The Second-Best Bed

Time for a more well-known fact now, but one that is still a favourite of mine:

In his will, Shakespeare left his wife the second-best bed.

Now, this might sound like a snub, a secret hint that he didn’t really like his wife very much, but this is not the case. The best bed, of course, was reserved for guests, to make them as comfortable as possible. The second-best bed was therefore the one that Shakespeare and his wife would have slept in themselves, and so his leaving it for her actually is a lot more endearing than you might think.

The Lord of Misrule

One of my favourite facts from my reading has got to be the role of the Lord of Misrule.

The Lord of Misrule was a person from the lower classes who was chosen to be lord of the village for the day.

This is something that came to my attention through reading C L Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, which is a study of how social customs of the Elizabethan period influenced and affected Shakespeare’s comedies. The Lord of Misrule is a kind of comical figure, the almost farcical hobbledehoy who takes on the gallant social position during the days of festivity and was waited on just like a rich man. This is a fascinating social custom, and raises questions about social mobility, though many have suggested that this kind of celebration was only in order to suppress any likelihood of discontent amongst the peasantry in order to ensure the continuation of the social norm, and did not in fact indicate class permeability at all.

Traditions of St George’s Day

Never underestimate footnotes, as this was a little gem I picked up from a footnote to R L Smallwood and Stanley Wells’ edition to The Shoemaker’s Holiday. In Scene XVIII, Firk says to a servant “we’ll make Shrove Tuesday Saint George’s Day for you”, which seems a puzzling statement. What the footnote reveals though, is this:

St George’s Day was the day on which domestic servants traditionally looked for new employment.

So, it is then clear that what Firk is implying is that they will cause the servant to lose his job, and so Shrove Tuesday, around which this scene is happening, will become St George’s Day because he will have to find new employment.

I always enjoy learning about traditional feast days in the English calendar, especially because so few are observed anymore despite the fact that they made up a huge part of people’s lives for centuries. I find this particularly perplexing when it comes to St George’s Day, as it is still marked on many calendars, and yet most people do very little to celebrate, when you compare, for instance, to the attention that St Patrick’s Day receives. Looking back to these old traditions, I think it would be of benefit to make more of days like St George’s Day that meant so much to the country at one time (though of course making people find new employment would not be a tradition worth reviving!)

Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley

The Master of the Horse was the only person officially allowed to touch the Queen.

This is a fact I acquired from the wonderful book Elizabeth’s Bedfellows by Anna Whitelock, a piece of writing which continues to fascinate me. What I love about this piece of information is that it highlights the sacredness of the body of the monarch in the Early Modern mind – that there was only one person who was allowed to touch Elizabeth shows how much she was valued, and thought beyond the reach of other people, not only spiritually and in terms of status, but also physically. And of course Robert Dudley was at one point Master of the Horse, which only perpetuated rumours about his having a clandestine affair with Elizabeth. A simple privilege of position was turned by nosy observers into a search for physical interaction, and only set tongues wagging. Speculating over the lives of people in the public eye certainly isn’t a modern phenomenon!

Sir Beef

So, the first fact that I will share here has to be one of the things that perked me up the most while I was slogging through essay season, a good six months ago now. I have a feeling that it was very late at night, and I had already been researching every day for the last week into the small hours, and so when I came across this gem it certainly made my day. Frustratingly, I left my book of research notes at home and so I cannot source the book that it came from as I simply cannot remember! However, the fact is this:

When James I arrived in England for his coronation, he was so excited that he knighted a piece of beef.

Now, I think you would have to be pretty excited to do that, and I just love the idea of an enthusiastic James I holding his sword over a shoulder of beef! I can only wonder at what the courtiers were thinking…

The Origin of Snappy Facts

A new feature to my blog, which I have decided to call ‘Snappy Facts’, is something that I thought of after posting something on Twitter. I was just doing some revision when I came across the fact that poet Robert Herrick is remembered in his parish for teaching a pig to drink out of a tankard, and this of course amused me greatly, so naturally I shared it on Twitter. It received what I consider to be a good reception, and so I thought that I would make the sharing of fun facts a part of my actual blog and not just something that I do on Twitter.

Snappy Facts will be where I share facts that I have found during my studies, but the more quirky ones I hope. I would like to think that some of them are not very widespread facts and that I will not just be repeating old news, though sometimes I will share more well-known facts, simply because to me as a student they seem well-known, but other people may not have heard about it. Things always seem obvious or easy when you know about them, as I often repeat during family games of Trivial Pursuit when I am losing abysmally!