In The Shaker Murders I used a granny cradle to comfort one of my ill characters. I saw one of these large cradles at a display of Shaker materials at the New York State Museum.
These cradles look like baby cradles although they are much larger. No one is quite sure what these items were used for but it is assumed they were used for people who were ill or at the end of life and in need of comfort.
I chose to use the cradle this way.
A friend called me a Luddite the other day after a fit of yelling about computers.. (I am actually good with computers. But after my laptop crashed in June, I still haven’t gotten my finances straightened out. According to Quicken, I am $14,000 in the hole. Hence my rant about computers in general and online banking in particular.) But I digress.
The name-calling prompted me to research the Luddites. Yes, it was a real group – of weavers and other textile workers in the early nineteenth century. New weaving and spinning machines were coming into the factories.The owners said that the machines were more efficient – they probably were – and would make cloth cheaper – and they did. (The word ‘shoddy’ came into being shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I doubt it.) The weavers were not opposed to the new machinery; that was not the issue. The problem was greed.
Weavers spent seven years in an apprenticeship before they could set up shop. Now they feared that the time and effort put into this craft was wasted. They had reason to worry. As the factory owners fired the men, they hired women and children, who they paid much less, to work instead.This was the beginning of six year olds working 14 hour days in a factory.
So the men protested. They blackened their faces and broke into the factories to destroy the new and expensive machinery. They purported to follow a fictional character called Ned Ludd(a stocking weaver) or another fictional personage King Ludd. Thus the name.
The British Government sided with the factory owners and made breaking machinery a capital crime. Soldiers were sent to quell the protests. A large number of men (both members of the protests and not) were swept up and accused of being Luddites. Those that were found guilty were either executed or transported. That ended the protests very quickly.
The situation was slightly different in the United States. The first textile factory came into being in Massachusetts in 1814. Lowell, who had seen the textile machines in Great Britain, wanted to do the same in the U.S. (The city of Lowell is named for him.) He built his first factories beginning in 1816. But the United States had a smaller population and there was not a large number of unemployed men so there was not the same labor pool. To solve the problem Lowell hired young women, who became known as mill girls, between the ages of 15 and 35. He of course paid them less than men. (To his credit, he chose not to employ children.) The mill girls were housed in company owned boarding houses, were strictly chaperoned and offered other ‘improving’ activities so the jobs had decent working conditions. This changed as the century wore on. The mill girls unionized, went out on strike a few times, and finally joined forces with another union.
Since my character, Will Rees, is a weaver he is going to be affected by the increasing industrialization. In fact, will lose his profession in less than twenty years. He will be in his middle fifties by then, however, a fairly advanced age for the time, so he will have missed this huge change by only a few years.
The positions of coroners and constables both came to the United States from Britain. Corner, the root of which comes from the same root as crown – think coronet – was set up in 1134 to certify the death of an individual within a jurisdiction. The position of constable was also an import but the word is much older. The stable part of constable is from the Latin for, you guessed it, stable so the word actually means the count of the stable.
The United States still uses ‘coroner’. Think Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta. But the office, and the requirements for, vary widely by state even now. Some require a forensics speciality, some just a physician. Some are appointed, some are elected. I suspect the results and the opportunities for abuse also vary from state to state.
Anyone who watches British TV knows about constables and all the ranks within the generic title. But even in the United States the early constables had the duties and privileges of a low level law enforcement officer – they have the power to arrest for example. In the era of my character Will Rees, constables (and the watch) were the agents of the law. The constables were under a Sheriff but in Colonial and early Federalist times there were few of those. In the District of Maine (Maine was not a separate state then but was a part of Massachusetts) there was only one Sheriff.
There are still constables in the U.S. but the duties vary widely. What happened? Well, in 1829, when the British Metropolitan Police were established, the states in the U.S. gradually adopted the model of a police force. And police officers took over the duties formerly assigned to the constable.
Very excited to post the cover for the next Will Rees. Although it will be published in Great Britain this fall, it will come out here in the States next spring.
I am excited and very happy to announce that two new Will Rees books have been accepted for publication. “The Shaker Murders”, Rees number 6, will be coming out next spring. Number 7, working title “Simply Dead” (Not crazy about it), will be after that.
