The Royal Menagerie

            I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately (to the detriment of my audiobook listening…).  My mom recommended the Rex Factor podcast, and it’s great.  The gist of it is, the hosts go through all the Kings and Queens of England and rate them in different categories and determine if the monarch has the Rex Factor.  Presumably (because I’m not that far yet) they’ll pit those who do have the Rex Factor against each other and try and figure out who the best English monarch was.  I think they’re doing Scotland now that they have finished England, which should be cool too.  All this to say: I heard about today’s topic in a couple episodes of Rex Factor and decided to look into it further.

            Throughout history, monarchs have been exchanging crazy gifts as a way of showing how powerful they are and to forge alliances.  This included food stuffs, gems, princesses (because really, you’re giving away your daughter to another country in order to forge an alliance, and what shows power more than that?), as well as all sorts of wild and exotic animals.  A lot of these animals were not even natural to the country that was gifting them, and so it showed that monarch’s wealth in that he could pay for this crazy animal to come from India or Africa or wherever and just give it away.  Some animals signified the strength of the monarch giving it away as well.

            England was given a lot of gifts of exotic animals over the years; as well as being symbols of wealth and power for those gifting them, they were symbols of power for the English monarch as well, often being purely “for the entertainment and curiosity of the court” (1).  Some monarchs wanted to show off so much, they acquired exotic animals on their own.  William the Conqueror was the first king to keep animals.  His home, Woodstock, was stocked with a number of exotic animals, though what kinds they were isn’t known.  William’s son, Henry I, enclosed Woodstock’s grounds and expanded the collection of animals to ultimately include “lions, leopards, lynxes, camels, owls and a porcupine” (2).  These two were really just the king keeping these animals because he wanted to, the gifted animals would begin later.

            The first records of what became known as The Tower Menagerie or The Royal Menagerie began in 1204 with King John.  John kept his animals at the Tower of London, a practice that would continue for over six-hundred years.  We know John received three boat loads of animals from Normandy, but we don’t know what they were.  We do know he had lions and bears, though.  The only way we know he really had anything is because of bookkeeping records referencing them.

John’s son, Henry III, is usually credited with the creation of the Menagerie, because we know so much more about the amounts and kinds of animals he had.  Henry III came to power in 1216; the first known gifts of animals were in 1235.  Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, gave Henry III three lions or leopards as a wedding gift upon Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence.  Frederick II had married Henry III’s sister, Isabella, and “this gift was a sign of their alliance and friendship” (3).  Frederick gave Henry three lions (or leopards) because there were three lions on Henry’s shield; this emblem is still used on English football and cricket patches.

            In 1251 Henry III was given a “white bear” from King Haakon IV of Norway, generally believed to be a polar bear, though that term was not in use then.  The bear was kept muzzled and chained when it was on land, but was put on a large rope and was allowed to fish in the Thames.  The sheriffs had “to pay fourpence a day towards the upkeep” of the bear (4).

            The sheriffs’ having to pay to keep the king’s animals is a recurring theme.  Just three years later they had to pay to build an elephant house at the Tower for the arrival of at least one, male, African Elephant from King Louis IX of France.  The elephant obviously needed a lot more space than the lions did, and so a forty foot long, wooden elephant house was built with the money from the sheriffs.  The elephant house eventually was converted into prison cells.

            In 1264, the animals were moved to the west end of the Tower of London.  This new area had “rows of cages with arched entrances, enclosed behind grilles.  They were set in two storeys, and it appears that the animals used the upper cages during the day and were moved to the lower storey at night” (5).  Most popularly and in the long-term, the lions were kept here.  Originally just the Bulwark, this part of the Tower of London became known as Lion Tower under the reign of Edward I at the beginning of the fourteenth century.  Edward I created the position, Master of the King’s Bears and Apes, later called Keeper of the Lions and Leopards.

