she could find, and play’d with it, while the old Boy bill’d her, as if he would have eaten her up. After he was gone, she came into our Room, and we began to run the rig upon her, about what we had seen, and I called her - and - , which made her so angry, that she swore I and Gandy had stole the Watch.

The four carpenters all testify to this version of events, in which Mary Beaumont no longer features as a frugal housewife. She is still sitting in the same chair where she says she was making a shift, but she is now pictured as a stereotype of uncontrolled female lust, a woman who exploits her sexuality. Or are the carpenters exploiting the stereotype? Did the fact that Mary Beaumont spoke publicly in court, citing the carpenter’s supposed swear words perhaps contribute to the stereotype? The husband’s reaction to the carpenters’ testimony is not recorded, and perhaps unrecorded signs are what made the court decide that Mary Beaumont was not telling the truth. For the proceedings state that “the Prosecution appearing scandalous and malicious, the Jury acquitted the Prisoner.”

Read the trial proceedings

History Carnival number 22 is up at Frog in a Well! In Jonathan Dresner’s own words, a ‘reasonably clear and straightforward’ selection of history postings, that I look forward to dipping into.

The search facility of the Old Bailey Proceedings is truly addictive. A search on the keyword “Shakespeare” resulted in 58 items. These mostly concern people called Shakespeare, people living in Shakespeare-Walk, or drinking at the Shakespeare Head. But there are some interesting insights into the Shakespeare Industry of the eighteenth century to be gleaned from the proceedings.

A number of Shakespeare volumes are stolen from shops. In one case, two volumes of Shakespeare together with two volumes of Biblical Researches disappear from a book shop. The thief sells them to another book seller, who does not think that they are worth the fourteen shillings he asks for them, since they are “odd volumes” — meaning presumably that the thief should have stolen a more complete set of plays if he wanted to make that kind of money. Other cases show glimpses of Shakespearean images circulating in eighteenth-century culture. A man whose watch has been stolen believes that it had “Shakespeare’s head” on its seal. And on 21 April 1759 John Adams stole a twelve-inch high plaster figure of Shakespeare from a shop. He does not state why he ventured to steal it out of its glass case — was it because of the playwright’s 195th birthday two days later?

See also:

In the Friday cat blogging tradition, this is a post on cats. The photo is of my own criminal cat, who likes to nestle down on anything that I happen to be reading at the time. I thought I might combine the Friday cat blogging tradition with some hair-raising tales involving a cat from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey each Friday. I am sure that these posts will not qualify for Sharon and Jonathan’s Old Bailey Symposium, but their symposium-announcement did point me to the database with its addictive search facility.

Today’s cat from the Old Bailey proceedings is a real Sherlock Homes. In August 1735 she was living in a House in Queen Street. It was a Sunday morning, and her owner, Jasper Paine, got out of bed at a quarter past eight to give her something to eat. The cat, however, was not hungry, and instead ran down to the cellar of the house. Jasper Paine, being a caring and intelligent cat-owner, followed her down to the cellar. This is his testimony:

On Sunday the thirty first of August, at a Quarter past eight in the Morning, I went down to give my Cat some Victuals, but she flew down into the Cellar, and I followed her, and hearing a Noise in the Vault, I thought she was fallen in there, for I once had a Cat that met with such a mischance. I got a Candle, and looking down I saw something wabbling about, which I thought was the Cat. But my Wife coming down for some Coals, the Cat came and fondled about her, at which she screamed out and said, It is not the Cat in the Vault - I got a piece of an Iron Hoop, which I tyed to a String and put it down, and by moving it about I discovered part of a Child - We got Assistance, and broke up the Vault, put down a Ladder, and a Boy went down and brought up a Child alive[.]

One of the other inhabitants of the house, Mary Dixon, had given birth to the boy in the early morning. Despite the cat’s clever communicative skills, the baby boy died later in the day. Mary Dixon was in a very confused state, and could not really explain why she went down to the vault to give birth there. She was happily married, and had a four year old child already. She stated that she woke up feeling ill, and somehow went down to the vault — her senses simply went from her, she said. No forensic evidence of giving birth was found anywhere else in the house, and she was acquitted of infanticide.

I posted on early modern swimming a couple of days ago, and regretted that I had not been able to find an image from Everard Digby’s sixteenth-century treatise on swimming online. I made do with a description of his illustrations, since I did not dare to scan an image and post it on the web. But Peacay of BibliOdyssey read my post, engaged his special image-finding skills, and found an online image from Digby’s original Latin treatise, De Arte Natandi. It is on the website of St John’s College, Cambridge, and I reproduce it here.

