by Molly Owen | Aug 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
In the fourteenth century, Ralph de Stafford, 1st Earl Stafford, abducted Margaret de Audley, the heiress of Gloucester and forced her to marry him. She was worth a lot of money.
Abduction was a serious problem in the Middle Ages. There were several statutes on the books, making abduction a felony as well as giving standing to relatives to sue the abductor.
The heiress of Gloucester’s parents sued and lost.
The Knight Errant, by Mallais — critics thought the female in distress so lifelike, so clearly a woman of loose morals, that she must have consented to being tied to a tree.
How can this be?
It begins with a foundational tenet of the law governing the relationship between man and women–that a female is presumed to have consented to being carried off. This is based upon the religious precept that Eve was the seductress,, the “sexualized temptress.” Woman might seek to become pure, but her default position is always predisposed to sex.
In the application of the law, she must overcome the presumption of having consented to the relationship with the alleged abductor. Worse, if she becomes pregnant, she is subject to the medieval notion provided by medicine: “two seeds” are necessary for conception of a child. If pregnancy is the result of rape, then the woman is presumed to have consented, having contributed her “seed.”
It also helped that Ralph de Stafford was politically connected, having been a close supporter of Edward III.
Almost one hundred years later, the two heiresses to the Wakehurst fortune were abducted.
Margaret and Elizabeth Wakehurst had been sent by their grandmother to live with her deceased son’s widow, Agnes. She and her new husband, Sir John Culpepper, would look after the two girls, who were unmarried and thought to be in their early teens.
As they were heiresses to the great fortune of Richard Wakehurst the Elder, Sir John had “promysed on the faithe and trouthe of his bodye and as he was a gentylman” that no harm would come to the girls.
The old lady would soon have reason to regret sending her granddaughters to him.
(The grandmother) made serious accusations against John, along with his brothers Richard and Nicholas Culpepper and their brother-in-law Alexander Clifford, claiming that they “with force and armes, riotously agense the Kinges peas, arayed in the manner of warre…toke and caried away” the girls to Clifford’s home in Bobbing, Kent. At the time of their abduction, we learn, Margaret and Elizabeth made “grete and pittious lamentacion and weping.” — Abduction–An Alternative Form of Courtship? by Julia Pope, M.A.
To add insult to injury, it seems the Margaret and Elizabeth were hauled away to London and confined at the home of one John Gibson. From there they were forced to marry the Culpepper boys. Ms. Pope explains a number of reasons for this–that the marriages were within the prohibited degrees of affinity (by reason of Agnes’ marriage to Sir John), that there was no time or inclination for banns to be read in the parish where the girls were living with Sir John and that a priest willing to overlook these niceties of ecclesiastical law could probably be found in London, where Gibson graciously offered them shelter.
The case serves as a window into the medieval view of abduction. The grandmother’s lawyers went to considerable effort to present the marriages as having been forced through violence. Consent was never secured, it was alleged, at least before they were carried off.
The initial ruling of the court was unclear. By this time the girls had married the Culpepper brothers (the exact date is uncertain). Nevertheless, the grandmother fought on. Her real goal, to block the new husbands’ access to the heiresses’ properties, now came to the forefront. In all likelihood the Culpepper brothers had little prospects of inheriting property on their own and the family had been known to be social climbers.
The case dragged on for twenty years. In its aftermath, Richard and Margaret died without having children. Nicholas and Elizabeth, on the other hand, had five surviving sons. Their funeral brass in Ardingly Church, Sussex shows ten sons and eight daughters. It has been described as resembling a “poster warning against rush hour traffic.” See them here.
by Molly Owen | Jun 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
In front of the Radley gate, Tim Johnson had made up what was left of his mind. He had finally turned himself around, to pursue his original course up our street. He made two steps forward, then stopped and raised his head. We saw his body go rigid.
With movements so swift they seemed simultaneous, Atticus’s hand yanked a balltipped lever as he brought the gun to his shoulder. The rifle cracked. Tim Johnson leaped, flopped over and crumpled on the sidewalk in a brown-and-white heap. He didn’t know what hit him.
