This is a really useful thing to do, the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society have scanned and made available all the back issues of their journal, Norfolk Archaeology. So, that’s 44 volumes and 1361 articles. Most useful.
The link is at:
Author: admin
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Shotesham – St. Martin’s Church
This ruined church is in Shotesham St. Mary and it’s dedicated to St. Martin, having originally been constructed in around the eleventh century. Most of the current building, or what’s left of it, dates to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
Looking towards the tower from the east end of the church. Walking with my friend Rob, he mentioned how clear the sky was without any aircraft trails visible, which is quite right but isn’t something that I’d thought about.
The walls are made of flint, with some brick dressing, and are surprisingly robust in the sections that remain. They’ve received some work recently to strengthen them, so hopefully they’ll last for some time yet.
The church was abandoned in probably the seventeenth century and it had become derelict by the nineteenth century. Given how many other churches there are in the Shotesham area, even the Victorians didn’t feel the need to restore this one.
The former roof line where the nave met the tower is visible, but the high quality of the construction is apparent at the top of the arch.
Until a few years ago, this church was covered in ivy which had taken hold from the 1950s and had made it more difficult to visit and it was also causing long-term damage to the structure. The work to clean up the site led to the discovery in the south wall of evidence of the location of the holy water stoup. There are no gravestones visible, but the site remains consecrated and it’s in the care of Shotesham Parochial Church Council.
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Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Seventy-Four
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
Choak Pear
Quite a lengthy definition this:
“Figuratively, an unanswerable objection: also a machine formerly used in Holland by robbers; it was of iron, shaped like a pear; this they forced into the mouths of persons from whom they intended to extort money; and on turning a key, certain interior springs thrust forth a number of points, in all directions, which so enlarged it, that it could not be taken out of the mouth: and the iron, being case hardened, could not be filed: the only methods of getting rid of it, were either by cutting the mouth, or advertising a reward for the key. These pears were also called pears of agony”.
And the instruments that the dictionary refers to have since been created to show what they would have been like. They are though almost certainly a figment of imagination from the early author, F. de Calvi, who first mentioned them. It’s true that devices like this were used as gags in punishment, but there has been no evidence present for criminals ever using them.
If a criminal of the time wanted to steal something from someone, they could easily do that. The chances of them having some complex mechanical device which they then used to extort a ransom seem low, there must have been easier ways for them to manage to get money out of their victim. I’m blaming the grub street press again, keen to sell newspapers and scare people, this would be the perfect story to spread. A few newspapers reported the device, but they all referenced Grose’s dictionary.
So, the stories behind devices also known as Pears of Agony or Pears of Anguish are likely false, with the museum pieces mostly dating to the nineteenth century. But if they were true, this must have been a hideous thing to endure.
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Shotesham – Name Origin
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Shotesham and my visit today saw some warm weather. A bit too hot, but there we go. Anyway, the origins of the village name.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary comments on this name:
Shotesham, Norfolk. Shotesham in 1044, Scotesham in Domesday Book, Schotesham Omnium Sanctorum in 1254. Scott person, literally from Scotland or Ireland.
The 1254 longer version of the name means Shotesham All Saints, but it’s impressive that the village had the same unchanged name nearly 1,000 years ago of Shotesham. The ‘ham’ means farm, homestead or settlement, but I’m not sure what Scots person exactly this is named after. I’m sure that whoever it was that they’d be surprised to see just what a legacy they had on the area.
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Shotesham – Shotesham Rocket
Located near to the village of Shotesham, near to All Saints Church, is this sign which gives some history about why there’s a hole here.
The depression, which is a little hard to make out here now because of the trees, was caused by a German V2 missile which caused damage to 43 buildings in the village. It was fired on 6 October 1944, the only such attack in the UK that day, and fortunately no-one was hurt during the explosion. As the sign notes, it’s not entirely clear what the Germans were trying to hit, but it’s thought that it might have been the Radar Station at Upper Stoke. So, it wasn’t a marvellously accurate attack, as that’s a few miles away.
The rocket was fired from Rijsterbos in the Netherlands and it travelled at around 3,000 miles per hour and descended from a height of fifty miles. The rockets caused significant damage to the area where they landed, with craters being around twenty metres in width and eight metres in depth. If this would have been developed and used earlier in the war, its impact could have been terrifying as they were nearly impossible for the British military to be able to stop once they were fired.
