Mr. Beard's Regency Tour Day 24: Living Decoration: The Ornamental Hermit

Over at the EFHA blog, I discuss a most curious trend in the Georgian England.

For the Georgian landowner who has everything: the ornamental hermit.

From Rome to Napoleon: Portchester Castle and the Castles, Customs, and Kings Blog Hop

As many of you know, I occasionally pen historical essays over at the EFHA blog.

In an effort to provide an interesting not-so-little book of bits of English history, the powers that be from that blog (particularly Debra Brown and M.M. Bennetts) gathered up and edited a collection of the essays from the blog and did a bang up of organizing them by period. The result is a nice collection of English history from well, before there was an England all the way to modern times:

 

As part of celebration of the release of the book, there's a blog hop going on focused on castles (though, just to be clear, the book subject matters covers a lot of different aspects of English history, even beyond just the customs and kings of the title). There are many fine people discussing many fine bits (and giving things away as well), and you can find their blogs here:

For my part, I decided to discuss Portchester Castle, a castle that links the ancient past of England with the perhaps more familiar to many medieval and later period.

Our fine defensive fortification tale begins before there even was an England, in the 3rd century AD. At that time, the Romans, those ancient masters of defensive positions themselves, established a fort at the location of modern day Portchester, in Hampshire along the southern England coast. The area's access to the sea allowed the Romans to use the fort as a naval base, in particular in their attempts to deal with local pirates.

Once the Romans mostly withdrew from the area, the prime location of the fort still made it useful for later groups to use for similar reasons, such as the Saxons dealing with Viking pirates. The Saxons added some additional buildings and towers in the area, and the evidence suggests continual occupation from the 4th century on, even after the departure of the Romans.

Of course, 1066 and all that brought Norman domination of England. In the 11th and 12th century, Norman lords controlled and helped fortify the area even more by adding such features as additional defensive ditches, timber palisades, and additional towers.

The castle would move from mere nobles to royalty by the end of the 12th century. Three different England kings (John, Edward II, and Richard II) would occupy that castle at various points between the 12th and 15th century, and Henry V spent some time in the castle in 1415. Every new occupant brought new fortification, expansions (e.g., royal apartments), and remodeling of the area. Other important royal leaders from English history, including Queen Elizabeth I, would also grace its halls.

Ownership shifted back from royals to "mere" aristocracy in 1632, when one Sir William Uvedale (his descendants the Thistlethwaites still retain ownership of the castle) purchased the castle from Charles I. The shift from royalty also resulted in a shift from focus, as the castle was often used as a prison for prisoners of war in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. During this time, although the defensive fortifications of the castle were not strongly upgraded compared to earlier periods, many additional wooden houses were built to house prisoners.

Coalition victories in the Napoleonic Wars would lead to less necessity for military prison in the early 19th century, with the last prisoners of the war gone from the location by 1814. The military itself would leave in 1819.

Though I am not personally one who is inclined to believe in ghosts, the long history of the castle, combined with things like the deaths of prisoners there, may have contributed to Portchester Castle's reputation as one of England's more haunted castles.

Thanks for stopping by. I encourage you to stop by and visit the various other blog hop participants listed above.

In addition, as part of the celebration,  I'm giving away an eBook copy (available in Kindle/Mobi, ePub, and PDF) of my Regency paranormal romance, A Woman of Proper Accomplishments, which doesn't feature any castles, but does reference the Napoleonic War. If you're interested, just leave a comment with a contact e-mail, and I'll pick someone next week at random.

Isolated on a Mountain in 1899: An interview with historical fiction author Carol Ervin

1) Please tell us about your book. 

The Girl on the Mountain is a bit historical, a bit mysterious, somewhat religious, and (I’ve been surprised to learn) shot through with human sexuality, though nothing explicit. The story opens in 1899, with a young wife whose husband leaves her in an isolated mountain cabin while he works in a logging camp through the week. The rail line that carries logs down to the sawmill passes by her cabin, and several times a day she waves to the trainmen, the only humans she sees on weekdays. Then her husband disappears, and she finds herself abandoned in a sawmill town with no friends or family, the object of gossip.

2) Please tell us about your lead, May Rose.

May Rose suffers from lack of family, a mother who died when she was born and a father who left her to be raised by his sister, who died before May Rose reached her teens. Now her uncle and cousins are supposed to be homesteading in the West, but she’s lost track of them, a mystery that runs through the story.

Her lack of family and her prettiness make May Rose a target of predatory men. Her strongest characteristic, and a great motivator, is her compassion for unfortunate children.