I am working on the next Will Rees; “A Circle of Dead Girls” which is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new United States.
As I mentioned before in the previous post, at least my character Will Rees was used to money. Of course, in the early U.S., the people used French sous, Spanish pieces of eight, and British pence as well as the new coinage: the American dollar.
In the new series, in Bronze Age Crete, I am not sure how common money was.
No longer nomadic, the civilizations of the Middle East had settled homes where they grew food. Financial interchanges probably began with barter – but that must have taken some dickering. “I’ll give you a bracelet for so many bags of wheat” for example.
By the period of my new series, the civilizations did have metal – hence the name Bronze Age. Bronze is a mixture of tin and copper. I suspect, since they had metal, they had some form of coinage – or at least metal that was used as money. Was it per weight? Who knows.
Many many clay tablets have been found on Crete and of course where the great civilizations of Mesopotamia were located. Most of them are lists: lists of products or a name of a person who will pay so many pieces of silver. One theory suggests that writing began so as to keep track of money.
But we would probably not recognize the money. In some cases the money was based on measures of barley that is the shekel. As we might expect, gold was rare and valuable – but also heavy – so silver and electrum (a combination of gold and silver) were also used. Egypt used copper as money.
And with the trade that took place at this time, I expect Egyptian copper money, shekels and other coins were used as well.
True coins, by the way, were not created until around 600 BCE. A great leap forward because, if you have consistent coinage, the money offered does not have to be weighed every time a financial transaction too place. Of course gold and silver would have been good for valuable items such as a slave or a bull but what about food?Thousands of less valuable coins made of copper or bronze have been found at places like Athens where there were markets and shops.
There is a lot more history about money – the role of kings, banking, lending and interest and so forth – features we take for granted to day. Hard to believe it all had to be invented and is actually quite complicated.
Very excited to announce I will be at the Elm Street Bookstore in New Canaan, Ct on Saturday, September 9 from 12 noon to 2:30. I expect to talk about witchcraft as well as the Shakers and will bring some show and tell items.
There is no rum without sugar (this is true for any alcoholic drink). Prior to the Revolutionary War most people drank rum or hard cider. Sailors were paid partly in rum. The early settlers, however, drank it in a punch or toddy. Early on, rum was distilled in the Caribbean where sugar was grown. Then it made sense for the rum to be distilled where the prime market was – New England. By the mid-1700s, though, most rum was made, and made more cheaply too, in New England. Many fortunes were made by this rum and I’ve read that one of those fortunes was made by. the Kennedy family.
But I digress.
What were some of the consequences of this cheap and easily obtainable rum?
Well, sugar is very labor intensive so the cultivation of sugar resulted in a tremendous need for slaves and was one of the big drivers of the slave trade.
Second, sugar exhausts the soil quickly so planters had to keep finding new land. This was certainly a big reason for the push for plantations and slavery westward.
Third, Americans drank more than ever. ‘Demon Rum’ became one of the many names for rum, leading to the temperance movement and to Prohibition with all of its associated crime and other problems.
And yes, although many New Englanders were abolitionists, New England profited hugely from the trade. New England ships brought slaves to the New World. New England ships brought sugar north. And New England ships brought codfish south for the slaves to eat.
Rum drinking declined after the Revolutionary War since rye was grown in the frontier – then around Pittsburgh – and distilled into whiskey. Of course, that came with its own set of problems.
Sugar is still grown in Louisiana and Domino has a big presence there. (Their factory looks abandoned – broken windows and shabby exterior.) In Louisiana there are two plantings a year.
How much sugar do we consume now? Well, in the early 1700s, a few pounds or less might be ingested by the average person per year. In 1999, the peak of sugar consumption, it was 111 grams a day, just about half a pound a day. In 2016, that dropped to 94 grams a day. Soda is one culprit but actually sugar and high fructose corn syrup is in just about everything.
And what about rum? Well, by Prohibition, although rum was castigated as the ‘demon’, most people were drinking whiskey. Rum’s big day had already passed. And in a weird twist, New Englanders again made fortunes by becoming ‘rumrunners’, making available alcohol during Prohibition.
And it all started with sugar.
