Museums

From time to time, many museums create small exhibitions, trails, or blog posts, by asking all their staff to write a short piece about their favourite object. They usually call these “Curator’s Choice”. I have been thinking about some of my own favourite objects from the historical and archaeological world all over the planet. This little statuette of a frog is one of them. You might call this a “Curator's Choice" – look out for more!

I have never seen the actual object myself, and I don’t expect I ever will. Nevertheless, from the three images I have seen, it is one of my favourite pieces of art. It has the complete simplicity I like so much, and makes excellent use of the natural colouring of the stone it is carved from. Also I happen to be fond of frogs.

It is a religious object from around the turn of the 3^rd millennium BCE, i.e. during the Predynastic period in Egypt. The frog was an ancient symbol of fertility, relating to the annual flooding of the Nile which allowed the crops to grow, and which naturally encouraged the breeding of millions of frogs in its mud. It was later known to have been associated with rebirth and life after death, with childbirth and with the fertility goddess Heket or Heqet, who was identified with the goddess Hathor. Heqet was the wife of Khnum, the potter-god who shaped human beings on his wheel. She was sometimes represented as a woman with the head of a frog; sometimes as a frog.

This statuette has no provenance, i.e.no-one knows where it was found. It is made of travertine/alabaster and is 154mm tall. The clever use of the stone’s natural veining was probably intentional, as it was not intended to be painted.

It is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.“  Robert Louis Stevenson, “In the South Seas”, Chapter 1

Thus wrote the 19^th century author of ‘Treasure island’ in his account of his arrival in the south Pacific islands where he spent the last years of his life. It is something I have found myself thinking about recently. For much of my life, I lived and worked in an area (Hertfordshire) which had been under the control of Rome for four centuries after 43CE. I studied Latin at school there. I started in archaeology there. Travels in England and the continent introduced me to the rediscovery of Greece and Rome during the Renaissance. When in later life I visited Rome itself and stood among the ruins of the Forum, it was like coming home. I almost expected to see Horace or Pliny walking across the street. To me, having the Romans around was the natural order of things. But like Stevenson, I have come to realise how much living in the area of the former Roman Empire has conditioned my thinking.

Years ago, a letter from a fellow student at university who had gone on to become a museum curator in his native Pakistan, introduced me to the idea that there were Roman finds in the Indian subcontinent. During the early 1^st century CE the Romans learned to use the monsoon winds in summer to sail to what is now India and Pakistan, and the reverse winds in winter to bring them back. They imported luxury goods, such as spices and aromatics, especially various forms of pepper. They went crazy for pearls and Chinese silk. Exotic animals for the arena such as lions and tigers were another sought-after commodity in Rome. The Indians wanted, among many other things, gold coins, not as coinage but for the metal itself, and were keen on the bright red forms of coral that the Romans could supply. They also liked wine, transported in amphorae, glassware and high quality pottery. I found it interesting, as I wandered past the showcases full of stacks of Samian tableware in the Verulamium museum, to think of similar stacks somewhere on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a pioneering archaeologist of the years between the two world wars, who excavated at the Roman town of Verulamium and founded the museum where I worked for many years, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s. He worked at the South Indian town of Arikamedu, which produced many finds representing the trade with Rome, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, gems and pottery.

I am currently living outside the frontiers of the Roman empire. It is easy to forget that even in the British Isles there were areas where the Romans never penetrated. The far north of Scotland is one of them. Southern Scotland was controlled by the Roman army for short periods several times: under Agricola between 77 and 85 CE, again under Antoninus Pius between 142CE and c.165CE, and under Severus between 208 and 211CE. During Agricola’s campaign Roman military constructions were built as far north as Moray and Aberdeenshire. The Antonine Wall was built in the early 140s CE and ran for 60km, from the Firth of Clyde north-west of Glasgow, to the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh. It only lasted for about 20 years, and as it was made of turf on a stone foundation, there isn’t much of it left for viewing. This bit is in a Glasgow cemetery.

Orkney, where I live now, does not have a single Roman monument, nor is there any evidence that the Romans ever set foot here. They certainly knew it was there, from at least the time around Claudius’ invasion of southern England in 43CE, and they knew that it was an archipelago with many islands. Agricola’s fleet sailed round it in 80CE according to Tacitus. There are some extremely vague and unlikely claims by poets and a 4^th century historian that it became part of the empire, but that is all.  During the 1^st to the early 5^th centuries CE, the period when England and Wales were part of the empire, the people of Orkney were non-literate, prehistoric farmers, often living in or next to brochs, circular stone tower-like buildings with small clusters of houses around them. They had to wait until the Norse settlers in the 11th century for their first towns.

