Mudlarking - updated

This past week [In 2009] the BBC featured an article on "mudlarking," (treasure hunting along riverbanks at low tide).

"... there is no place better to mudlark than on the 95-mile foreshore of the Thames, considered by some the largest open-air archaeological site in London...

While a general permit to look for artefacts allows the aspiring treasure hunter to dig only 7.5cm into the ground, a special mudlark's licence allows the enthusiasts to venture much further underneath the surface.

"The best thing I've ever found," says Tony, "is a silver wine taster, dated 1634, that is now in the Museum of London's collection."

Over the last 30 years, Tony and his friends from The Society of Thames Mudlarks have amassed a collection of more than 2,500 buttons ranging in date from the late 14th to the late 19th Century. They are now being donated to the Museum of London and include examples of buttons made of silver, pewter and semi-precious stones...

I think it sounds like fun, although I think I remember references in some Dickens' novels that it was not viewed that way in earlier times:

During the Industrial Revolution, mudlarks were usually young children or widowed women. Becoming a mudlark was a cry of desperation as it is considered one of the worst "jobs" in history. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, excrement and waste would wash onto the shores from the raw sewage which wasn't treated. The corpses of humans, cats and dogs would also wash up. Mudlarks would be lucky if they made a penny a day selling what they had found during low tide, which was the only time people could scavenge along the shores of the rivers.

I'm sure lots of murder weapons and wedding rings have been tossed into the Thames.

Reposted from 2009 to add a report of the recovery of a neolithic skull fragment by a mudlarker:

The fragment of a neolithic skull was mudlarked from the south bank of the river’s foreshore by Martin Bushell last September... The discovery, which Bushell initially believed was just a shard of pottery, was handed in to the Metropolitan police. The force commissioned radiocarbon dating of the bone, which revealed that the man had died about 5,600 years ago...

Last month, a rare Roman oil lamp found on the river’s foreshore by Alan Suttie, an amateur treasure hunter, also went on display at the Museum of London. Other ancient objects found in the Thames in previous years include a neolithic polished macehead, a sword dated to the late bronze age and a bust of the Roman emperor Hadrian, dated to his visit to Britain in AD122 – all of which are on display at the British Museum.

See also:  Love tokens retrieved from the mud of the Thames (2011).

Reposted from 2019 to add a link to a Bloomberg article on the subject:

The number of mudlark permits, which are valid for three years, surged from a few hundred around 2016 to more than 5,000 during the pandemic, fueled largely by social media. Worried about a plundered foreshore, the Port of London Authority that oversees the riverbank halted issuing new permits in November 2022...

The publicity has been a headache for riverbank conservationists, and the multitude of mudlarks is part of the problem. Maiklem argues that using metal detectors, shovels and hand tools hastens erosion and are unnecessary given the river’s powerful 20-foot tidal swing that unearths buried treasures...

Miller says that because the number of mudlarks has “gone through the roof,” it’s harder to find buried artifacts. “It’s basically the same size cake, but now thousands of people are trying to get a slice of that cake.”..

Lots of rivers in old cities hold troves of sunken antiquities but nowhere else are they as readily accessible as the Thames. “London is really quite unique, in that we have that combination of having a tidal river and a foreshore that’s stable enough to be walked on,” Sumnall says. “And we are a global city with a very long history of human occupation that stretches back 400,000 years.”

Ah... politics

"Conservative candidate Jacob Rees-Mogg stands next to Barmy Brunch from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party during the declaration for the North East Somerset constituency at the University of Bath campus, on July 5, 2024, in Bath, England. Rees-Mogg lost his seat in the election."

One of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic.  credit: Finnbarr Webster / Getty

"Malice prepense" and other postpositive adjectives

This week I gave a "goodbye read" to a book I've had for some 50 years.  While doing so I paused at this curious passage:

"At this distance no one can say how much of what Lady Caroline accomplished represented malice prepense and how much was a quick response to opportunity."

