Found: Medieval Well

Colin Steer and his wife Vanessa.
Photo: SWNS, Source.

Going through my (very long) backlog of news articles and online ephemera earlier today (Happy Thanksgiving! We're celebrating tomorrow because I'm exhausted and why not!), I found this delightful article about a man in Plymouth, Devon, UK who found an old well under his living room while doing some home improvement chores one day. He's dug down 17 feet so far (all in the past year -- this is what he's doing with his retirement); found a crude, peasant's sword; and installed lights and trap door (see above).

According to living room adventurer and hobby historian Colin Steer's research, the land on which his home was built was woodland until the late 19th century, and archival plans date the well to at least the 16th century. He now wants to hire a professional to see if he can date it even further back in time.

Steer states:

I love the well and think it's fascinating. I'd love to find out who was here before us. I've got a piece of Plymouth's history in my front room. 

 Colin's wife, Vanessa, is less than enthused (just look at that glare on her face in the photo above), and says:

I hate the well. 

I just think this story's great.

Perhaps this will become a (relatively) regular sub-feature: Medieval Found Objects? Refer to my previous Found entry on Medieval Underwears, here.

Found: Medieval Underwears

This post's found objects weren't discovered by me, but by archaeologist Beatrix Nutz, a lady PhD candidate with a fantastic name and a jackpot dissertation.

Source

The University of Innsbruck announced Wednesday that archaeologists (lead by Nutz) have discovered a fantastic cache of medieval household detritus and miscellany used in the early 15th century as insulation under a floor at the castle of Lengberg in Eastern Tirol, Austria. The preliminary report lists:

more than 200 coins, 160 coloured playing cards of carton belonging to more than four different decks*, objects of iron and alloys, bones, horn, glass, ceramics plus more than 50 pieces of writing from amongst other things accounts, chits and litergical texts.** 

This list doesn't even get into the treasure trove of 15th century textiles that's caused international interest: a fully preserved male hose, embroidered lacing and silks, pleated shirts, fragments of hats and linen headgear, and -- most exciting -- four bras.

Comfy looking bras at that.

Fashion experts (and academics and researchers, I'm sure!) "describe the find as surprising" as the bra was commonly thought to have been invented in the late 19th century/early 20th century as a replacement for the corset.*** Not so; looks like the bra came first, then the corset, then the bra, again, reinvented. Comfy always wins.

Though the treasure trove was unearthed in 2008, the university only made the news public this week, after extensive research, carbon dating, and DNA testing of the found textiles and the recent publication of an article in BBC History Magazine.

Source

They used DNA testing to determine the sex of the person who wore these underwears above, which I find awesome and also horrifically embarrassing for whoever wore them. Note to self: wash all articles of clothing before using them as insulation material/dying. Though they look like fancy, lady's bikini bottoms, Nutz told reporters that they were most likely men's underwears as women didn't wear any at the time. 

"Underpants were considered a symbol of male dominance and power," she said.

But who wears the fancy bikini underwears now!!!

***

* What would I give for photo images of some of those playing cards? I wonder if any of them belong to an early tarot/tarocchi deck...

** Check out the article at Medieval Histories Magazine. 

*** Read the Washington Post article here. 

Procrastination Investigation: Medicinal Cannibalism and the Dogged Return of the Sack Man

I thought that I was done with the Sack Man after my handful of posts from earlier this year (it really was a full six months of Sack People, wasn't it? how depressiiiing). I find this kind of spooky, sinister, historically based folk-stuff absorbing and exciting, but even I have my limits. It eventually starts to get tired and depressing and macabre -- not the fun kind of macabre, but the truly sordid, disturbing kind of macabre -- especially when what was once all fun and fantastical games turns out to be all too real. It's sobering. When I finished my final Enriqueta Martí post in June, I thought that I had "exorcised" the fascination once and for all. But just like any other kind of unfinished business, the specter of the Sack Man popped up into my imagination yet again. Even Procrastination Investigations can haunt and spook. 

Egyptians embalming a corpse, source.