            We’ll skip ahead a few hundred years to the reign of Elizabeth I.  At some point during his reign, Henri IV of France had been sent an Indian elephant.  He found the elephant too expensive to feed, though, so he sent it on to Elizabeth I.  Elizabeth I is also the first monarch to open the menagerie to the public; previously it had only been for the enjoyment of the court.  At the time she opened it to the public, the menagerie included “lionesses, a lion, a tiger, a lynx, a wolf, a porcupine and an eagle” (6).  Under the reign of James I, public shows included lions, bears, and dogs fighting as entertainment (7).

            While James I was king, the British Empire was expanding, and he received gifts accordingly.  He received “a flying squirrel from Virginia, a tiger, a lioness, five camels and an elephant” (8); the camels and elephant were a gift from the King of Spain in 1623.  James was so invested in his lions in particular that he created a special nippled bottle so orphaned cubs could be fed.  James I’s elephant was housed at St. James rather than at the Tower of London and “was given wine daily from April to September, as it was believed it couldn’t drink water at that time of year” (9).  James I expanded the menagerie; because it was now open to the public, James had viewing platforms installed.

            Jumping forward a bit again, in 1672 Christopher Wren supervised the building of a new Lion House at the Tower.  People were still flocking in to see the animals and new structures were needed.

            Along with all the new visitors, misfortune streamed in.  In 1686, Mary Jenkinson was petting a lion’s paw “when it suddenly caught her arm ‘with his Claws and mouth, and most miserably tore her Flesh from the Bone’” (10).  Mary’s arm was amputated, but she still died.

            In addition to animals harming humans, humans harmed the animals, whether through intent or negligence.  Many of the animals had to travel great distances to get to England and then to the Menagerie.  People on the ships and in England didn’t know how to take care of these exotic animals and so many died on the voyages over.  Once in England, those that survived would still suffer due to their keepers just not knowing how to handle them.  Many animals were kept in cages that were much too small and were fed food that wasn’t part of their diet.  In addition to the elephant drinking wine mentioned above, some ostriches also suffered because of what people thought their diet was.  In the late eighteenth century, two ostriches were sent from the Dey of Tunis.  It was commonly believed at the time, for whatever reason…, that ostriches could digest iron.  In 1791, one of the ostriches died after having eaten over eighty nails that were fed to it (11).

            These animals were on display to entertain, not to educate, and everyone suffered for it.  Leopards were made or allowed to play with umbrellas; zebras were allowed to roam and one went into a soldier’s canteen and proceeded to drink what was available; while still on the ship it travelled over on, a baboon threw a nine-pound cannon ball at a young sailor boy on the ship and killed him; a wolf escaped; a monkey bit a soldier’s leg; in the 1780s monkeys were living in a completely furnished room, as if they were people.  Much like Mary Jenkinson above though, according to the 1810 guidebook, one monkey tore part of a boy’s leg off and so the monkeys were removed (12).

            In the early eighteenth century it cost three half pence to get in, or you could bring a cat or dog to be fed to the lions.  At this time the menagerie had slipped in the number of animals it had; there were really only lions, tigers, hyenas, and bears.  When George IV became king in 1820 (though he had been Prince Regent since 1811), he began rebuilding the menagerie.  With the help of his Keeper, Alfred Cops, George IV built the menagerie up from four animals (a lion, a panther, a tiger, and “a grizzly bear called Martin” (13)) in 1821, up to over sixty species and over two-hundred-eighty individual animals in 1828.  New additions to the menagerie included “a zebra, an alligator, a bearded griffin, a pig-faced baboon, an ocelot, kangaroos and a Bornean bear” (14).

            Alfred Cops was a good Keeper.  He seemed to really care about the animals and knew a bit better how to care for them.  He even brought some of his own animals to the Tower when he moved in (Keepers of the Royal Menagerie lived up in Lion Tower).  Despite all this, there were still accidents with the animals.  Cops himself had a boa close around his neck once while trying to feed it.  In early-mid 1830 a leopard attacked the person who had come in to clean its exercise yard.  In December 1830 a door was accidentally raised “allowing a lion and a Bengal tiger and tigress to meet” (15).  The animals fought for half an hour and were “only separated by applying heated rods to the mouths and nostrils of the tigers who were winning” (16); the lion still died a few days later.