The definition of "premeditated" was implicit in the context of the passage, but while looking up confirmation in online sources,  I encountered these passages:

"Malice aforethought is a direct translation of the Law French term malice prépensée, so the adjective follows the noun as in French."  "prepense is usually used postpositively."

As an English major now in my elder years, it's a bit embarrassing to see the word "postpositive" for the first time (even though in my career I responded to innumerable "code blue" alerts).  As it turns out there are an abundance of "postpositive" adjectives - I just didn't know the classification term.

A postpositive adjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as attorney general, queen regnant, or all matters financial. This contrasts with prepositive adjectives, which come before the noun or pronoun...

In some languages (Spanish, Welsh, Indonesian, etc.), the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is largely confined to archaic and poetic uses (e.g. "Once upon a midnight dreary", as opposed to "Once upon a dreary midnight") as well as phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin (e.g. heir apparent, aqua regia) and certain fixed grammatical constructions (e.g. "Those anxious to leave soon exited")

Recognizing postpositive adjectives in English is important for determining the correct plural for a compound expression. For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial...

Herewith some examples - tons more at Wikipedia and other online sources.  In food: spaghetti bolognese; chicken korma, whiskey sour. In titles:  professor emeritus, attorney general, consul general, postmaster general, surgeon general, astronomer royal, notary public, poet laureate, president-elect, prime minister-designate... In organizations: Alcoholics Anonymous, Amnesty International, Weather Underground.  Titles of works: Apocalypse Now, "Bad Moon Rising", Body Electric, Brideshead Revisited, Chicken Little, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Hannibal Rising, Hercules Unchained, House Beautiful, Jupiter Ascending, The Life Aquatic, A Love Supreme, The Matrix Reloaded, Monsters Unleashed, Orpheus Descending, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Prometheus Unbound, "The Road Not Taken", Time Remembered, Enemy Mine.

The book itself I am now done with, and I've listed my copy on eBay.  It was special to me for many years because the author, John Chapman, was a personal friend and my attending physician during my medical training in Texas.  He was a classic academic physician who had also developed a personal interest in the poet Lord Byron, and had extensively researched Byron's life and times, specifically to address the question of whether Byron committed incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh [TLDR answer: no.  The accusations were most likely malicious rumors started by a jilted other woman].  The book also has a detailed analysis of Byron's death at an early age, concluding that the original reports of cerebral malaria etc were nonsense, but that Byron may have had an intracranial arteriovenous malformation that occasionally leaked, causing his lifetime of intermittent headaches, before finally rupturing fatally on his last visit to Greece.  

This is a scholarly book, not a general interest book for the casual reader.  I didn't donate it to our library because its narrow focus and esoteric subject matter puts it at risk for being pulped, and IMHO it deserves a better fate.  I'm hoping that via eBay it will find its way into the hands of an interested scholar.

How bog bodies were secured underwater

Wet sites have yielded some of the most spectacular archaeological finds in the world. Prior to Windover’s discovery, ancient human remains had been uncovered at four others in Florida:  Little Salt Springs (Sarasota County), Warm Mineral Springs (Sarasota County), Republic Groves (Hardee County), and Bay West (Collier County). Known as mortuary ponds, these sites served as cemeteries during the Early and Middle Archaic periods, roughly 10,000 to 5,000 years ago...

Toward the end of the first field season, Doran and Dickel made an astonishing discovery: a mushy, greasy, tan substance inside one of the skulls... confirmed that a sample was actually human brain tissue. By the end of that year, several intact brains had been recovered. Though shrunken to a quarter of their original size, they still retained the shape and surface features of a typical human brain...

The bodies were tucked into a “flexed” position, bundled in fabric along with a variety of grave goods, and submerged beneath the water, typically on their left sides, facing west. Wooden stakes driven through the cloth kept them anchored to the bottom of the pond. Generation after generation returned to the pond to bury their dead in this manner for the next 1,000 years.

More information at the Orange County Regional History website.