Enter the Smithsonian Magazine's May 7 article "The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine."*

The article, written by Maria Dolan, highlights the recent work of Dr. Louise Noble of the University of New England, Australia, and Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University, England. In their most recent books, they (separately, they aren't collaborators) explain that for centuries -- peaking in the 16th and 17th c. -- many Europeans ingested wildly popular "remedies" containing human bone, fat, and blood for ailments running from headaches to epilepsy. BOOM, THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR. These medicaments were frequently used by royals, priests, and scientists, and lead to the desecration of ancient burial grounds in both Egypt (powdered mummy was quite popular) and Ireland (ancient powdered skull, too).** The proles made due stealing from local graveyards and gathering free blood and body parts at public executions. Dolan writes:

"... consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. 'It emerged from homeopathic ideas,' says Noble. 'It's "like cures like." So you eat ground up skull for pains of the head.' Or drink blood for diseases of the blood."

AHORA TODO TIENE SENTIDOOO. "Like cures like." In the case of the consumptive (tubercular) patient in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- whose illness mainly manifested itself in malaise, dwindling body weight, and the coughing up of blood -- "new" blood cures "bad" blood. These folk-remedies -- poultices made with bodily fats, drinking the blood of children -- bound-up in the Sack Man folk-mythology make quite a bit more sense now that we can "read" them as part of a long-standing, European medicinal tradition. What at the turn of the century were "old-wives"/witches' cures, or "home-remedies", had previously been the status quo -- medicaments favored by the rich and powerful -- for millennia. 

The execution of Charles I of England. Note spectators sopping up the beheaded king's blood,
presumably for consumption. Source: National Galleries of Scotland

The article goes on to reference other academics working on the history of European corpse medicine, detailing the eventual discrediting of medicinal cannibalism by the European medical elite -- and the sway it still held over the common people even centuries later -- in this way:

"As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century... But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy... A belief that a magical candle made from human fat, called a 'thieves candle,' could stupefy and paralyze a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalogue at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold."

I read the above passage and just yelled at my computer screen: "Helloooo! Sack People! In Spain! Until 100 years ago!!! That was happening too and at the same time!!!" The Sack Man is just part of a larger story. 

Dolan goes on to make other excellent points, highlighting the hypocrisy of the European Imperialist that reviled the cannibalism encountered in the New World, and ends the article exposing the hypocrisies underlying our own current day revulsions by deftly connecting the corpse medicine/medicinal cannibalism of yesteryear with present-day medical practices and research (namely, blood transfusions, organ transplants, skin grafts, stem-cell research). But, of course, I'm still too fixated on the Sack People to even start considering all these new (post)colonial connections (though they are compelling).

At the very end, she touches on the global black market trade in body parts/organs, and my synapses immediately start firing at top speed.

Sack People: they're still out there, adapting and evolving just like the rest of us.***

In true PI form, I diligently researched and scrounged up a handful of publications examining the subject further. If you're interested, Noble's 2011 text is here. Sugg's more recent 2012 text is here. I love both their titles.

Other web articles and scholarly texts (not mentioned in the Smithsonian article) are here, here, and here (and I'm throwing in this Daily Mail article because it references one of my favorite disturbing-movies-I-watched-too-young, Alive). Of course, we fall even further down the rabbit hole with these other texts that, instead of considering corpse medicine, deal with out-right cannibalism perpetuated by Europeans in times of war and famine (equally as fascinating, by the way). You're welcome.

Cannibalism in Russia and Lithuania, 1571. Source.

All these publications attest to the popularity of the study of Western cannibalism in the academe right now (it's a thing, okay? just like how the zombie apocalypse is a thing? I'm actually getting to be so over the zombie apocalypse and bath salts and all the rest of it...) and it seems as if there's only more to come. 


The more I learn, the more normal the abnormal becomes. Or is it that the more abnormal the normal becomes? Oh, Sack Man. And again, the things we forget. 

***

* I would be remiss to not mention that I found said Smithsonian Mag article through the blog of The Order of the Good Death, an arts and science collective (founded in 2011 by Los Angeles-based mortician Caitlin Doughty) that examines mortality, death, and how we currently face them (and fear them) in our the modern (Western) world. See the post with the link to the Smithsonian Mag here, and a second OGD blog post on corpse medicine here. I think their work is wonderful and fascinating and it's given me nightmares and I just can't get enough of it. Have you seen Doughty's "Ask a Mortician" webseries? Oh my god, go and be amazed!
** Let's not even get into the fetishistic/Imperialistic implications of the consumption of ground up skull taken from ancient Egyptian tombs and Irish burial grounds because it's so repulsive that it makes my brain turn to goo. 

*** I know, I sound like an X-File. I don't care.