Equestrian Resources for Historians

I hadn't realised until this last year that many historical novelists don't have even a nodding acquaintance with the world of horses. While to me it's very easy to visualise how the world looked and behaved when only horses were the fastest means of transport, clearly this aspect of life is - ehem - a closed book for many writers.

I had also forgotten that I have been collecting equine trivia from across history since I first created the Fell Pony Museum web site back in 2000. It's been up there on t'interweb for 13 years, waving gently at passers-by, but not making a nuisance of itself. You can Google "Fell pony history" and the Museum site will appear in the first half-dozen entries on page 1 (and: I manage two of the other sites that are up in that bracket!).

Since the concept of pedigree farm animal breeds didn't emerge in England till the 19th century, much of what I've recorded in the Museum site is generic British pony (horse) information. By definition, "Fell pony history" is not really available before then, but a good deal of information can be found about the animals who were of similar size, use and geographical distribution. So, when questions of colour, type, size, use and behaviour arise among my fellow authors, this site is a useful resource. There is a also long list of links to further reading.

This blog, Jackdaw E Books, also has several posts about horse use, and coaches and carriages, which could save much writerly embarrassment at the book reviewing stage!

Search for posts labelled:

"horse"

"carriage driving"

"coaching era"

"bluffer's guide"

MM Bennetts' Literary Historical Fiction blog and Jonathan Hopkins' Cavalry Tales blog frequently offer terrific insights into the world of horse usage. Both are riders and Jonathan is a professional saddle fitter.

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Sue Millard is the author of several equestrian books including Hoofprints in Eden, Coachman and One Fell Swoop, and two children's educational activity books, Fell Facts and Fell Fun.

Historical Novelists' 4 Day Book Fair, 12 - 15 April 2013

 

Historical Novelists' 4 Day Book Fair

Blogfest coming up!

I'm preparing a post in order to join in the Historical Novelists' 4 Day Book Fair.

And don't forget that the digital editions of COACHMAN, THE FORTHRIGHT SAGA and DRAGON BAIT are at a discounted price on Amazon until the end of the Easter holidays: $2.99 or the GBP equivalent of approx. £2.72. Curl up by the fire and enjoy driving a Victorian coach, flying with a dragon, or solving a Cumbrian crime without getting cold!

Classy Language

Vocabulary

For some time I've been increasingly uncomfortable with the language that modern writers put into the mouths of historical characters. While I acknowledge that stories must be written in a style that readers find easy, there are times when a writer's personal vocabulary could benefit from being channelled to mark out a character's lifestyle and personal circumstances.

Georgette Heyer plundered cant and slang dictionaries for her lower-class characters. For example, in The Toll Gate her highwayman Jerry and people who associate with him have a quite different vocabulary from that of Captain Staple, who is the son of an aristocratic family.  (However it's not a good idea to copy Heyer's expressions, because in the same way that modern computer programmers build-in redundant code she also invented her own colourful phrases to check how many rivals were plagiarising her work.)

Historic correspondence

Original letters suggest that even during the Regency and the reign of William IV, everyday polite English between people of the educated class was surprisingly like the language we write today. A glance at the correspondence between William Wordsworth and his wife Mary in the early years of the 1800s, or the letters from 1829 onward between a young lawyer, William Holt, and his fiancee Mary Cox, shows that sentences were typically long, few contractions were used (can't, won't), and the & mark often replaces and. Other than those stylistic points the language isn't noticeably archaic. Most of the time they use the formal "you" when addressing each other, and use "thee" only when writing of more intimate feelings.

Spoken language

There's considerable difficulty for writers in researching spoken language, because recorded conversations even in works such as Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor are filtered through the author's hand. They are probably a factual record of what was said, but they are not verbatim transcriptions. A further difficulty in composing historical conversations is that regional phrases and dialect would have been even more strongly localised than they are now, yet we don't want to make a character's dialogue totally incomprehensible to modern readers.

U and Non-U

In 1956 the terms 'U' meaning Upper Class and 'Non-U' meaning non-Upper Class appeared in Alan Ross's academic paper for the University of Birmingham: U and Non-U – An Essay in Sociological Linguistics. Nancy Mitford also wrote about these differences in 1956 in Noblesse Oblige.

There are some interesting distinctions made, notably the fact that the vocabularies of working class and upper class were similarly robust and forthright, while it was the middle class who used "delicate" phrases involving euphemisms and French words. This may sound strange, but compare the following lists. Which words will be in the vocabulary of the upper class, and which of the middle class?

loo lavatory sofa napkin drawing room supper lunch(eon) sitting room pudding house England vegetables spectacles looking glass sick underwear rich

toilet bathroom settee serviette parlour tea dinner lounge sweet home Britain greens glasses mirror ill lingerie wealthy

Food for thought

While some of the terms above are relatively modern, for historical fiction I hope the point is still clear: upper class characters shouldn't express themselves in fancy language, any more than working class ones should. The characters who do will mark themselves at once as middle class.