It is the fourth image in Nicholas Orme’s edition of Christopher Middleton’s translation of the treatise (1595). The first images in the treatise are concerned with techniques of entering the water. It is of the utmost importance, Digby writes, that the swimmer be neither too hot or too cold before entering the water. A beginning swimmer should simply wade into the water, but “when he can perfectly swim and boldly turn himself every way in the water” the swimmer could leap into the water. There are several ways of leaping into the water. Digby first describes a technique in which the swimmer declines his head forwards and turns round over with his heels — a technique that seems to resemble our modern dive. In this illustration, however, he pictures another technique. We see the swimmer ready to dive gracefully into the river, and we see him in a later stadium when he has fallen “on his left or right side, after this fashion”:

Many thanks to Peacay!

Not the re-told version this time, but the good old BBC-Shakespeare productions. I only own a few of them, and they are scattered around squeeky old video tapes that threaten to break when you rewind them. The BBC Shakespeares used to be terribly expensive to buy on video tapes, but they now are all available in a wonderful new DVD-box, for (only) 139 English pounds. And just in time for Christmas, too…

I was reading Henry Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman (1622), and when, apart from suggesting that “leaping is an exercise very commendable and healthful for the body, especially if you use it in the morning,” he also remarked that

The skill and art of swimming is [...] very requisite in every noble and gentleman, especially if he looketh for employment in the wars, for hereby, besides the preserving of his own life upon infinite occasions, he may in many ways annoy his enemy (139)

…I suddenly found myself wondering if anyone has ever written a cultural history of early modern swimming. In Peacham’s view, swimming is a gentlemanly sport, ranking with leaping and hunting. Did women swim in early modern England? And did farmers? I remember a scene from the BBC’s Tales from the Green Valley in which a historian somewhat uncomfortably shared a country stream with a sheep. I searched some bibliographical databases and came up with Nicholas Orme’s Early British Swimming: 55 BC-AD 1719. It is not exactly the cultural history that I was looking for, but it is a wonderful book. The star of Orme’s history of British swimming is the Cambridge Scholar Everard Digby, who in 1587 published the treatise De Arte Natandi, translated from the Latin into English, and thereby made available to a much broader audience, by Christopher Middleton in 1595.

Digby’s treatise is a manual for the gentleman swimmer of early modern England. It advises him to swim during the months between May and August, but not on cold and windy days, and certainly not during the night. He should preferably find a natural swimming water where the ground is either rocky or sandy, and should take a companion with him for safety. Orme notes that the early modern swimmer “was more of an individualist than most swimmers today.”

Orme’s Early British Swimming includes an edition of Christopher Midlleton’s translation of the treatise, accompanied by the wonderful engravings of Digby’s orginal Latin publication. The engravings serve as illustrations for the technical part of the treatise, in which Digby surveys the various swimming techniques. It explains how to enter the water, how to swim on your back, on your side or on your belly. The engravings are very ingeniously designed: there are about five different settings in which we see a river, some trees, or a herd of cows, a farm, a gentleman sitting on the bank of the river taking off his stockings, and a naked man ready to dive into the river. In the river, as Orme also explains, a different rectangular section is used for each illustration, in which we see the swimmer performing the techniques explained in the accompanying text. Digby argues that man is a better swimmer than fish, since men can also swim vertically in the water, and can even transport things while swimming, keeping those things dry above the water. The technique for doing so is duly illustrated, but my favourite engraving has to be the one for paring your toes while swimming in the water:

Swimming upon his back, let him draw up his left foot and lay it over his right knee, still keeping his body very straight, and then having a knife ready in his right hand, he may easily keep up his leg until he hath pared one of his toes, as thus:

Michael West comments that “characteristically, the figure in the accompanying illustration is so drawn as to appear to be accomplishing a physical impossibility.” I would love to reproduce the engraving with the text, but since it is not available on the internet, I am not sure if I am legally allowed to place it here.

Orme’s book also contained a clue about women’s swimming. William Percey’s The Compleat Swimmer (1658) recommends swimming for pleasure, exercise and health, and not only to men, but also to women: “I could very well wish every man and woman were perfect in swimming likewise, which with a little practice they easily may attain unto” he writes. Orme does add that the book itself, like Digby’s, assumes that the practitioners will nevertheless all be men (104).

Nicholas Orme, Early British Swimming (Exeter: The University of Exeter, 1983). See also: Michael West, “Spenser, Everard Digby, and the Renaissance Art of Swimming,” Renaissance Quarterly 26:1 (1973): 11-22.