The French Connection

I planted out some Brussel Sprouts the other day, bought from the garden centre. One type was Brolin which I put in last year and were excellent, and another type, which caught my eye because it was an earlier maturing variety, called Breton.

As you may have seen from my previous blogs, I’m always on the look out for those little curiosities that can turn up whilst digging. Occasionally I have dug up things that look like coins but disappointingly never are, sometimes it’s a stone and other times it’s been a button. Well this time, whilst dibbling a hole for a sprout plant, the real thing turned up.

Here’s a shot of it still in the soil.(Click photo to enlarge)

This is it cleaned.
After a bit of research it turns out to be a 17th century French coin, issued during the reign of Louis the 14th. You can just make out the denomination, a Liard de France. Unfortunately, you can’t see the date, but by style it falls somewhere between 1650 and 1700.

Now back to the connection bit. It happened to be one of the Breton variety that I was planting at the time. OK, I know that’s a bit tenuous to say the least, and I could well have been planting out French Beans or sowing early Nantes carrots I suppose, however there’s more.

It seems that old Louis was more than just interested in gardens and loved his vegetables. So much so that he had The Potager du Roi (fr: Kitchen Garden of the King) created near the palace of Versaille, to supply the King's court. A massive enterprise covering 25 acres, “it required thirty experienced gardeners to tend to the garden plots, greenhouses, and the twelve thousand trees”(full Wikipedia article here), to supply the King’s court.

The Potager du Roi.
Now that's what you call an allotment.

Something to make your hair curl.

As a coincidence to the last blog, and in continuance of my “finds from the plot” series, here's a find I didn't post last time, shown in the pictures. The reason being, was that I had no idea what it was or whether it had any age to speak of.

It is made of a similar material to that of clay pipes and has a makers mark on the end, “WB” under a crown.



At first I thought I it was quite modern, a porcelain switch handle maybe, and then wondered if it was some kind of stamp for pottery making.

After a bit of research I have eventually tracked it down, and it turns out to be an 18th century Wig Curler, dating to around 1750. Or more correctly, half of one, the other end would have been exactly the same.

It seems they were used to curl wigs in Georgian days, by tightly curling the hair around them, dampening the wig, and then baking in an oven.

Apparently, the wearing of false hair, or “periwigs” reached its peak in France and England during the 17th and 18th centuries, and a great variety were for sale, together with the necessary accompaniments of a wig stand and wig curlers.


These curlers were made from pipe clay, some being hollow to allow heat to penetrate, and it is thought that they were made by pipe makers. The WB stamp is by far the most common of those found.

They are also found in America, for example on an archaeological dig at Ferry Farm, George Washingtons’s boyhood home, and here is a very interesting link for our friends across the water.
http://www.kenmore.org/ferryfarm/archaeology/arch_special/washington.html

Here you’ll see they found wig curlers with exactly the same makers mark, as this one found in a small corner of an English allotment. So as that old saying goes, it’s a small world isn’t it.

Independence.

We went to Filey on the east coast today, and had a walk along the front in the bracing sea air then up towards the gardens at the far end. When we reached the top I noticed the council had put up an information board about a famous sea battle that took place in the bay, between Britain and America no less. Apparently, in September of 1779, one John Paul Jones, an American of Scottish birth, took on the might of the British navy in the American War of Independence and won. In fact just to rub our noses it in, he also nicked one of our ships, his own being damaged, and scarpered off to Holland in it!

As we stood looking out towards Flamborough Head, I could just imagine the ships blasting each other at point blank range within the bay, and the carnage being caused. An epic battle between the nascent America and the government of Britain being waged just off our coast, who would have thought it.

So what has this got to do with allotments, I hear you ask.

Well it’s to do with the psychology of allotment holders, and what makes them tick. After all not everyone is as daft we are, to turn out in all weathers digging and weeding, and fight an endless war of attrition with countless pests and diseases. All to get a few vegetables that would cost half as much from the supermarket, if the true cost of the many hours of labour were accounted for.

So there must be something else, and I think it’s all down to independence.

Most allotment holders seem to have a strong desire to work their own piece land and grow their own vegetables, in an act of almost defiant independence of “the system”. It’s like sticking two fingers up to the hegemony of the supermarkets, and the officialdom that took away our rights to land for the benefit of today’s elite rich landowners.

Now back to that battle - John Paul Jones was just one of many thousands of people at the time, who moved to a new country in search of independence and to own their own piece of land. Admittedly, many were forced by circumstance, but many were not, and they all took their chance, in the hope of having a piece of earth they could call their own. So strong was this desire, that they took on the old system and won their nation’s independence, through the bravery of men like this.