3) What got you interested in writing turn of the twentieth-century historical fiction?

I was inspired to set a story in this period because I feel physically close to it. In my region of West Virginia, artifacts abound: foundation stones of old sawmills, traces of logging roads, antique shops with tools and utensils in dim buildings from the same era. Years ago when we moved to our farm, elderly neighbors shared stories of their youth. Living here and experiencing a culture that carried on traditional ways of doing things, I felt like we’d stepped fifty years back in time, in a good way.

4) Do you feel historical fiction is more valuable as a tool to understand a past or as a useful way of exploring universal themes and ideas about the human condition that are outside the emotional context of modern events and societies?

Fiction can make history more understandable, and reading historical fiction has affected some of my ideas. But mainly I like period fiction that broadens my awareness and connects me to people of other times and places. In researching and writing The Girl on the Mountain, I felt close to grandparents I never knew.

5) What sort of research did you do in order to capture the intricacies of the period and place you portray?
Many details are from personal experience, like knowing a woman whose fingers were bitten off by a pig, but I read articles about logging, railroading, and sawmill work in Goldenseal, the magazine of West Virginia traditional life, found descriptions of products like washing machines and canned milk on company websites, read about the construction of wooden trestles, looked up popular novels and music of the period, talked with my railroad-hobbyist neighbor and read about railroad carts (speeders), checked usage of words in the Oxford English Dictionary to be sure certain terms were not modern. Twice I rode a narrow-gauge logging train pulled by a Shay engine at Cass Scenic Railroad State Park. The most important reference was Roy B. Clarkson’s Tumult on the Mountain, Lumbering in West Virginia—1770-1920. It’s a wonderful book with some 250 photos, first printed in 1964 and still in print from McClain Printing Company in Parsons, WV. I love the people in those old photographs.

6) What were your primary thematic goals in this book? Were you more interested in exploring identity directly or the social interface of gender and gender roles?
A writer’s beliefs do come out, and one of mine is that we make many mistakes in judging others. May Rose misjudged her husband. The townspeople misjudged her. I showed what I believe to be true of male and female roles of the period—women had little power to sustain themselves or advance without the influence or protection of a man. But even then, women found ways to be influential.

7) Please tell us about your other projects. 

When readers of early drafts warned that Wanda, May Rose’s 13-year-old sidekick, might “steal the show,” I decided to make her the main character in a sequel. Wanda’s story begins 15 years later, after much of the land has been devastated by fires and floods. The first draft of Wanda’s story is nearly complete. The third book in the series will bring back May Rose.

8) Do you have any excerpts you'd like to share?
Here’s an excerpt liked by my writer-friend, Lindy Moone. The passage shows May Rose near the beginning of the story, trying to decide how to deal with her husband’s deceit:

At dusk she dragged the porch stool and the shotgun to the middle of the clearing and watched the dark spaces between the trees to prove she had nothing to fear. A tract of thick virgin timber, saved from the logging company by a surveyor’s mistake, surrounded the clearing on all but the west side. There the railroad track passed at the edge of the sky. Her ears tuned to sounds of leaf whisper and high cricket drone. Hawks drifted in circles above and below her line of sight. This, like dawn, was the clean time, when the earth did not tremble with far-off crash of trees, and passing trains did not smother the air.

The better parts of two years with Jamie begged to be remembered. They might be as much as anyone had. They might be more. She closed her eyes and saw how his face transformed when he smiled, how the edge of his lip turned up. She remembered the rhythm of his work songs, how she shivered when his hands stopped her in the garden or at the stove. She felt his lips on her neck and the length of him against her those Saturday nights, when he took her breath--those Sundays, when they knew what mattered.

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Thanks, Carol.

If you'd like to see more from Carol, please visit her at http://carolervin.com/.

If you'd like to purchase The Girl on the Mountain, please visit http://carolervin.com/where-to-buy-2/.

Mr. Beard's Regency Tour Day 21: Gambling, The Profitable (and Costly) Vice

Although I covered some of this material when I discussed whist, I've written an article for the EFHA blog with a slightly more expansive discussion of gambling in Regency England.

Please check it out at the EFHA blog.

Mr. Beard's Regency Tour Day 19: Steal a book, seven-years' hard labor overseas: Transportation as punishment in the 17th-19th centuries

This is part of my continuing series on Regency England and Georgian England. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please check out my archive here.

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As England gained colonial holdings, the country also gained a new option for punishment: transportation to an overseas colony.

Over at the English Historical Fiction Authors Blog, I discuss this form of punishment that many considered "merciful" compared to others at the time.