Medieval gardens and turfed benches

I recently enjoyed browsing this book.   It has chapters on monastery gardens, abbess gardens (medicinal plants), pilgrimage-related gardens, cook's gardens (edibles), orchard gardens, and alchemist's gardens, and one on "Mary gardens."  Since I was raised Protestant, I have never been taught the extreme degrees of reverence for the Virgin Mary, or known that Mary gardens were a thing.  The book chapter details the history beginning in an ecumenical council in 431 at Ephesus and the subsequent rise of a "cult of Mary."  By the late medieval period there was an outpouring of relevant music, literature, and art, including garden design.  I was amazed by how many common garden plants were not only dedicated to Mary, but named after her.  The "lady" in the many plants named "lady-x" refers to the Virgin Mary. Here is a partial list of plants incorporated in a Mary garden:

"Eyes of Mary" is one common name for forget-me-nots.

Soapwort (Bouncing Bett) is also known as Lady-by-the-gate

The wooly mullein is also "Lady's candle."

English Primrose = Lady's Frills

Sweet Violet = Lady's Modesty

Ground Ivy = Madonna's Herb

Maidenhair Fern = Maria's Hair

Bachelor's Button = Mary's Crown

Meadowsweet = Mary's Girdle

Marigold = Mary's Gold

Bleeding Heart - Mary's Heart

Lungwort = Virgin Mary's Tears

Spearmint = Menthe de Notre Dame

Iris = Mary's Sword

Cowslip = Mary's Tears

Bedstraw = Lady's Tresses

Solomon's Seal = Lady's Seal

Pansy = Our Lady's Delight

honeysuckle = Lady's Fingers

Hweet Woodruff = Lady's Lace

Columbine = Our Lady's Shoes

Lily-of-the-Vally = Our Lady's Tears

And many more.  However "Rosemary" is not a corruption of "Rose of Mary", but of the Latin ros marinus ("dew of the sea").

One more interesting item from the book.  Herb gardens typically incorporate benches, some of which in medieval times were "turfed":

"The turfed seat drained quickly after rain and provided the sensation of sitting on a dry and fragrant meadow.  It consisted of a raised bench seat with the sides constructed of stoneor brick or, less permanently, wattle, almost filled with compacted stone and rubble to provide good drainage and topped with a layer of soil.  The seat was then turfed with soft fine grass or fragrant creeping herbs, such as apple-scented chamomole and thymes, to form a dense mat."

What a great idea.  I've been unable to find a suitable photo of a turfed bench other a few partially depicted in stained glass windows.

Here's the Wikipedia page on medieval gardens.

"Laying a hedge"

 For my gardening Zoom group I recently browsed In a Unicorn's Garden: recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens.  There I encountered the phrase "laying a hedge" and had to look it up...

What life is like for a normal person

"Kevin Bacon has daydreamed about walking through life as a regular, nonfamous person... A person who could stroll the Earth for a day without being asked for a selfie by a stranger.... Then Bacon realized he could test out his fantasy by donning a disguise... Bacon put on his normal-person camouflage and tested it at one of the most densely populated locations in Los Angeles: an outdoor shopping mall called The Grove..."

At the Grove, Bacon recalls, “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”

"The Sixteen Pleasures"

"I Modi (The Ways) is best known as The Sixteen Pleasures, an illustrated sex guide published by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1524. Based on paintings by Giulio Romano, The Sixteen Pleasures carries the proud boast of being the first work of pornography banned by the Catholic church. For his gross indecency, Raimondi was imprisoned by Pope Clement VII. All copies of the book were destroyed. Romano got away with it. And so began a long debate whether art and porn can ever be the same thing?..

Pietro Aretino was aroused by this curious case of private and public mores. “After I arranged for Pope Clement to release Raimondi,” he wrote, “I desired to see those pictures which has caused the [Vatican] to cry out that their creators should be crucified.” Aretino thought the illustrations needed a few words, so he composed a sonnet for each woodcut. He also successfully fought to have Raimondi released from prison. In 1527, I Modi and Aretino’s sonnets appeared in a new collaborative work. “Come view this you who like to fuck,” wrote Aretino, “without being disturbed in that sweet enterprise.” Predictably, the Pope banned this second book and destroyed every copy...

