Blessed are the cheese makers
Well the first week of 2021 has been quite eventful, although not in any way surprising. An attempted coup in Washington, a rampaging virus and everything is covered in ice. I was lucky to get out of the village in that sweet eight hour window between heavy snow and everything being all scary and closed. Recent events have left me feeling as though it might be safe to dip my toe back into twitter after a very long absence. Maybe that will be a bonus, maybe not. But I do feel we should probably head straight to the 1720s this week, just so we can visit somewhere new.
A small trigger warning... today I'm going to mention the electoral process and some fake news. But it all happened a really long time ago and there will also be stuff about cheese and sheep and even a small sports section. Not my area of expertise but I will do my best.
Last week Daniel Defoe and I reached Land's End. After a brief paddle in the sea we turn ourselves around and head back along the north side of Cornwall and Devon towards London. We visit Tintagel but he doesn't think much of it. I think he will be happy to leave the South West behind. He seems to find both the landscape and the people too wild. He is fairly horrified by a local game they like to play that he calls 'the Hurlers' which he describes as 'brutish and furious'. Cornish Hurling is one of those insane village football games which seems more like an annual fight. The ball is only about the size of a cricket ball but weighs over a pound and is covered with silver. Surprisingly, when I looked into it, I could find only one recorded death.
We cross from Cornwall into Devon over Exmoor which is apparently a 'filthy, barren ground'. I have not found any writers from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century who like untamed landscapes at all. We will have to wait another fifty years or so for the Romantics to come along and even they will be rather frightened.
In Somerset we come to Wellington, which is a most unhappy experience. Here we find ourselves surrounded by people begging for money. Daniel is shocked. He wants to run away and he does, though we are pursued for some distance beyond the town. He does not know, and I could not find out what has happened in Wellington but clearly something has gone very wrong here.
In Taunton, things seem to be going much better. Daniel is most impressed by this town because everyone is so busy weaving. There are maybe eleven hundred looms in the town and any child over the age of five 'if it was not neglected by its parents, and untaught, could earn its own bread'. Here, he tells us they have a rather surprising way of earning themselves a vote. Some of the electorate are called pot-walloners. I didn't quite understand what he meant, but the fact is, that in order to earn a vote you need to prove you have a hearth big enough to boil a cauldron. So I guess the idea is that you have to be pretty rich to qualify. But the people here have found a loophole. They take their cooking pots out into the street and make a fire there. They cook up their meal where everyone can see. Now they have proved they have a hearth big enough to boil their pot, they have a vote for life. It seems crazy and archaic, but the last pot-walloner in Taunton will die in 1904.
At Bridgewater there is, unsurprisingly, a rather good stone bridge. It needs to be strong as this town is one of the places that is regularly inundated by the sudden high tide called the bore. From here we visit Glastonbury where Daniel is quite moved by its antiquity, which is unusual for him. He is fascinated by the inscription on King Arthur's coffin and by the Glastonbury Thorn which legend tells us sprang from a staff belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, who also brought the Holy Grail to Britain and founded the abbey. Daniel is excited enough by this to carry a piece of the thorn away in his hat!
Visiting Cheddar, we find whole village of cow keepers. Cheddar cheese is, he says, the best cheese in England, maybe the best cheese in the world. Near here, the road to Bristol runs through a 'deep, frightful chasm in the mountain' He means the Cheddar Gorge. Fortunately, our journey will not take us that way. As we cross the countryside, past the standing stones and barrows around Marlborough on the way to Reading he speaks about the surrounding countryside in a general way. There is a lot of cloth making around here and wool is a fantastically important product in Britain. It is so important that over in the east, in Kent and Sussex, if you live near the coast you need special paperwork just to move your fleeces around. Wool smuggling is a serious problem. Also there is another excellent kind of cheese made here which is called green cheese. Not because of the colour but because in is eaten new rather than matured. It is sold in small round cakes, so if you've ever heard anyone tell you that the moon is made of green cheese, this is probably what they mean.
At Reading, Daniel is keen to tell us about that time the whole kingdom was thrown into a terrible panic because everyone thought that Irish soldiers were coming to cut everyone's throats. A frightening prospect but almost everyone will be fine. He was kind of there, or nearby at Windsor. So he saw exactly what happened. It was when King James II was deposed and we were sort of invaded by William of Orange. Some of James's troops were left at Reading where they certainly did threaten to kill everyone and burn the town. But they were driven out by William's soldiers and afterwards moved on to Maidenhead, to Colebrook, to Stanes all the time blustering and cursing that they would burn everything and kill everyone when they got there. People fled in advance of the marauders with news not only that they had escaped certain death but that their town was surely already destroyed. They had come with the news '...and you are next' And so the fear spread from town to town but so far as I can tell, no towns or their people were harmed at all.
A little north of here is a tributary of the Thames called the Lodden where there are a large number of mills. They are very old and have changed their use over the years according to need. Some were, until recently, brass mills making kettles and pans but were possibly once used by the Knights Templar for making their chain mail. One is a thimble mill right now. Thimbles are pretty important at a time when absolutely everything is sewn by hand. I used mine today to fix the ice grips on my boots. Mostly the mills grind corn and make paper. It's not great paper, it's the sort you use to print pamphlets.
Pamphlets are a great way to disseminate news and ideas and Daniel has been in a fair amount of trouble for publishing them in the past. His most famous one is called ‘The True-Born Englishman’ which explains there is no such thing and we should stop falling out about who is really English and who isn’t. I wish I could tell him that in the 21st century, we will be over all that. A pamphlet can draw attention to important philosophical or religious debates. It can also be full of scurrilous personal abuse. So a bit of a mixed bag really. A kind of eighteenth century twitter, but more long-winded.
Well we have reached Windsor and are almost home. I think we can conclude that it's not necessarily wise to believe everything you hear. That it is better to seek the opinion of someone with a balanced overview. I think we can also see that tossing heavy metal balls around is also a bad idea. Oh, and we know what sort of cheese the moon is made of.
Next time we will be visiting London and I'm excited to find out how I'm going to illustrate it. There is not much around here that resembles 18th century London and I'm not allowed to go anywhere else.