            It was becoming apparent that the Tower was no longer suitable (if it really ever was) for the keeping of animals and for crowds to come through to see them.  When William IV became king, he really didn’t care about the menagerie, and so the animals were moved in 1831.  The Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park received thirty-two animals beginning in 1831, and Dublin Zoo and another zoo received others.  By 1835 the last of the animals were transferred to Regent’s Park “after one of the lions was accused of biting a soldier” (17).  Only Alfred Cops and his personal animals remained.  When Cops died in 1853, Lion Tower was torn down.

            Despite this, the monarchy continued to receive animals from other countries and still does today.  Queen Elizabeth II has received jaguars and sloths from Brazil and was sent an elephant from Cameroon as a wedding anniversary present (18).  In 2011, an art installation by Kendra Haste was on display at the Tower of London.  The wire lions, near where Lion Tower stood, were a big hit; the display also included an elephant, polar bear, and baboons.

1, 15, 16 - Tower of London – The Royal Menagerie:life with the lions

2, 5 - Menagerie

3, 7, 10, 11, 12 - Tower of London - Tragic andSurprising Stories

4, 17 - Tower of London - Menagerie

6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18 - Julia Stuart, “Thepolar bear who lived at the Tower… along with a grumpy lion and a baboon whothrew cannon balls: Britain’s first (and most bizarre) zoo”, The Daily Mail, September 21, 2010.

The Father of Immunology

            This is another subject recommended by my mom.  A couple weeks ago I made the mistake of getting into a discussion about vaccines on Facebook.  I knew it was a bad idea as I was doing it but couldn’t help myself.  As you can imagine it didn’t go well…  I related the story to my mom and she suggested researching vaccines, or at least Edward Jenner.  So I did.

            Edward Anthony Jenner was born on May 17, 1749, the eighth of nine children.  His father was the Rev. Stephen Jenner, the vicar in Berkeley.  Because his father was a vicar, Edward had a better education than most.  He went to school at Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester, where he was inoculated against smallpox.  This inoculation supposedly had a lifelong impact on his health and may have affected his further career.

            When he was fourteen, Edward was apprenticed to a surgeon, Mr. Daniel Ludlow, in South Gloucestershire.  Edward stayed with Mr. Ludlow for seven years.  In 1770, at the end of the seven years, Edward was apprenticed to John Hunter and his colleagues at St. George’s Hospital to study surgery and anatomy.  John  Hunter gave Edward the advice, “Don’t think; try”, the famous advice of William Harvey.  Edward returned to his boyhood area in 1773 and became a successful doctor and surgeon; he kept in contact with Hunter though, and Hunter even suggested Edward for the Royal Society.

            Back in Berkeley, Edward and some colleagues started the Gloucestershire Medical Society.  The group had meals and read medical papers.  Edward contributed papers on “angina pectoris, ophthalmia, and cardiac valvular disease and commented on cowpox” (1).  Edward was part of a similar group near Bristol as well.

            In 1788, Edward was elected to the Royal Society for a paper he wrote on the nested cuckoo; natural history was a lifelong passion of his.  In 1792, Edward received his MD from the University of St Andrews.  In March of 1788, Edward married Catharine Kingscote.  Edward and Catharine may have met while he was doing a ballooning experiment on or near her family’s property.  They would have two sons and a daughter together before Catharine’s death in 1815 from tuberculosis.

            A bit of background on vaccinations and smallpox.  Previous attempts had been made to stop people from catching these horrible diseases.  The Circassians had been doing inoculations for as long as was known, and the Turks had learned of it from them.  In 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought variolation to Britain from Istanbul.  Voltaire wrote that 60% of the population at the time caught smallpox, and 20% of the population would die from it.  Smallpox was devastating countries’ populations.  In 1765 John Fewster wrote a paper on the link of smallpox to cowpox, but did not pursue the connection.