In 1798, The Sixteen Pleasures reappeared as the French title L’Arétin d’Augustin Carrache ou Recueil de Postures Érotiques, d’Après les Gravures à l’Eau-Forte par cet Artiste Célèbre, Avec le Texte Explicatif des Sujets. With most of the original mucky pictures lost (or maybe just locked away in the Vatican?), this book featured illustrations based on engravings by painter Agostini Carracci.

I have embedded one of the Carracci images above; the others are viewable at a 2017 article in Flashbak.

Two doggy day care bus videos

"Dressing pretty" is over

"...I'm a messy eater,” admits Isaiah Lat, a 20-year-old student, DJ and stylist from Chicago, “I used to wipe away stains but now I don’t mind a little oil or a little spaghetti on my shorts. I think it’s chic.”

He does not believe that a term has yet been coined for the way he likes to dress. “It’s probably this dystopian, Mad Max, pirate, Steam Punk, mythological vibe,” he says, big on thrift and DIY; he likes skinny jeans, Capri pants and visor-like sunglasses. He doesn’t pile on the pasta sauce before he leaves the house but says he does like his clothes to be “somewhat stained”.

There’s a new mood in fashion: aesthetically varied, but its disparate elements – camouflage, combat shorts and grungey plaid; goth-inspired make-up and stomper boots; silhouettes and garments inspired by 2010s indie sleaze; T-shirts emblazoned with slogans inspired by nihilistic internet humour – project a common mood. Daniel Rodgers, digital fashion writer at British Vogue, says that much of it stems from the rebellious energy of kids “born in 2000 trying to reclaim the things millennials wrote off as loserish”. It is often a bit grotty, a bit greasy and crumpled and raw.

It’s a big leap away from the homogeneous looks that have dominated visual culture for a decade, including sleek, mass-produced athleisure and the ubiquitous “clean girl” trend, which problematically centres influencers who either are – or look like – Hailey Bieber, with white, gently blushing skin and huge fluffy eyebrows...

It is an intentional rejection of the mainstream. “We are sick of late-stage capitalist fashion,” he says. “In the aftermath of Trump’s presidency, with the conservative supreme court and our rights being stripped away, we want to dance and look hot – and this is our way of showing the government and corporations that we don’t need them.” [you might consider voting...]

Still, there is something particularly nihilistic about what is happening now, says Rodgers. The way people are “dipping into looks from the past 15 years of mainstream culture and putting them all together in a wild bonfire heap” and sampling from subcultures without the “lifestyle obligations” that used to be part of wearing those clothes. He says that when micro-trends come into style at the moment, they stay in: “So everything is trending at once. Everything is porous and blurred; it’s kind of a free for all.”..

Even Hailey Bieber, the ultimate icon for the “clean girl” look, is dressing a bit more chaotically, points out Rodgers, and is “in some way mirroring what’s happening on the street. She’ll wear a football shirt with some tailored trousers and cowboy boots or a poet sleeved shirt with Fila shorts and a Mary Jane, like someone’s kind of sifted through a lost property box on sports day.”

More (with photos) at The Guardian.

The most common jobs in the United States

From the Department of Data column at The Washington Post, where there is some discussion.  I'll also embed the bottom of the list (which goes on for 58 pages).

The rarest book in American literature

If ever a book ought not to be judged by its cover, Edgar Allan Poe’s debut collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, is that book. Known as the Black Tulip, only twelve copies appear to have survived since its publication in July 1827...

Both Poe and the novice printer Calvin F.W. Thomas were just eighteen when the poet handed over his manuscript, presumably at Thomas’s shop at 70 Washington Street in Boston, and paid him to make it into a book. The result was forty pages of unevenly printed verse bound in drab tan wrappers the shade of a faded tea stain. Tamerlane’s front cover features a potpourri of discordant typefaces within an ornamental frame that resembles a geometric queue of conifers—a heavy-handed period design I have grown to adore. It’s clear that Thomas, as a workaday job printer whose usual commissions were show bills, apothecary labels, calling cards, and the like, had his shop stocked with a mishmash of typefaces to fit any taste. On this occasion, he seems to have drawn liberally from his inventory... 