— as narrated by Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Rowlandson’s Mad Dog in a Coffee House
Tim Johnson was a dog. As he approached the town, residents fled indoors as if the tenth plague of Egypt was coming upon them.
Rabies is considered to be the oldest infectious disease known to man. As early as 2300 BC, death by dog bite resulted in a heavy fine for the animal’s owner. The dog star Sirius was considered to exert a malignant influence among ancient Greeks. The god Apollo had a son specifically charged with the prevention of rabies. Artemis, already consumed with hunting and protecting women in childbirth, was given the task of healing rabies infections.
A goddess is never too busy.
As rabies spread from the Mediterranean to Western Europe, a cure was still nowhere in sight. Rabies epidemics became common, resulting in wholesale dog butchery in the streets of London and Madrid (1760s). Human victims were common as well, their disease given the name of hydrophobia for their fear of water. Above all, rabies was known as a disease of terrorizing madness, particularly once the connection with saliva was established.
In 1883, Louis Pasteur successfully produced a vaccine from the spinal cord of an infected animal. His discovery was not a cure but a means of stopping the disease before it became deadly. By then, rabies had found its way into literature as a device symbolizing madness, and worse, an unstoppable evil.
Cujo by Stepehen King. Old Yeller by Fred Gipson. To Kill a Mockingbird uses rabies as a symbol of racism, spread by one to infect the many.
Come here…Don’t you go near that dog, you understand? Don’t go near him, he’s just as dangerous dead as alive.”
We saw Zeebo drive up. He took a pitchfork from the back of the garbage truck and gingerly lifted Tim Johnson. He pitched the dog onto the truck, then poured something from a gallon jug on and around the spot where Tim fell.
“Don’t yawl come over here for a while…”
The herb Skullcap–reputed to cure the bite of a mad dog. (This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 – photographer Joe Decrueyenere)
by Molly Owen | May 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
At times there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle Hortense so like a bodily spring upon the subject of it that such subject involuntarily starts and fails back. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn’s case at present, though Mademoiselle Hortense, with her eyes almost shut up (but still looking out sideways), is only smiling contemptuously and shaking her head.
“Now, mistress,” says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the chimney-piece. “If you have anything to say, say it, say it.”
“Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby.”
— Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (1852) 
The character of Lady Dedlock’s grim French maid was inspired, it is said, by a female hanged for her lover’s murder in 1849. The case excited a great interest in England and abroad. How could that flower of the Victorian Age–Woman–do such a horrible thing?
Marie de Roux left Switzerland to find employment as an English lady’s maid. She was hired by Lady Palk, who, along with her husband, were active in society, frequently journeying from their Devonshire estate to London. It was believed Marie met her future husband Manning, who was a railroad worker, on one of these visits to the metropolis. The relationship between the two ripened when Marie came to London permanently, to become lady’s maid to Lady Blantyre, daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, then living at Lancaster House.
Now a permanent resident of London, Marie soon attracted the attentions of another man, Patrick O’Connor, a money-lender in the London Docks. She chose Manning in the end, and soon had cause to regret it. Her husband was a profligate spender and drunkard, with shady associates who drove away the business from their nascent hotel venture.
Meanwhile, O’Connor, having invested his cash in railway shares, was becoming quite wealthy.
Neighbors soon noticed O’Connor at the Manning residence in Minerva Place. He would often stay long into the night, smoking and chatting, as he was averse to drinking alcohol. He would come at other times, when Manning was away.
August 9th, 1849 was the last time he was seen alive.
O’Connor’s friends, anxious as to his whereabouts, made a novel decision. They hired two constables, Barnes and Burton, to make inquiries. A visit to Minerva Place revealed the house was stripped of everything. The Mannings had fled.
The detective work that followed was remarkable. Barnes and Burton carefully searched the entire Manning residence and found fresh mortar around the large York flagstones in the back kitchen. Immediately beneath the stones they found a stocking, a layer of lime, and a human toe. O’Connor was identified only by his false teeth and prominent chin, the lime having done quick work in decomposing his body.