But sometimes Roman artefacts are found in Orkney, usually at broch sites. They are the sort of objects, few in number, which were likely to have been passed from person to person as occasional gifts or curiosities, rather than part of a regular trade in olive oil or high-quality tableware, as happened in the south of England. Things like the broken neck of an amphora which once held foodstuffs like olives or wine; fragments of Samian ware; a glass cup in a burial; a bronze patera (handled dish); glass beads; and small groups of coins. They mostly date from the late 1^st and the 2^nd centuries CE, the period when the Romans penetrated farthest north in Scotland.  My favourite object is the exquisite carnelian intaglio from the broch at Howe, a gemstone carved with the figure of an eagle, which would have been set in a ring. You can see this in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

I also like the fragment of a Samian mortarium (Dragendorf 45) with a lion-head spout from Oxtro broch. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but unfortunately their catalogue does not seem to have an image. There are also some objects which were probably not of Roman manufacture but were influenced by Roman design: tweezers, a sandstone lamp, and my third favourite object, a brooch in the form of an insect with outspread wings, made of tinned bronze and found at Howe broch, Stromness. This is also on display in Orkney Museum, along with several other Roman objects.

What the Iron Age inhabitants of Orkney had heard about the Romans, and what the Romans believed about them, apart from them being unfortunate barbarians who didn’t have the advantage of being civilised, we will probably never know. But I myself have had to look at history from a different perspective.

Many thanks to Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, for allowing me to use the two images from their collection

M

I have finally, alas, had to say goodbye to my entertaining job as a tour guide at the Tomb of the Eagles, closed permanently because of the Covid pandemic. It was such fun: not only was I working with a group of really nice colleagues in a beautiful piece of countryside but I was actually being paid to talk for hours about my favourite subject to a captive audience (well, they could have walked out if they were bored). It was sad to say goodbye to the familiar artefacts – the beautifully crafted stone mace head, the terrible pottery (I could do better myself), and especially to the three skulls we used to hold up and explain to the public, ‘Jock Tamsin’, ‘Granny’ and ‘Charlie Girl’. They had almost come to seem like friends.

This gave rise to a curious thought. For 53 years I have been “playing with my forefathers’ joints”, as it were (William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” Act IV Scene III). I dug up my first skeleton in a Roman graveyard at the age of 17, closely followed a few months later by an Iron Age chieftain’s cremated bones. The skeleton was a bit of a disappointment, as it was the only one in the cemetery that had any grave goods, and since I was a relative beginner they took it away from me and got someone else to finish digging it. The chieftain I principally remember because it was the depths of winter and we all had to kneel on ice-cold chalk around a circular hole containing the bones and goodies, passing a golfer's hand-warmer round to unfreeze our numb fingers.

When I went to work at the museum in St Albans, I was greeted every morning by our three Roman skeletons, displayed in their coffins in the “Death and Burial” section with their grave goods on shelves around them. They were part of my life for decades and they, too, came to seem like friends. They were later joined by the amazing grave goods from a pair of Romano British graves discovered a few miles away. One contained what would normally be considered female grave goods and the other what would normally be considered male ones. Unfortunately, the bones had been cremated, which makes it difficult, although not always impossible, to identify the sex. Very few of the fragments from the “male” grave had been recovered, which made it even more difficult. There was considerable academic argument as to whether the “male” was a male or a warlike liberated Celtic female. Oh dear…

There were many boxes of human bones behind the scenes in the museum stores, since there had been many excavations on graveyards, Roman and medieval, in and around the town, and we were responsible for storing the lot. Those presumed to be Christian had to be given a Christian reburial after study; we had an arrangement with a local vicar (I hasten to add that all human skeletons were treated with respect.) One of our staff had a special interest in human bone and used to give lovely talks, illustrated with examples of pathological specimens. He was particularly keen on leprosy and syphilis, but my favourite was a medieval skull with a large slice taken out across the top, which was considered to be the result of a sword cut by a mounted soldier cutting downwards at someone on foot, possibly during the Wars of the Roses. We did have two battles in the streets of the medieval town.

As for their teeth, from the Neolithic to the early modern period, before and after the availability of lots of sugar, I have seen things in ancient jawbones that would make your toes curl. Like Granny, the old lady from the Tomb of the Eagles, who had half the roof of her mouth eaten away. NEVER miss your appointment with your dentist, and be thankful that we now have anaesthetics and antibiotics. Be very thankful.

Those of our bones and our bags of crunchy cremations which came from relatively recent excavations were carefully stored in standard boxes on the shelves of roller racking in a store with proper security and environmental controls. On one occasion, however, we did discover a forgotten cache of bones from an early excavation, stored in a basement below the next-door public toilet and forgotten about for decades. They were infested with dry rot and had to be decontaminated by one unfortunate member of staff, garbed in special protective clothing.

Not so dry bones.