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Whitlingham – Name Origin
Whilst on a roll checking the origins of place-names in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the village of Whitlingham is defined as:
Whitlingham, Norfolk. [Wisinlingaham in Domesday Book, Wicthlingham in 1206, Withlingham in 1254]. The ham of Wihthelm’s people.
‘Ingas’ (or ing) is the Saxon word for a group of people, whilst ‘ham’ means farm, homestead or settlement. I’m not sure if I’m meant to know who Wihthelm was, but I don’t. Although he was probably quite important if he had a little collection of followers. It does though help date the settlement, now best known for its lake and sewage treatment works (these two are separate locations, they haven’t merged them), to at least the Saxon period.
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Panxworth – Name Origin
I was reminded of the village of Panxworth as I visited it yesterday and I’ve long found its church quite intriguing. It fell into disrepair and was brought back by the Victorians who reconstructed the nave and since then it has been taken down again and just the tower remains.
I still didn’t know where the word Panxworth had come from, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary also struggled to come up with an answer, noting:
Panxworth, Norfolk. [Pancforda in Domesday Book, Pankesford in 1165, Pangeford in 1254] The only old English word with which the first element may be compared is panic, a kind of millet, a Latin loanword. Probably some other form of explanation should be sought.
So, the second half used to make more sense, it was a shallow river crossing, or ford. Although worth is a different meaning, it’s from the Anglo-Saxon ‘worðig’, meaning an enclosure, so the village name must have changed in around the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The word ‘panic’ has a different origin to how it’s used today, it’s from ‘panus’ which means the ‘ear of millet’ in Latin.
I’m not sure I got an answer to the name origins of Panxworth, but it’s probable that Panx was just a person and they’ve named the village after him. But, there’s something nice about it being derived from the word panic.
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Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Seventy-Three
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
Chirping Merry
A charming way to describe someone who has been drinking perhaps just a little too much, the dictionary defines this as “exhilarated with liquor. Chirping glass, a cheerful glass, that makes the company chirp like birds in spring”. The phrase was also linked with a regional term that was “cherry merry” meaning the same thing, the phrases were in use from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. It’s quite a polite term, there are much more vulgar ones in the dictionary.
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Quincy – Hancock Cemetery (Ebenezer Hayden)
Back to my visit to the Hancock Cemetery in Quincy.
This is the grave of Ebenezer Hayden, who was the son of John and Susanna, and he was born in 1645 and died on 13 February 1717. Colonial American history doesn’t get much older than this and Ebenezer married Anna and had three children, Ebenezer jr (born 13 April 1679), Ruth (born 19 November 1681) and William (birthdate unknown, but he married Sarah Hobart on 26 December 1726). Hayden was made a freeman in Boston on 15 May 1690, but lived most of his life in Braintree (which was effectively the same place as Quincy then).
Hayden fought in the Suffolk Troop during King Philip’s War, also known as the First Indian War, which was a conflict lasting from 1675 until 1678. It was fought between the native Americans and the colonists, and although the numbers on each side were about even, the native Americans suffered greater losses. That time in the military meant that Hayden is now seen as a veteran of the US Army, hence the circular marker by his grave.
I do wonder what these seventeenth-century colonists would make of the Braintree and Boston areas today……
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Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Seventy-Two
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
With the moving of server last week I got a bit behind on these, but I’ve caught up now and today is day 72 of this. This has lasted for considerably longer than I had anticipated.
Cherry-Coloured Cat
I had heard of this phrase in relation to PT Barnum, when he agreed to buy a cherry coloured cat for his circus and realised he had been fooled when he was presented with a black cat and the seller told him “you can get black cherries as well as red”. But, this dictionary pre-dates Barnum, and their definition is nearly identical, which is “a black cat, there being black cherries as well as red”.
The phrase has also been used to describe a confidence trick or scam and there was a report in a newspaper in the 1830s fondly telling the story of how a man in Scarborough enjoyed fooling the gentry who came to the town with the same trick. This then became a common jape in the late nineteenth century, but it’s perhaps through Barnum that this lives on.