So I’d like to think that we humble allotment holders, have a little bit in common with these early pioneers, in retaining and nurturing that same strong sense of independence, and woe betide those bloody councillors if they try to put the rent up this year!

Get off my land.

I was napping, sorry digging, on the plot the other day, when I was startled by the sound of a low flying aircraft overhead. It was that low in fact, it had me running for cover thinking I was in bloody Pearl Harbour!

Luckily I had a brown paper bag in the shed, and after I’d stopped hyperventilating I realised it was on a training run, testing the radar at nearby Staxton Wold RAF Station which is just to the South of us. Night and day these people scan the skies over the North Sea, protecting our territory from those nasty Russians. Don’t they know that they can come over here on ferries now, with visas.

As it happens, just to the North of our allotments (See above photo) I can see an archaeological site where people were doing a similar thing, 4000 years ago. Here there are ancestral burial mounds and massive boundary earthworks, that were meant to send out a clear message to any newcomers, that this was their territory, “Keep Off”.

Now when we first got these plots they were marked out just with pegs by the council, and the first thing everyone did was to put up a fence around theirs, and woe betide anyone who tried to pinch a bit from someone else.

Of course it was to keep those damn rabbits out, wasn’t it ? Well no, I suspect there was a little more going on than that. It was that same vital urge to claim their territory, that’s been going on since those first farmers settled this land.

So I sat back down in my little bit of territory, keeping a wary eye out for any more suicidal kamikaze pilots, and thought, “nowt’s changed much as it”.

Are you digging on my grave ?

It was good to be able to do some digging the other day, and following on from my "Victoria to the Bronze Age" blog, I found some teeth !


No, not somebody’s long lost dentures, but real “tussy pegs”.



Obviously they were animal teeth, which I suspect were from some old sheep that’s probably been buried here when it was a field, many moons ago. But I have to admit it did get me going for a while, and kept a wary eye out for any other signs that I was perhaps digging up someone's resting place.

It reminded me of this little poem which I find quite moving, and yet funny at the same time.

Ah, are you digging on my grave ? by (Thomas Hardy)

"Ah, are you digging on my grave,
My loved one? -- planting rue?"
--"No: yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
'That I should not be true.'"

"Then who is digging on my grave,
My nearest dearest kin?"
-- "Ah, no: they sit and think, 'What use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
Her spirit from Death's gin.'"

"But someone digs upon my grave?
My enemy? -- prodding sly?"
-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
And cares not where you lie.

"Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say -- since I have not guessed!"
-- "O it is I, my mistress dear,
Your little dog , who still lives near,
And much I hope my movements here
Have not disturbed your rest?"

"Ah yes! You dig upon my grave...
Why flashed it not to me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!"

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting place."

From Victoria to the Bronze Age

So who's been here before you ?
As promised earlier, here’s a bit of a diversion from the usual allotment type blog, which you may find interesting, about finds on my plot

Being interested in history and archaeology, I couldn’t help noticing the man made things that turned up as I was digging the plot for the first time. Most of it was just broken 19th and 20th century pottery, glass and clay pipes but there were a couple of earlier items that pushed the history of man’s presence on this piece land even further.

As you know, up to last year this was farmland, that I presume has been cultivated for hundreds of years, being close to a very old and important village and town. So most of the items found, probably came to be here through the activity of spreading night soil on the land. Night soil was the name given contents of household “privies”, from the towns and villages that was collected and sold as manure to farmers, before the days of sewers.

Given that they were basically a hole in the ground into which all sorts of rubbish, as well as sewage, was deposited, it is not surprising that broken bits of household items turn up, and here is a selection of them. Some things were a little more personal, like the little pot lid perhaps from a toy teapot and the opaque class bead possibly from a brooch, at the bottom of the photo.



However, some items will have been dropped by farm workers whilst working the fields, and I’m sure this is how the clay pipe bowls, come to be there. If you’re lucky you may find a bowl with a makers’s mark which can be researched.



Pushing things back even further, there was a piece of 17th century slipware from the English civil war period, aptly nicknamed Mr Kipling ware, and a couple of pieces of Medieval glazed earthenware from around the 15th C .



Now for the surprise!!!
Having studied Archaeology for a short while has enabled me to identify worked pieces of flint, from the many that you find in the soil. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found this piece.



It is not exactly a flint tool but what is known as a core, from which pieces of flint have been knapped (knocked off) to form small tools such as knives and scrapers. You can plainly see where the pieces have been struck off from the main body. As for its age, it was dropped or lost on this site by its owner during the Bronze Age, when flint was still being used, probably around 3500 years ago !

So keep an eye out when you are digging you never know what might turn up, and I’ll keep you posted on anything else I find.

By the way, I would love to hear what any of you have found on your plots or gardens, just post in the comments.