They glowed in brilliant colours in the dim and dusty store, deep blue and red, yellow and pale turquoise, grass green, picked out with gold and silver bands and edgings. Some had exquisite paintings of shepherdesses and country scenes done by hand, or sprays of flowers, or blue and white Chinese scenes of willows and pagodas. The cups were all sorts of shapes and sizes, with handles or without them, with or without saucers. There was imported Chinese porcelain, there were clumsy 17^th century attempts at making tin-glazed earthenware look like Chinese porcelain and European attempts at making porcelain. There were silver lustre teapots and red stoneware teapots and earthenware teapots shaped like cabbages with moulded green leaves.

In twenty years or more at the museum, I had never had any idea that they were there. I only discovered them because I had recently been promoted to a job which meant I had responsibility for keeping the collection records for the whole museum up to date and accurate. I had hitherto spent most of my time working on the archaeology collection, so I thought I ought to spend some time on the social history collection as well. Since I specialised in medieval pottery, it seemed a natural progression to check the post-medieval pottery next.

These tea cups and pots were not found on excavations. A few had probably been donated to the museum by the daughters and grand-daughters and nieces of local people of historical interest. Most of them had been bought at auctions, car boot sales, or market stalls. They were chipped and cracked, and some had been very badly mended with a glue which had a tendency to yellow with age, so their financial value was virtually nil. I assumed they had been bought as a reference collection, to help identify small sherds found on site, or for occasional inclusion in a display of a period room. Or because the long-retired curator whom I suspected of having collected them just liked that kind of pottery.

But they were beautiful, even the damaged ones, with their jewel-bright colours and gilding. And the whole history of tea drinking in Britain was there. Tea was introduced into Europe from the Far East by the Dutch and Portuguese in the early 17^th century, reaching England by the mid-17^th century. It is said to have been popularised by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Tea grew to enormous importance in British diet, trade, and social rituals. Think about all the references to tea drinking in Jane Austen’s novels: Jane Bennet making tea in the drawing room after dinner, Catherine Morland and her chaperone taking tea in the interval at a ball. Think about William Cobbett’s fiery condemnation of tea-drinking among the labouring classes in his “Cottage Economy”: “I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age”. Oh dear!  In his opinion they should have stuck to nutritious home-brewed ale and he blamed the tax on malt. The production of the equipment needed for preparing and drinking tea, both metal and ceramic, was a major spin-off.  Think Royal Worcester, Crown Derby, Bow, Lowestoft, Liverpool, Chelsea and other major manufacturers.

You might say that that small collection of quite common tea and coffee wares, in poor condition, wasn’t really worth keeping. If it has been discarded since I retired I wouldn’t complain. But it gave me great pleasure at the time. And it allows me to show off a bit if I’m watching the Antiques Roadshow with friends!

For many years, I only had a part-time permanent job as a museum curator, and I made up my weekly hours with education work and even re-enacting, at various museums. Food and cooking was a natural extension of my work on medieval and early modern pottery. I had an evening lecture on medieval food and cooking too, which was very popular with local associations, usually to follow their annual general meetings or annual dinners, and Dame Eileen Currant's Tudor Christmas had a regular spot at a local museum. Since the museum which was my home base was at an important Roman site, I ended up doing Roman food demonstrations at open days as well. I gradually accumulated a collection of replica kitchen equipment, and a set of recipes for demonstration purposes. I came to realise that for all of these periods, many of the recipes had a characteristic set of instructions, as to both ingredients and methods, which could be summarised as follows.

In cibum Romanum – to cook Roman food.

Pepper.  Honey.  Fish sauce.  Asafoetida. Herbs. Wine vinegar.

Roman recipes mostly come from the so-called “Cookbook of Apicius”, and many of them are extremely cryptic, often consisting of nothing more than a series of nouns. Project Gutenberg has a translation of Apicius with comments. The line above is a summary of the majority of Roman recipes, in the Apicius style.  To make anything taste Roman, use some or all of these ingredients. They seem to have used them to flavour everything from sliced cucumber to hard-boiled eggs to roast chicken and other birds (including parrot). But you don’t need to try to find sows udders or larks’ brains to go Roman. Most of the time they ate quite ordinary things like chicken or fish or lentils, flavoured as above. Serve them with wholemeal bread, and wine mixed with water.

The herbs could be any of lovage, mint, cumin seed, coriander seed, fresh coriander, oregano, celery seeds, caraway seeds, parsley, savory, thyme, fennel seeds, or ginger. Avoid rue or pennyroyal in case of bad effects.

Thai fish sauce makes a good substitute for the Roman version (“garum”). Hing or asafoetida is the nearest thing to the Roman herb silphium, which was a popular if expensive flavouring. Pine kernels were also used a lot. They were pretty fond of pouring beaten eggs over everything and turning it into a sort of omelette or frittata. Don’t forget that pepper was considered to go well on sweet stuff. Try dates stuffed with pine nuts, fried in honey and sprinkled with freshly-ground black pepper; they are delicious.

