Curiosa: Memorandum

I'm still up to my armpits in Milton and likely to be so for the foreseeable future, since my boss tells me that the folks upstairs have filled up two more Big Blue Crates of Doom with items for this collection. I try not to weep till I get home. But at least this last cart-full has included a few pre-1800 imprints, which are almost always more interesting than their post-1800 brethren. Case in point: I discovered the following ms. inscription on the reverse of the plate preceding book II in a 1795 edition of Milton's Paradise Lost (which claims to have been printed in London for A. Law, W. Miller and R. Cater, but was probably pirated at York for Wilson, Spence and Mawman -- arr!):

MEMORANDUM.
Ann Chadd died on the 12th day of November and was Interred on the 15th of ye said month wch was on Sunday and was ye first corpse that came up ye new Road wch was made [illegible letter]ye Rector, Mr. P. Leigh.

churchGreen
November 18, 1807
Thos. Moors.

Poor Ann Chadd, immortalized as the first stiff trundled up the new road, presumably to her long home. RIP. There's got to be a story here, but bedoggoned if I can figure out what it is ...

Curiosa: The Cat as Experimental Draught Animal

An off-LJ friend recently reminded me of an incident from my days as a professional medievalist-wannabee, when Usenet was still a going concern and I lurked on the fringes of soc.history.medieval. The group was witty, collegial and learned, so of course it attracted a resident troll, who took up station under its bridge and emerged regularly to make faces and scream oddly capitalized, faux-Latinate abuse at persons whom he took in dislike. This led, on one occasion, to a long, acrimonious and needlessly tendentious argument about the development of draught harness for horses from late antiquity into the Middle Ages. That argument is best forgotten, trust me -- except for the contributions of the late Ellen Pinegar, who conducted the now-famous Cat Hitched to Vacuum Cleaner experiment in order to bring a little evidence-based rigor to what had become a war of assertion. ( Read more... )