(I’m moving office in January – well, the entire research unit is – hence more on finding random things in drawers:) Here’s another one: “We had a Parson who was as bad as reading Homer.” – Martha, Lady Giffard to Lady Portland, July 14, 1700 (I must’ve written this down when proofreading for our corpus.) […]
Tag Archives: letters
Rabble of Mac Rebels
Thomas Wilson, writing to Sir Robert Cecil in March 1604 from Spain, describes the Irishmen in Spain (spelling and punctuation modernised): “Besides this Mac Williams here is a great sort of other Macs and macaques as Mac Sweeny, Mac Shannon (or ‘Mac a shame on him’), Maurice Mac-I-know-not-who, Mac an Earl, Mac a devil, & […]
Why am I doing this again?
I cannot claim to be an organized person who follows through agendas to their logical conclusions. Instead, more often than not, I find myself running down tangential paths, chasing unicorns or lemurs or hunches of inklings of ticklings of possibilities. Pots of gold at the end of rainbows, that kind of thing. Recently, as part […]
more on the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents
TNA SP 94/12 ff.144-147 is a 4-page document entitled: “Note of my letters of aduertisments from spayne, Italy & other parts from Jan 1605 vntill [missing]” In other words, it is a list of letters received during 1605. It was compiled by Thomas Wilson, secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, in charge of intelligencing relating to […]
Lady Day (and the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents)
I just realized that today is Lady Day – that is, Annunciation. Once upon a time, this was New Year’s Day. It probably derives from the date being originally set on the Spring equinox, which makes a pretty sensible first day of the year if your concept of the world derives from observations of the sun. […]
“French news”
Most of the time, Cocks (whose letters I’m working on) includes a disclaimer when he reports on news and rumours of, shall we say, less credibility: “but I doe not beleeve that to be trew / for it is french news” (SP 94/13 f.69r) This made me think of national stereotypes and classic insults, but […]
NaTheWriMo Day 10: Autocorrection (was/were)
It’s still grammatical in some English dialects to say things like “we was going to church” – that is to say, the verb be can occur equally in plural form with a singular referent pronoun, or vice versa – contrary to standard English usage and what we are taught in school. Having read thousands of […]