Category Archives: 17th century

1619: Homophobe wears buttock basket, fight ensues

Writing in 1619, Pedro de Leon reports a recent incident in Madrid. City authorities there had broken up a fistfight between a local student and a barber, arresting both men. Under questioning, it was soon discovered the student had entered the barber’s shop with “a large basket tightly fitted to his buttocks”. When the barber asked the reason for this, the student replied:

“These are dangerous times, what with the city full of Italian sodomites. I find it prudent to wear the basket as a preventative measure.”

The barber, who was Italian, naturally took umbrage at this provocation and threw the first punch. De Leon reports that both men escaped punishment – and when the student was released, he was “still wearing his defence”.

Source: Pedro de Leon, Compendio, 1619. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1614: Wiltshire mob pisses in a pottage pot

In the early 1610s, the small village of Nettleton, north-west Wiltshire, was shaken by an ongoing row between two local women: Agnes Davis and Margaret Davis (they shared the same surname but were apparently unrelated).

By 1614, local authorities had had enough of their feuding: both women were hauled in before stewards and found to be common scolds. Margaret was sentenced to the usual punishment for scolds, a ducking in the local pond. Agnes, however, managed to talk her way out of this penalty.

Infuriated by this, Margaret’s family and supporters spent several days accosting Agnes, confronting her on the way to church and chasing her around the village.

On Christmas night 1614, they barged uninvited into Agnes’ house, “making affray”, eating her mince pies and “pissing into her pottage pot”. They then threw Agnes into the local pond.

This seems to have settled matters. If the feud continued after 1614 then its outcomes are not recorded.

Source: Various, including Records of the County of Wiltshire and D. Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England”, 1985. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1694: Scottish advice on when to conceive

In 1694, Scottish doctor James McMath published The Expert Midwife in Edinburgh. McMath’s book was one of several guides to pregnancy and childbirth available at the time.

Its content is mostly unremarkable, filled with medical advice standard for the time. McMath’s flowery writing style, however, sometimes bordered on the absurd. He refused to include an anatomical description of the female genitalia, out of “modesty and reverence to nature” – yet likens pregnant women to “tender vessels” on a “long and perilous voyage [on] rough and rocky seas”.

Even more strange is McMath’s account of the best time for conception, when:

“..the blood of the courses [menstrual fluid] is of a florid bright colour and smelling like marigolds.”

Source: James McMath, The Expert Midwife, 1694, p.81. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

c.1648: The British king ever fiddling about his crotch

The Court and Character of King James I was probably written by an unknown author in the 1640s. It appeared in print toward the end of that decade.

Though presenting as an objective history of James’ reign, it is little more than an instrument of political assassination, attacking the king’s appearance, health, masculinity and judgement. It implies homosexual tendencies, claiming that the former king liked to surround himself “with young faces and smooth chins”. It suggests that James was physically feeble, if not deformed.

It also says of his physical appearance and mannerisms:

“His tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink… His skin was as soft as taffeta sarsnet, which felt so because he never washed his hands… His legs were very weak, having had (as was though) some foul play in his youth, or rather because he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age, that weakness made him ever leaning on other men’s shoulders… His walk was ever circular [and] his fingers, in that walk, fiddling about his codpiece.”

Authorship of The Court and Character of King James I has been attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon, an English courtier who disliked the Scottish generally and the Stuart dynasty specifically. Several modern historians are sceptical of Weldon’s involvement, however.

Source: Anthony Weldon (attrib.), The Court and Character of King James I, c.1684. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1688: Tortoises, lungs and snails – and sugar candy

Theodore Mayerne (1573-1655) was a Swiss-born physician who traveled widely to study, research and work in medicine. By the early 1600s, he was one of several personal doctors to the French king, Henry IV. He also spent time in the royal and aristocratic courts of Denmark and Britain, eventually settling and setting up practice in the latter.

Like many physicians of his time, Mayerne believed that illnesses and injuries must be ‘shocked’ out of the body with chemical concoctions. The more foul and disgusting these substances were, the more effective they would be.

For problems with the lungs or breathing, Mayerne recommended a particularly gnarly brew – though it at least contained something a little sweet:

“A syrup made with the flesh of tortoises, snails, the lungs of animals, frogs and crawfish, all boiled in scabrous and coltsfoot water, adding at the last sugar candy.”

Source: Theodore Mayerne, cited in Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I, 1997. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.