The Holy Grail of book collecting, Tamerlane is one of those books that—like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the original boards, which sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $1.17 million, or Shakespeare’s first folio, priced at $7.5 million and sold last year by the London-based rare book firm Peter Harrington on its 400th anniversary—causes a stir among rare book enthusiasts whether or not they have any hope, or desire, of acquiring it. (Not to mention the Bay Psalm Book or even the Eliot Algonquin Bible, other ultra-rare early American printed books, though religious texts, not literary.) Whenever a first edition of Tamerlane comes under the hammer—a rare event in itself—its past legacy and future home become the topic of discussion among booksellers, archivists, collectors, and Poe scholars around the world.

Originally produced in an edition estimated at forty or fifty copies, Tamerlane was from its inception a rarity. The Morgan Library doesn’t own a copy. Nor does the Library of Congress. The copy once held by the University of Virginia, Poe’s not-quite alma mater, was stolen in 1973 from the McGregor Room vault in Alderman Library. If it is never recovered, an unfortunate possibility, the number of known copies drops to eleven. At least one prominent Poe expert I know speculates it may have been destroyed to hide the evidence. 

More details about Tamerlane at Literary Hub.  

Edgar Allan Poe and the Big Bang Theory.

Sleep paralysis in the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Your biodegradable, renewable, sustainable T-shirt may start in an old-growth forest

"You might think that wearing a top made from wood pulp would give instant eco-credentials – it is renewable, biodegradable, and, having once been a tree, it has soaked up some carbon along the way. What’s more, it’s not plastic. This is why many brands are opting for viscose, Lycocell, acetate and modal – soft, silky, semi-synthetic fabrics made from tree-pulp – as an apparently more sustainable option... Except that the chances are that your wood-pulp top may not be so green...

In total, about 300m trees are logged globally each year to make viscose, sustainably or otherwise. These fabrics go by the rather geeky term, “man-made cellulosic fibres”, or MMCFs. Demand for viscose, the third most used fabric in fashion (after polyester and cotton), is expected to double over the next eight years, says Rycroft: “Many brands are looking for a substitute for polyester or virgin cotton, but it’s trading one environmental disaster for another.”

“Significant amounts” of viscose come from endangered forests in Brazil, Canada and Indonesia, says Rycroft. “We’ve also noted old-growth forests in Australia – koala habitats – disappearing into the viscose supply-chain. 

More information at The Guardian.

I forgot to post this on Tau Day (June 28)

More about Tau Day.

Stars in tree twigs

"...this five-pointed (also called five-angled) star shape is common in Populus (aspen, poplar, cottonwood) and Salix species (members of the willow family) but is also found in oaks (Quercus), and chestnut (Castanea). The pith inside a stem is made of parenchyma (large, thin-walled cells), which are often a different color than surrounding wood (xylem). The pith’s function is to transport and store nutrients. Pith is usually lighter when new, but darkens with time (as seen in images like these of cottonwood “stars”).

Mowry’s story notes the importance of cottonwood to the belief systems of Native American tribes: the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Oglala Sioux. Pacific Northwest naturalist and poet Robert Michael Pyle’s essay, “The Plains Cottonwood” (American Horticulturist, August 1993, pp.39-42),  describes an Arapaho version of the story of the stars that you told above: “They moved up through the roots and trunks of the cottonwoods to wait near the sky at the ends of the high branches. When the night spirit desired more stars, he asked the wind spirit to provide them. She then grew from a whisper to a gale. Many cottonwood twigs would break off, and each time they broke, they released stars from their nodes.” Cottonwood twigs sometimes snap off without the assistance of wind, a self-pruning phenomenon called cladoptosis. Pyle suggests looking for twigs that are neither too young nor too weathered if you want to observe the clearest stars: “The star is the darker heartwood contrasting with the paler sapwood and new growth.”

Embedded image from Mountain Cathedrals.