            Starting in the 1770s, five people in both England and Germany were testing cowpox as a treatment against smallpox, but did not make proper headway.  At the time it was understood that milkmaids had relative immunity to smallpox.  Edward Jenner believed that if we could put pus from cowpox blisters into healthy people, it would protect them from smallpox.

            On May 14, 1796, Edward tested his theory on the eight-year-old son of his gardener.  Edward put pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blisters into small cuts on both of the boy’s arms.  The boy developed a bit of a fever but was basically fine.  After the boy had recovered, Edward gave him the normal course of variolation for smallpox and the boy was fine; Edward tried again a while later and the boy was again fine.  This helped show that 1) we could prevent smallpox better than we’d been doing and 2) that we could create immunity from person to person, people did not have to come into contact with cows.

            Edward tried his procedure on twenty-three other subjects and the results held.  Edward published his findings and vaccination took off.  (Some of the conclusions Edward made were correct, others have been disproved due to improving science, but his theory about vaccination holds.)  Edward’s discovery spread across Europe and the world; by 1840 Britain had banned variolation and made vaccination for smallpox free of charge.  All this work on vaccination meant Edward couldn’t keep up his normal practice though; he was granted large sums of money to keep up his research rather than having to go back to his normal job.

            From 1803 to its disbanding in 1809, Edward was president of the Jennerian Society which was “concerned with promoting vaccination to eradicate smallpox” (2).  In 1808 the National Vaccine Establishment was founded; Edward didn’t like who was running it though and so was not very involved.  In 1805, Edward became a founding member of the Medical and Chirurgical Society, which later became the Royal Society of Medicine.  In 1802 Edward was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1806 a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

            In 1811 Edward returned to London.  He noted that the cases of smallpox that were around among the vaccinated were of much less severity than those of those who weren’t vaccinated.  This continued to show his research to be correct, and allowed him to continue making observations on vaccinations over time.

            In 1821 Edward was appointed physician to King George IV.  He was also elected mayor of Berkeley, and was a justice of the peace.  Throughout this time, Edward continued his natural history work too.  In 1823 he presented a paper to the Royal Society on bird migrations.

On January 25, 1823, Edward suffered a case of apoplexy that paralyzed his right side.  The next day, January 26, he suffered a stroke and died.  He was 73.  Edward Jenner was buried at St Mary’s in Berkeley and was survived by a son and a daughter.

            Edward’s recognitions did not stop with his death.  English settlers to Pennsylvania named a number of towns for him in Pennsylvania.  His house is now a small museum.  There are statues to him all over England.  Hospitals all over have wings named for him.  He has a crater on the moon named for him, and there’s even a character on The Walking Dead named Jenner for him.

Edward Jenner’s work laid the foundations for immunology, leading to him being called “The Father of Immunology”.  Most importantly, I think, in 1979 the World Health Organization “declared smallpox an eradicated disease” (3), largely due to vaccinations, but from other measures as well.  Some samples of smallpox still exist in places like the CDC, but hopefully we will never need them.

            Vaccinations are so important.  As that last paragraph says, the WHO has declared smallpox eradicated.  We are close to that with other diseases too, but access to vaccines in some places across the globe makes that difficult.  There’s no reason that some of these deadly diseases should be popping back up in the United States of all places.  They were nearly eradicated here and due to the anti-vaxx movement they’re coming back (I’m think of measles, etc. right now).  This is ridiculous.  People put their lives at risk to vaccinate rather than potentially get some of these diseases (look at those numbers from Voltaire again!  Also, I recommend finding the clip from the John Adams miniseries where Abigail vaccinates –or I guess actually variolates– the family against smallpox), and we’re not vaccinating because that’s somehow seen as worse?  I don’t get it… Okay, soapbox-ing over.