“From the evidence collected, it appears that hole was dug for the body, and the lime purchased to consume it, some three weeks before the actual perpetration of the foul deed: so that the deceased must have sat nightly, in company with his murderers, over the grave prepared for him!” — The Terrific Record and Chronicle of Remarkable and Interesting Things, Volume 1 (February 10, 1849)
Manning was apprehended on the island of Jersey, demanding to know if the police had caught “the wretch,” meaning his wife. They had indeed, pouncing on Marie just as she was trying to exchange her lover’s railway shares in Edinburgh. They were brought to trial together, each accusing the other of shooting and then bludgeoning O’Connor to death.
They were both found guilty by a jury, whereupon Marie became very violent. She threw a handful of rue (a strong-smelling herb used in courtrooms against prisoner pestilence) at the barristers and shouted that England was a shameful place. Undaunted, the guards escorted her and her husband to the gaol where they were hanged together in full view of the public.
The spectacle of the Manning execution was so appalling that Dickens was moved to write to the editor of The Times:
“Sir — I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger-lane this morning….I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language, of the assembled spectators.”
Dickens paid 10 guineas for a rooftop viewing spot of the execution, along with the illustrator of this cartoon from Punch.
by Molly Owen | Apr 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
I was a God-fearing child, innocent and physically unattractive.” — Robert Schumann, Diaries
Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) was the true Romantic pianist. He lived a life of excess in romance–closely chronicled in an environment of “devotion and tempestuous passion.”
Robert Schumann
Schumann originally started out studying law but left it for music, with the notion of becoming a virtuoso pianist. Then, in some obscure way, he suffered “an injury” to his hand and had to give up this dream:
“Schumann suffered from many afflictions…continuous general malaise, tinnitus, vertigo, insomnia, headache, depression, premonitions of insanity, numbness, cramp, difficulty in writing, speech disturbance, memory failure, a stroke, pains in bones and joints, florid psychosis, giddiness, general paralysis of the insane, and deterioration to death – to which one might add: manic depressive schizophrenia, a suicide attempt, and a hand problem” — http://www.pianisttopianist.com/?p=10
Faced with this failure. Schumann cast about for a remedy and found it in the daughter of his piano teacher. He could not expect to make money as a performing pianist, but Clara Wieck with her modest dowry might answer to the purpose. She was an aspiring pianist, with no injury to her own fingers. Her father naturally objected but Schumann persevered and when Clara was old enough, she decided for herself. (more…)
by Molly Owen | Mar 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
She was “the best born and the best bred” lady in all England and heiress to the vast estates of the earldom of Northumberland. She was also someone to die for. 
Lady Elizabeth Percy (1667 – 1722) was the daughter of the eleventh earl and one of the “Beauties of Windsor,” Elizabeth Wriothesely. An intimate of hers noted with sadness how the Countess had lost custody of her daughter upon her second marriage. The heiress was given into the care of her grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Northumberland and a co-heiress in her own right of the Duke of Suffolk. Lady Howard was
“..a meddling and jealous old woman, who, having got her long-descended and amply dowered grand-daughter into her own hands, ‘made her the subject of constant intrigues with men of power who wished for wealth, and rich men who wished for rank and power.'” (more…)
by Molly Owen | Feb 14, 2013 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
Louis L’Amour is not known for having the frontier female as a main character. However, of all his voluminous novels of the West, the one I remember the most features the widow Evie Teale and her tumbleweed notes of love and longing, which seemed to find their way into men’s hearts: 
Charlie McCloud, Stage Driver: Well, what are you up to, Conagher? Drifting again?
Conn Conagher: I got tumbleweed fever.
Charlie McCloud, Stage Driver: You too? Half of the cowboys in the country are chasing tumbleweed.
Conagher captures an elusive element of storytelling–finding the unexpected. The best romance has the reader finding love in the most unexpected places. (more…)
