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Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book
An Englishwoman's Life During the Civil War
Lucy Moore
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Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book
An Englishwoman's Life During the Civil War
Lucy Moore
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'Fascinating... A vivid account' - Philippa Gregory, The Times 'Moore's prose is witty. Her book is full of arresting detail and thoughtful comment' - Sunday Times 'An enchanting, idiosyncratic Tardis of a book, peppered with good humour' - Daily Telegraph In the mid seventeenth century, England was divided by war and bloodshed. Torn apart by rival factions, father opposed son and brother met brother on the battlefield. But while civil war raged on cobbled streets and green fields, inside the home domestic life continued as it always had done. For Ann Fanshawe and her children it meant a life of insecurity and constant jeopardy as she and her husband, a Royalist diplomat, dedicated their lives to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. In this uncertain world, Ann's 'receipt book' was a treasured and entirely feminine response to the upheavals of war. These books were a feature of women's lives during this period, when there were few doctors to be found, and were full of life-saving medical knowledge that had been gleaned from mothers and friends. Remarkably, Ann's morocco-bound book full of scraps of ink-stained paper has survived to this day.Using Ann's receipt book and the memoirs she wrote for her surviving son, Lucy Moore follows her through this turbulent time as she leaves home, marries, bears - and buries - children and seeks to hold her family together. Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book brilliantly brings to life Ann's struggles and her joys, revealing how ordinary women across the country fought to protect their loved ones in the face of conflict.
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Primordi della storia modernaCHAPTER ONE
1643
For the Greene Sicknes
Take of the dust of the purest Spanish Steele a Spoonfull up heapt, a Nutmeg made into fine Powder, as much weight of Anyseeds in powder finely searsed [sifted] and halfe so much Liquorish, and a quarter of a pound and two ounces of Sugar finely beaten and searst. Take as much as will lye upon a shilling in a morning fasting in Warme Beer or warme Sack [fortified wine] in three spoonfulls of either. You must not eate in two hours after, but rub, or saw, or Swing, or walke very fast. For diet refrain all Milke Meats whatsoever, and use Broths with opening herbes espetially Penny Royall, Veale and Mutton chiefly.
Early in 1643, Ann Harrisonâs father summoned her and her younger sister, Margaret, from their handsome new house in Hertfordshire to join him in Oxford, which had over the past winter become the wartime capital of the beleaguered king, Charles I. Dutifully they rode into the unknown, seventy miles or so through the unsettled country north-west of London, over the chalky hills and through the beech woods of the Chilterns, to his side, taking only what âa man or twoâ could carry on horseback in their cloak bags.
Ann and Margaret did not question their fatherâs order. âWe knew not at all how to act any part but obedience,â Ann wrote later of her seventeen-year-old self, using a dramatic idiom well suited to her theatre-obsessed age and narrating events that could have graced a Jacobean melodrama. Later, it is implied, she would learn to be less biddable. âFrom as good a house as any gentleman of England had, we came to lie in a very bad bed in a garret, to one dish of meat, and that not the best ordered, no money, for we were as poor as Job, [and had] no clothesâ.1 I love that single dish of âmeatâŚnot the best orderedâ; artlessly it speaks of such privilege.
âThe scene was so changed,â said Ann: not just the scenery and their costumes but the parts they were playing. From the role of cosseted and protected daughters at the pinnacle of Stuart society they had been recast as refugees, exiles in their own land. The only analogies that could help her describe their situation were Biblical. âI began to think we should all, like Abraham, live in tents all the days of our lives.â 2 She was right. This strange existence would become her reality.
If, a year earlier, Ann Harrison had imagined her future, it would almost certainly have looked very much like her motherâs: marriage to a man not unlike her father, from a family which had grown prosperous in the service of the crown; comfortable houses both in London and set in knot-gardens, orchards and green fields outside the city, their warm-panelled, candlelit rooms the backdrop for celebrations of future christenings and marriages as well as the grief of unavoidable funerals, manâs lot on earth being to suffer as well as to be joyful.
Apart from her motherâs death two years earlier, fate had been kind to Ann. âWe lived in great plenty and hospitality,â 3 she remembered of her childhood, and no expense was spared by her doting father to equip her for life as a woman with all the responsibilities as well as privileges of gentle status. At their newly built rose-coloured brick mansion in Hertfordshire, Balls Park (see plate section), in the summer, and during the autumn and winter in London at Montague House, Bishopsgate, Ann was taught the bearing and accomplishments considered essential in the world she inhabited: to dance gracefully, to play the lute and the virginals, to sing and to speak French and to sew and embroider.
But though she âlearned as well as most didâ she was, she said, âa hoyting girlâ 4 â that is to say, a hoyden, wild and carefree. She delighted in running, skipping and riding. Although her motherâs death, when she was fifteen, made her grow up, her sense of adventure would never leave her.
It was the example of her mother, Margaret Harrison, that made the young Ann âas an offering to her memory⌠[fling] away those childnesses that had formerly possessed meâ. As the elder of his two daughters, she took charge of her widowed fatherâs household. Despite her independent streak, all through her adult life, as her memoirs and receipt book demonstrate, Ann would strive to be, like Margaret, âa loving wife, and most tender motherâ 5 and, implicitly, the final element in the triad that made up the sole acceptable vocation of a seventeenth century woman, mistress of a well-run house.
As the daughter of a rich man and future wife of another, Ann would need to do no more than expertly oversee most domestic chores, such as butter-making, everyday cookery and laundry. Perhaps the most important practical skill she would learn from her mother was household medicine. Her motherâs remedies form the core of the medical section of Annâs receipt book and she must have stood at Margaret Harrisonâs shoulder in the still-room of her childhood home watching her make up many of them. A still-room (short for distillation-room) or still-house was the desirable household adornment of the day, where the mistress of the house would dry herbs, extract essences and concoct ointments and cordials. As the repository of these complex skills, a still-room demonstrated the mistress of the houseâs compassion, learning, status and femininity.