Moving on to the medieval period, we come to works such as the Menagier de Paris (The Goodman of Paris), a sort of medieval Mrs Beeton in French dating from the late 14^th century. The author is unknown but it is written as if narrated by an elderly Parisian householder to his inexperienced fifteen year-old wife, and gives instructions on almost everything, from how to roast a swan to how to make ink. The Form of Curye is one of the oldest surviving English cookery books, attributed to Richard II’s head cooks, also 14^th century. So:

For to make your food taste medieval

Smite hym in pieces

Fry hym up in grece

And do thereto good herbyes

Nym wine oder water

And seethe it tyl it be enow

And serve it forthe…

Smite i.e. chop it into pieces. This works for anything, meat or vegetable, but avoid potatoes and tomatoes because they come from South America which hadn’t been discovered yet.

Fry it in whatever you usually fry stuff in, but it should be animal fat (‘grease’)

Add whatever herbs you think will go well with it: thyme, parsley, sage, bay leaves and basil. Do NOT use chilli: again, it hadn’t been discovered yet. “Herbyes” included vegetables so add any that you like. The onion and cabbage families were popular.

Add wine or water

Seethe i.e. boil/simmer it until it is done. Medieval recipes didn’t give cooking times. After all, they didn’t have any clocks. The only clocks were in churches and other important buildings, and they were not very accurate. They didn’t give temperatures either, because they had no way of measuring them. They just had to move the pot closer to or further from the flames. Use your judgement.

Serve it forth, usually in a little wooden bowl with a spoon, accompanied by some “pain de main” (white rolls) or if you are a bit more down-market, some “maslin" i.e. mixed wheat and rye bread. And ale or wine of course. It’s really most authentic if two or three people share the same drinking cup…

If you want to show off, the medieval lord would expect dishes which included rice, almonds, rosewater, sugar, dried and citrus fruits, and a hint of exotic spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. These ingredients were mostly brought back to England from the eastern Mediterranean by the Crusaders. They might be used in something like a rice pudding flavoured with rose petals and a lot of cream, or a chicken dish, where the chicken is boiled, pounded to a paste, and then reheated with wine, ground almonds, dried figs and spices. And if you want to serve a medieval salad, leave out the tomatoes and peppers, go heavy on the spring onions, and use edible flowers and lots of herbs.

Finally we arrive in the 16^th century. For reasons of convenience in transporting the equipment in a small car, and setting it up in a very cramped corner of a small gallery, I usually concentrated on banqueting stuff, which may be summarised quite simply: sugar. They had just got hold of the New World and access to sugar cane in quantity.

A Tudor Banquet

 ‘Suckets’: candied everything – lettuce stalks, cherries, orange peel, rose petals, rosemary flowers, whole spices, etc, simmered in sugar syrup over a chafing dish.

“Manus Christi”: little sweets made of sugar flavoured with rosewater and decorated with gold leaf

‘Marchpane’: marzipan on a pastry base with a layer of icing baked onto it.

Gingerbread: made with breadcrumbs, honey and spices including ginger; it was often coloured red and shaped in small wooden moulds

Sweetened wine

If you were a Tudor with social pretensions, the banquet was a dessert course at the end of a feast. There are many surviving books with recipes for making banqueting stuff; The good huswife's Jewell by Thomas Dalton is as good as any. A banquet involved sweetmeats of all kinds, served on plates moulded from sugar paste, accompanied by sweetened wine drunk from goblets moulded from sugar paste, and enlivened by music, entertainers, and a “subtlety”, a huge sugar sculpture carried in by several servants. This often included a tasteful reference to the importance of the host, such as a coat of arms; or perhaps a reference to the occasion, for example a woman in childbirth if it was a wedding.

If you felt that providing your guests with sugar plates was a bit over-the-top, you might have a set of little circular wooden trenchers decorated in bright colours with gold leaf. Many of these little plates had a poem on the back. If you were going to eat a wet sucket dripping with syrup (my favourite is candied lettuce stalks), you might even use a fork. Fingers were still used for the rest of the feast.

If you were wealthy enough, you might have a separate banqueting house, where you went to enjoy your dessert after the rest of the feast was over. Some people built them on the roof of their mansion, others out in the garden, where they might be a permanent structure, or something made for the occasion out of green branches decked with flowers. My favourite was one built up a tree.

All this sugar was very bad for Tudor teeth, as Queen Elizabeth I is said to have found out the hard way!

Some of these dishes are really yummy. So if you get tired of making your food taste Chinese or Italian or Indian or Mexican, try a Roman, Medieval or Tudor dish instead.