1, 2, 3 – Edward Jenner

Sigrid Undset

            Apologies for the lack of post last week.  I was behind to begin with, I got halfway through typing up my notes but I was feeling horrible, and wound up spending all day in bed instead of doing anything at all productive. L  But here we are this week with the post I should’ve written for last week.  Hopefully that won’t happen again.

            This week we have a Nobel Prize winner in literature for a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while (I finally picked it up last weekend!), Sigrid Undset.  Sigrid was born at her mother’s childhood home in Kalundborg, Denmark on May 20, 1882.  She was the oldest of three daughters of Charlotte Undset (née Anna Maria Charlotte Gyth) and Ingvald Martin Undset, a Norwegian architect.  When Sigrid was two, her family moved to Kristiana, Norway (what is now Oslo; the name changed in 1925).

            When Sigrid was eleven, her father died after a prolonged illness.  This put the family in financial trouble, and Sigrid had to give up her hopes of going to university.  Instead, Sigrid enrolled in a one year secretarial course, and at age sixteen went to work for an engineering company in Kristiana; she would work there for ten years.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid was writing fiction.  When she was sixteen she had started a novel set in Denmark in the Middle Ages.  This was completed by age twenty-two, but it was turned down by the publishers she approached.  Two years later, Sigrid had a new manuscript; it was only eighty pages and was set in contemporary Kristiana, focusing on a middle-class woman.  This too was turned down at first, but was then published.  The work, Fru Maria Oulie, created a stir upon its publication; the opening line reads “I have been unfaithful to my husband” and scandalized its readers with its frank discussion of adultery.

            The publication of Fru Maria Oulie made Sigrid Undset a “promising young author in Norway” (1).  In 1907 she joined the Norwegian Authors’ Union; in the 1930s she would head their Literary Council and was one of their chairmen as well.

            From the time Fru Maria Oulie was published in 1907 until 1919, Sigrid wrote about life in contemporary Kristiana, “about the city and its inhabitants,” “working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children” (2).  She focused a lot on women and who and how they loved.  In 1911 Jenny was published, and in 1914 Varren (Spring) was published.  All of her works sold well immediately, and after her third book was published, she was able to quit her office job to write full time.

            Sigrid was given a writer’s scholarship and travelled throughout Europe.  She went to Denmark, Germany, and Italy, where she spent nine months in Rome.  Her parents had loved Rome and she spent her time travelling to all the same places she knew her parents had visited.  In Rome there was a group of Scandinavian writers and artists and Sigrid made friends with them.

            In Rome in 1909, Sigrid met the Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad.  He was nine years older, and was married with three children, but they fell in love.  They waited three years for Anders’s divorce to finalize, and then married in 1912.  They travelled to London for six months and then came back to Rome where their first child was born in January 1913.  The child was a boy, named for his father.  By 1919, Sigrid had had another child, a mentally handicapped daughter, and had taken in Anders’s other three children, including a mentally handicapped son.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid continued writing, working on more novels and some short stories.  She also entered public debates, critical of women’s issues, and the moral and ethical issues she saw that had led to the First World War.

            In late 1919, Sigrid moved to Lillehammer, Norway with her two children, and pregnant with her third.  The plan was for Sigrid to rest in Lillehammer while hers and Anders’ home was being built in Kristiana.  However, the marriage broke up and the couple divorced before their home was completed.  Sigrid stayed in Lillehammer and her third child was born there in August of that year.

            Within two years, though, the home that was being built was completed.  Bjerkebæk was a large home with traditional Norwegian architecture.  It had a “large fenced garden with views of the town and the villages around” (3).

While the home was being completed, Sigrid worked on a Norwegian retelling of the King Arthur myth.  She also “studied Old Norse manuscripts and Medieval chronicles and visited and examined Medieval monasteries, both at home and abroad”, becoming “an authority on the period … and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages” (4).  Her works are “precise, realistic, and never romanticized” (5), showing true human emotions, just set in a different time period.  By using the Middle Ages, she was able to give herself the necessary distance, but also allowed for her admiration of Medieval Christendom.