Only one such still-house survives, almost intact, at Ham House, just south of Richmond on the River Thames, built in the 1670s â significantly, for its female owner, who would have told her architect exactly what she wanted. Bright and well lit, with its own entrance by a side door (leading out towards the herb garden) and the original crisp, black and white chequerboard floor, it is dominated by an oven with compartments for cooking at different temperatures, a large work-table and tall, shelved, heated cupboards lining one wall. Still-room inventories list pestles and mortars of wood and stone, braziers, scales and weights, small refrigerators for cooling heated liquids, presses, bain-maries, glass funnels and bottles, containers of earthenware, brass and silver, gallypots (small glazed pots for storage), graters, strainers and sieves, chopping boards and a collection of âqueer tin vessels of many shapes with spouts at all anglesâ 6 alongside a bewildering variety of potent ingredients ranging from the humble (locally gathered wild herbs and fresh eggs) to the expensive and exotic (nutmeg from the Banda Islands in Indonesia, ground pearls or olive oil from the Mediterranean) to the dangerous (opium, mercury and arsenic).
Ann would also have been given instruction in financial matters, for as a good wife she would need to administer her household with discretion and frugality. As with healthcare, this skill was too important to delegate. A rare account book survives from c.1610â13, detailing the personal expenses of Margaret Spencer (another Margaret, not Annâs mother; it was a popular name, redolent of feminine strength, harking back to that legendary fifteenth century matriarch, Margaret Beaufort) between the ages of thirteen and sixteen and kept as an educational exercise. The concern with pin-money demonstrated by this book was far from trivial. Margaretâs father, reckoned one of the richest men in England and the source of her generous allowance, examined her accounts regularly, because a woman who could take responsibility for appropriate expenditure would be a valuable wife and thus a successful daughter.
Most of Margaretâs spending was on clothes, a necessary expression of her status as much as frivolity or luxury â fine lawn to be made into smocks, spangled lace sewn onto ribbon, kid gloves stitched with silk flowers, velvet masks, a tall, fashionable hat of albino beaver fur from the Americas â or on looking after her wardrobe, having clothes made or expensively laundered and starched. But she also paid for lessons in dancing and playing the virginals and for small gambling debts as well as buying a âsilver thimbellâ for her embroidery, a âpicktooth cass and picktoothâ and, somewhat surprisingly, âa payer of pistollsâ.7
It is a measure of how independent young women of gentle birth were expected to be that, in her early teens and unmarried, Margaret commissioned friends and relations with errands, requesting feathers for a hat to be sent to her from London, for example, and then tipping the servant who delivered them, or buying presents for friends and family. Gift-giving was an important social function of seventeenth century society, encompassing valuable concepts of favour and obligation: it was a skill even girls could not be too young to learn. Far from being sheltered, Margaretâs account book reveals a young woman immersed in society and serving her apprenticeship to it, learning to supervise servants, sewing and reading, visiting and entertaining, attending sermons and performing private devotions, a young woman much as Ann Harrison must have been at the same age some thirty years later. Its particular poignancy today lies in the knowledge that the lessons in adulthood Margaret was learning were acquired in vain, for she would die unmarried at sixteen.
Existence was precarious in the seventeenth century. Ann was just two years older than Margaret Spencer when her world and expectations changed forever. The comfortable security of her early life was shattered in 1642 when her father, Sir John, was arrested and his house and its contents were confiscated by the Parliamentary forces hostile to his master, Charles I.
In 1642, unable to persuade Parliament to grant him the taxes he wants and control over the army, King Charles I rides out of London and raises his banner against the men opposing him, whom he calls rebels. The Parliamentarians believe royal power should be subject to Parliament; the kingâs men, Royalists or Cavaliers, believe royal dignity is divinely ordained and must not be challenged. Support for Parliament against the king, warns an ominous royal proclamation that July, would âend in a dark equal chaos of confusionâ.8 The first inconclusive battle of the civil wars that will define the next eighteen years of British history, Edgehill, takes place that October. With neither side able to claim victory, the scene is set for a long struggle ahead.
Annâs father, Sir John Harrison, had made a great fortune serving the king. A man of humble background and great talent from Lancashire, arriving in London with nothing but his education, he had risen through the Treasury (and an advantageous marriage) to become a loyal MP as well as the first Commissioner of Customs, a position he created. Throughout Annâs childhood, the familyâs main home was near the parish church of St Olaveâs, Hart Street (also Samuel Pepysâs church, where he and his wife are buried, and indicating a similar government and businesslike milieu for John Harrison). This area of Thames-side London was within sight of the White Tower built by William the Conqueror nearly six hundred years earlier and at the heart of the cityâs burgeoning trading centres, excise offices and customs houses, warehouses, exchanges and sales rooms.
Sir John, whose impressive wealth and influence derived from this area, was a familiar figure in these bustling, narrow streets as one of the crownâs senior officials. When sides had to be chosen â and as the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe wrote to the Elector Palatine the month after Edgehill, âNo neutrality is admitted⌠Both parties resolve that those who are not with them are against them⌠and all who will not are as corn between two millstonesâ 9 â Harrison didnât really have a choice. He owed his fortune and his hopes for the future to his association with the crown and, unlike more established gentry or aristocratic families whose loyalties were sometimes divided, his allegiance was never in doubt. Like Lord Goring, he could truly say, âI had all from his Majesty, and he hath all again.â 10
That summer of 1642, Parliamentarian forces ransacked the houses of prominent Hertfordshire ...