Good writing for an English "period" story should reinforce my belief in the society being described, and when the author writes about aristocrats in a way that is unmistakably middle-class, s/he loses my trust. This, in my observation, is a point where a good many modern writers (and especially writers who are not English-born) fall down.

Further reading

http://www.debretts.com/etiquette/british-behaviour.aspx

The Bluffers' Guide to Horses & Carriages (part 1)

I've joined several forums for historical novelists recently while I've been completing COACHMAN. Reading some of their book previews on Amazon it has dawned on me that while historical novelists seem interested in being authentic about costume and weaponry, I've only found two who have any direct knowledge about horses, and one who understands carriages.

Given that until the start of Victoria's reign (or William IV if you are a Liverpudlian) the fastest means of transport anywhere was either a well bred horse or a well-horsed carriage, this seems rather strange. It's a bit like writing about modern London and not knowing that you can get your character across the city far more easily by Tube than by Ferrari.

Allow me to make some helpful information available!

Horses
Even for late medieval knights, war-horses were not huge beasts. (The modern Shire horse of 17 hands or more was developed for agricultural use, well after gunpowder put an end to the mounted armoured knight.) Ann Hyland proposes that the 15th C knight's "destrier" was likely to have been a sturdy cob type of about 15-2 hands. This type of horse was a "square gaited" animal who walked, trotted, cantered or galloped.

Horses for general riding were probably not taller than 15 hands, often smaller, and frequently they were "lateral gaited" or "soft gaited", which means they walked and cantered but their in-between gait was a pace, rack or amble, rather than a trot. All these were more comfortable than a trot; the pace is similar to that of a fast moving camel or giraffe, with the legs on each side moving at the same time (watch videos of harness-racing pacers). The amble was a rapid, level, shuffling movement. Over good going the rack, like the pace, could be quite fast. Horses that moved in this comfortable way were amblers or palfreys, popular mounts for both ladies and gentlemen.

Horses for racing or hunting were "coursers", ie running horses, who moved "square" like the knight's destrier; they trotted when not galloping, and even the racehorses were not large. Many early thoroughbreds were under 14 hands high.

A useful type from Shakespeare's time onward was the Galloway, originally a type from south-west Scotland. Later the term became a generic one (like Hoover for vacuum cleaner) for any sturdy, sensible small cob of 13 to 14-2 hands. They probably looked much like a Highland, Dales or Fell pony, though for practical reasons they probably didn't carry anywhere near as much hair on neck, tail or fetlocks ("foot locks") as their modern counterparts do.

Women travelling would have a choice of riding pillion behind husband or brother; rich ladies could ride side-saddle; or ride in a litter, which was a covered seat carried on 2 long poles, suspended either side of a horse before and behind.

Distances
Modern endurance horses ridden intelligently at suitable paces for the terrain can cover anything from 25 to 50 or even 100 miles in a day. This isn't just the racy Arabian types; I know a Fell pony that has completed a 100 miler in less than 18 hours. Bear in mind that the riders don't flog on at full gallop, which being anaerobic activity would rapidly exhaust the horses' energy; they go at the pace that suits the country they have to cover, and much of that is aerobic, steady trotting or cantering, with intervals of walk to allow the horse to have a breather.

Military dispatch riders galloped, of course, and covered short distances of 3 or 4 miles in a quarter of an hour (12 to 16 MPH); but ridden horses for civilian travellers over longer distances would average no more than 6 MPH, so a day's journey was probably no more than sixty miles and often much less if roads were bad. Working horses in a city were often forced to walk because of other traffic, and there were few highway regulations to ease their passage.

Unlike cars, horses do need recuperation time before they can reasonably be expected to make another journey. This involves them being groomed, fed with grain and hay, and given water to drink and a stall under shelter in which they can stand quietly and perhaps sleep - though horses can sleep standing up and tend only to lie down for short periods.

Part 2 will look at travelling by carriage and coach.

I'm delighted to have been asked to do a guest spot on M M Bennetts' blog. I drive a good deal, as you will know, and in this case, I'm looking at coaching, both stages and Mails.

I've been researching this history extensively for a good many years. Praise be for the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and places like the Post Office Museum and archive, which have all provided contemporary material or first-hand accounts from people who actually drove commercially in the 1830s and knew the proprietors of the great coaching businesses which, within a few years of Victoria's accession, had vanished from most of England.

I've now completed my historical novel, "Coachman!" George Davenport is a young, ambitious driver whose move to London coincides not only with the Coronation of Queen Victoria but also with the completion of major railways which marked the beginning of the end for coaching. Of course, being a novel, I've further complicated George's life, with Lucy, his pregnant girlfriend, and Sarah Chaplin, his boss's daughter, who is as ambitious as he is, and with far fewer principles.

I hope the Chaplin family will forgive me for having taken liberties with their history, but Sarah was the one member who never married, so there are no direct descendants to protest. My excuses are that the one Chaplin I know well was happy for me to write a novel about her famous coaching ancestor, while George, the coachman, and Lucy, are my own great-grandparents, albeit transplanted a couple of generations back in time ...

I like the results and I hope readers will too.

But first I need to complete the polishing and find an agent - or decide whether to go it alone and self publish.