In several of my books, Rees’s children attend dame schools. I mention them almost without a description. (Of course I mention the schooling received at the hands of the Shakers. Boys and girls were segregated: boys were taught by the men during the winter and girls by the women during the summer.)
Well, what are dame schools?
The New England Puritans believed that Satan would try to keep people from understanding the scriptures so it was decided that all children be taught to read. In fact, the first American schools arose in New England. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635 and the Mather School in 1639 in Dorchester.In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made town schools compulsory and other New England colonies soon followed. These were for white boys only. Common schools were established in the 1700s but a tuition was charged.
If parents could not homeschool their children they went to dame schools. Considering how busy most women were I wondered how that worked out. With that said, however, there were enough educated women in the North who could function as teachers. Usually they were widows who taught in their own home. They were paid in money but also in kind – baked goods, produce, alcohol and the like. (I imagine the abilities of these untrained teachers varied widely – from essentially a day care to a real school. But I digress.)
In the beginning education focused on reading and ‘rithmetic but soon it was the four R’s; ‘riting and religion as well. Some of the dame schools offered girls embroidery, sewing and other such graces. Dame schools went up to eight grade and most girls went no farther. Boys, however, might move to a grammar school where they were taught advanced arithmetic, Latin and Greek by a male teacher.
There was also a huge divergence between the North and the South. Planters educated their children with tutors and son were frequently sent to England or Scotland for schooling. During the early part of the 1800s, it was against the law to teach slaves but schools for white children were opened in Georgia and South Carolina (1811). Segregated schools for children of all races began opening during Reconstruction and continued until 1954 when the Supreme Court declared state laws establishing segregated schools unconstitutional.
A final note: These schools went only to the eighth grade just like the dame schools. For many rural areas of the country eighth grade school was the norm until 1945.
The Shakers arrived in the New World in 1774. Like most of the new colonists, they brought some herbal knowledge with them. Yarrow, boneset, dandelion (which is not native to North America) are some of the plants brought over from Britain. Although there were doctors, most of a family’s medical needs were served by a wife or mother, midwife – not the doctor. But I digress.
Again like many of the new colonists, the Shakers drew upon the knowledge of the local tribes to learn about the herbs in the woods. At first, the Shakers wanted the herbs to treat the illnesses in their own community. Later, they planted physic gardens to meet their needs. As farmers everywhere do, if they grew a surplus, they sold it. This was the beginning of a thriving and very profitable business.
Although Watervliet was the first Shaker community, (just outside of Albany several of the old fields now lie under the Albany airport), the Central Ministry was located at New Lebanon in New York (west of Albany.) The herbal trade began here and soon spread to several other communities, Canterbury, NH and Union Village near Lebanon, Ohio among them. AS we all know, the health business is rife with quackery, The snake oil salesman is a caricature of reality for our early history. The Shakers, despite the fact they were considered religious oddities (almost cultists) brought herbal medicines to respectability.
It was also incredibly lucrative. At its height, the business grossed $150,000 annually. This in a time when an experienced carpenter might make four shillings a week. In today’s money, that $150,000 a year would be worth upwards of 2 million.
The Shakers, by the way, kept meticulous records. Besides commercial transactions , they carefully documented what herb was shipped where and what it cost, they kept records of every aspect of Shaker life. The health of every individual was of prime importance. In fact, the Millennial Laws decreed that “As the natural body is prone to sickness and disease, it is proper that there should be suitable persons appointed to attend to necessary duties in administering aid to those in need.” In health care, as in so many other practices, the Shakers were well in advance of the society that surrounded them.
A quick review of the records pertaining to the deaths of these community members and in an age when the life span was between 40 and fifty, it is not surprising to find Shakers passing away at 87, 88 and even 101.
I based my primary Shaker community Zion on Sabbathday Lake which is located in Alfred, Maine. It is still home to the last remaining Shakers. (Three at last count. When I first began my research several years ago there were ten.) A visit to any of the gift shops in what were once thriving Shaker communities reveals packets of herbs for purchase, all packed at Sabbathday Lake. The remaining Shakers continue to labor exactly as they always have done.
Next: a review of some of the less common herbs used and sold by the Shakers.