Alchemy and Meggy Swann (17 page)
Alchemists, of course, never turned base metal to gold. They did, however, invent procedures, processes, and equipment that showed later generations how to analyze minerals and metals and make medicines from them, how to distill essences, how chemical changes follow from combining different substances, how to use balances and weights, and how to build and use a variety of laboratory vessels. Alchemy's significant advances laid the basis for the science of chemistry.
***
In the centuries before there were newspapers and news channels, the general public had to rely on news from the street to find out what was happening. The most popular news medium in England from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was the broadside. Sold by street vendors and sometimes pinned up on walls in shops and alehouses, these single sheets carried public notices, news, speeches, and songs that could be read or sung aloud. The first broadsides were printed to inform the public of royal proclamations, acts, and official notices. Later they covered themes ranging from politics to current events.
Broadsides were mainly pages of text, but occasionally illustrations were added. Generally the illustrations were crude woodcuts and, in many cases, bore little or no relation to the text.
Some broadsides offered accounts of murders and descriptions of executions, including a supposed confession by the guilty party and his or her last words. Many, if not all, of these scaffold speeches and confessions were purely fictional descriptions of how the condemned fell into a life of crime. They'd end with a plea for forgiveness and an appeal to the reader to live an upright life.
Broadsides about storms, shipwrecks, floods, and fires were as popular as newspaper stories about such disasters are today. So too were accounts of "monstrous" children and sightings of mermaids, cannibals, and sea monsters, which included dates, names, and places to give the impression that these were true events.
The most common form of the broadside was the ballad. Ballads were poems or songs, meant to be sung, about romance, historical persons and events, the private lives of politicians and royalty, new legislation, unpopular taxes, the supernatural, and even sports. Among the earliest ballad broadsides was "A Lytel Geste of Robyne Hood," printed in 1506. Famous writers such as Robert Burns produced ballads, but generally the words appeared anonymously. The tunes were usually old favorites with new words. New tunes were merely suggested on the sheets, for only a small number of broadsides printed had musical notation. Street balladry was a popular form of entertainment, as well as a method for providing the latest news. Most of the ballads were sung by hawkers who sold the printed version for a halfpenny or a penny.
Many of the printers who produced broadsides would also have printed chapbooks, hornbooks, sermons, and playbills. Sometimes the printers distributed their own wares, but they usually relied on ballad sellers—peddlers who would sing and shout on the streets about the latest publication or carry newly printed materials to markets and fairs throughout England.
The ballads and broadsides in
Alchemy and Meggy Swann,
with the exception of Meggy's own ballad and Roger's silly song, are quoted from or based upon actual broadsides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of these can be seen as facsimiles on various sites on the Internet, a situation that would surely astonish the ballad singers and sellers of the past.
Meggy Swann lives at a time when many medieval ideas and prejudices are disappearing, including certain attitudes toward the ill, infirm, or disabled. Although opinions were diverse, most people believed that such afflictions had supernatural or demonological causes. Ill or disabled persons might be suffering possession or intervention by the Devil or perhaps God's punishment for some unspecified sin. But the times were changing. The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church in 1215 had found that illness or impairment was only
sometimes
caused by sin. The birth of the modern era and the development of scientific and medical theories saw more advocates for belief in natural causes.
Seriously ill or disabled people were mainly taken care of in hospitals and infirmaries operated by the Catholic Church. But after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and dispersed the priests in the mid-sixteenth century, the ill and infirm often found themselves on the streets, forced to beg. In 1601 England passed a so-called Poor Law to codify care for the needy. Those unable to work—the lame, elderly, and blind and very young children—were to be cared for in almshouses, or poorhouses. The able-bodied poor were to be set to work in a workhouse, called a house of industry. Vagrants or the idle poor could be sent to a house of corrections or even prison. Even so, beggars swarmed the streets.
Before I could tell Meggy's story, I needed to know exactly what her disability was, how it affected her, and how it looked to other people. I decided she suffered from what is now called bilateral hip dysplasia, an abnormal formation of both hip joints at birth in which the ball at the top of each thighbone is not stable in the socket. Unless this is corrected soon after birth, abnormal stresses cause malformation of the developing bone, and the child will have difficulty walking, a characteristic limp or waddling gait, and, if untreated, lifelong pain. The condition can be inherited or caused by the baby being carried in an unsuitable position in the womb or being born in the breech position (especially with feet up by the shoulders).
In Meggy's time, little was known about how to identify hip dysplasia and even less how to treat it. Children now are routinely examined for it at birth. The condition can be treated with physical therapy and medications, braces and splints, or surgery.
Louise's slipped wing, also known as angel wing, crooked wing, or drooped wing, is a condition of ducks and geese where the last joint of the wing is twisted so that the wing feathers point outward rather than lying smooth against the body. The birds that develop the problem are perfectly healthy, but, according to one Internet site, "they are just not as beautiful." I'm certain that Nicholas would disagree.
In Elizabethan as in medieval England, the words
thee
and
thou
were used as well as
you. Thee
and
thou
were familiar or informal forms of
you.
One used them to address children, servants, family, and closest friends. Many people today think that
thou
is the more formal word because it is used in the King James Version of the Bible when someone is speaking to God. However, the translators of the King James Version wanted the reader to know that one's relationship to God is personal and familiar, and so they used
thou.
The more formal
you
was used to address strangers and anyone above one in rank. It was also used as a sign of respect to one's parents or elders. The plural of
you
was
ye—
completely different from the
ye
meaning
the,
which is pronounced
the.
By the end of the sixteenth century, those grammatical rules were breaking down. Most people, including Shakespeare, used
you
and
thou
interchangeably. I decided that the language in
Alchemy and Meggy Swann
was complicated enough without the additional pronouns, so I have used only
you,
as we do now.
If you want to know more about the historical setting of Meggy's story, here are some places to look:
Davis, William Stearns.
Life in Elizabethan Days:
A
Picture of a Typical English Community at the End of the Sixteenth Century.
New York: Harper & Bros., 1930.
Emerson, Kathy Lynn.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England.
Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1996.
Moran, Bruce T.
Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Picard, Liza.
Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004.
Stow, John.
A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598.
Dover, N.H.: Alan Sutton Publishers, 1994.
Woog, Adam.
A History of the Elizabethan Theater.
San Diego: Lucent Books, 2003.