The work this research led to is Krisin Lavransdatter, a trilogy published between 1920 and 1922.  The trilogy shows “life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, portrayed through the experiences of a woman from birth until death” (6).  In addition to the attention to detail about the historical period she was writing about, Sigrid employed modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness in Kristin Lavransdatter; these were cut out of the first English translations of the work though.

Around this same period, Sigrid became a Catholic.  Her parents had been atheists and her upbringing was secular, though living in a Lutheran country she had been baptized and had attended Lutheran church growing up.  With the outbreak of the First World War and the break-up of her marriage, Sigrid had had a crisis of faith, and Catholicism was the answer for her.  In 1924, at age 42, Sigrid was received into the Catholic Church and also became a lay Dominican.

Sigrid’s conversion was scandalous at the time in Norway.  As mentioned, Norway was a Lutheran country; almost no one practiced Catholicism.  There was also a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the country at the time.  As an author, Sigrid was also part of the intelligentsia at the time.  They too didn’t accept her though, being mostly socialist and communist themselves.  Sigrid was open about her Catholicism though, defending the Catholic Church in public debates.

Her next work after Kristin Lavransdatter was Olav Audunssøn (translated in English as The Master of Hestviken).  Olav, a four volume novel, was written during her conversion and published right after; it takes place during a time period when Norway was a Catholic country.  After Olav, Sigrid went back to writing contemporary books, set in Oslo and “with a strong Catholic element” (7).  In 1928 Sigrid won the Nobel Prize for Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages” (8).

Following this, Sigrid was translating the Icelandic Sagas into Modern Norwegian and writing literary essays on English literature, mainly on the Brontës and D. H. Lawrence.  In 1934 she published Eleven Years Old, an autobiographical piece about her childhood in Kristiana.  In the 1930s she was also starting a new historical piece, this time to be set in eighteenth century Scandinavia, but only one volume was published before World War Two broke out.  After the war Sigrid was too broken herself to finish writing it.

With World War Two came a lot of changes in Sigrid’s part of the world.  Stalin invaded Finland; Sigrid donated her Nobel Prize to the Finnish war effort.  In 1940 Germany invaded Norway.  Throughout the 1930s Sigrid had been critical of Hitler, and so fled Norway upon the German invasion.  She and her son first went to Sweden and then to the United States; they lived in Brooklyn and she pleaded for help for her country and for the Jews.  In 1940, also, her oldest son, Anders, was killed in battle (her daughter had died before the war broke out).

After World War Two ended, Sigrid returned to Norway, but never wrote again.  Sigrid Undset died in Lillehammer on June 10, 1949 at age 67.  She is buried in Mesnali, east of Lillehammer.  The son and daughter that predeceased her are buried there as well; there are three black crosses marking their graves.

Sigrid Undset has been honored in many ways.  In addition to the Nobel Prize in 1928, there is a crater on Venus named Undset for her.  She was on the 500 kronur note and a 1982 2 kronur postage stamp in Norway.  In 1998, Sweden put her on a stamp as well.  Her home of Bjerkebæk is now a part of the Maihaugen museum.

            The book I finally got of Sigrid Undset’s is Kristin Lavransdatter, but now I’m interested in her other works.  I think her books about contemporary Norway would be really interesting, reading about how Norway was in the early twentieth century, especially Fru Maria Oulie and its controversial opening line.  I’m also now interested in her more Catholic novels, though I’d wait and read those after I’d read her earlier works.  (While I love Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I wish I had read it after I’d read his earlier works.  He went through a similar conversion to Catholicism and it becomes more and more prevalent in his works.)  I hope I’ve inspired you all to go find some Sigrid Undset books as well!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – Sigrid Undset

8 – Nobel Laureates in Literature