The true story of Newton’s falling apple

by Kathryn Hadley

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was allegedly inspired for his theory of gravitation from seeing a falling apple in his garden. In his 1752 biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life the antiquary and scientist William Stukeley (1687-1765) recalled Newton’s telling of the apple-tree story:

‘After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea,
under the shade of some apple trees… he told me, he was just in the same
situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It
was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why
should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to
himself…’

Today, for the first time, the Royal Society has made available online the original manuscript of Stukeley’s biography in a ‘turning the pages format’ (www.royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages). The online publication forms part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations this year.

Stukeley was one of the first biographers of Isaac Newton. He lived in London for a decade, from 1717, where he befriended Newton and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He collected Newton’s reflections on his own life, but also gathered material about his childhood from residents of the King’s School in Grantham where he went to school.

Stukeley’s biography is just one of seven manuscripts to be published online to mark the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary. Other manuscripts from the Royal Society’s archive are also now available in an interactive format, including a 1789 description of an iron bridge design by Thomas Paine and John Locke’s contribution to one of the earliest American state constitution documents in the fundamental constitutions of Carolina from 1681.

Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson, a new book charting the story of science and the Royal Society from 1660 to the present, is also published today.

Further information about this year’s 350th anniversary events is available on the website of the Royal Society http://www.royalsociety.org/


In Genius Eclipsed: The Fate of Robert Boyle Michael Hunter explains why, within half a century of his death, the natural philosopher and scientist Robert Boyle was almost forgotten, overshadowed by his contemporary Isaac Newton.

Images (the Royal Society):

- title page from William Stukeley's 1752 work Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life
- extract from William Stukeley's 1752 work Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, the first time the famous story of Newton and the apple was written down
- portrait of Isaac Newton by Charles Jervas, 18th century

Mozart’s Mysterious Death

by Kathryn Hadley

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on December 5th, 1791, in Vienna. Over 200 years later, the cause of his death still remains a mystery. It has been the subject of considerable speculation with theories ranging from poisoning to renal failure to trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by eating undercooked or raw pork. However, a Dutch study published on Tuesday August 18th in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported that the composer may have died of complications stemming from strep throat.

The research was carried out by Richard Zegers (University of Amsterdam), Andreas Weigl (University of Vienna) and Andrew Steptoe (University College London). According to his death certificate, Mozart died of hitziges Frieselfieber or ‘heated military fever’, a type of fever accompanied by a rash. Researchers argued, however, that previous studies of the composer’s death were based primarily on subsequent accounts written decades after his death by people who witnessed his final days.

Zegers, Weigl and Steptoe based their study instead on official Viennese death records from November 1791 to January 1792 from the time surrounding Mozart’s death , which they compared with the records for the corresponding periods in 1790 and 1791, and 1792 and 1793. Over these periods, the deaths of 5011 adults were recorded (3442 men and 1569 women). The mean ages of death were 45.5 years for men and 54.5 years for women. The records also revealed that tuberculosis and related conditions was the most common cause of deaths, followed by cachexia, a condition of wasting associated with chronic disease, and malnutrition. Edema, a condition characterised by an excess of fluid collecting in the cavities or tissues of the body, was the third most common cause of death.

According to eyewitness accounts, Mozart’s symptoms included ‘inflammatory fever’, severe swelling, malaise, back pain and a rash, closely resembling those associated with edema. Researchers believe that the composer developed complications which led to edema as a result of a streptococcal infection, an epidemic of which may have originated in Vienna’s military hospital. Mozart’s sister in law Sophie Haibel notably recalled thirty years after his death that the swelling was such that he was unable to turn in bed. The official death records for the weeks surrounding Mozart’s death reveal an increase in deaths from edema compared with the previous and following years.

Richard Zegers was quoted in an article published by Reuters:

‘Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat
infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of
death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that
developed a deadly kidney complication.’

For further information on how Joseph II established German opera in Vienna in an effort to homogenise the Habsburg Empire, read our article The Politics of Culture: Joseph II's German Opera

Picture:
Mozart family grave, Sebastian Cemetery, Saltzburg

French Polish at Waddesdon

by Charlotte Crow

The love of French fine and decorative arts and the Rothschild family tradition for collecting such pieces is celebrated this season at Waddesdon with a special display centred on a newly acquired portrait ‘Etienne-François, duc de Choiseul at his desk’. Painted in 1786 by the female court artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), the portrait was commissioned by the sitter and though Choiseul died before it was completed, it shows a fresh-faced and lively man at ease in the study of his Parisian home.

Choiseul, born Comte de Stainville in 1719, was a powerful figure at the court of Louis XV (r.1715-74) playing a key role in French foreign policy as a diplomat and minister at a turbulent time in European affairs dominated by fierce colonial rivalry between Britain and France. He fought as a soldier during the Austrian War of Succession (1740-48) and became Ambassador to Rome in 1753. In 1758 he was made Minister of Foreign Affairs, acquiring the dukedom the same year. His early advancement was partly due to having earned the gratitude in 1752 of the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, whom he helped to avoid a potentially scandalous intrigue. He subsequently served as a naval minister (1761-66). When the Treaty of Paris brought the Seven Years War to an end in 1763 with humiliating colonial losses for France, he sought to reduce its impact. As minister of war from 1766 he instigated military reforms that he hoped would enable France to redress defeat. Eventually, however, he fell victim to court factionalism and was dismissed by Louis in 1770 after calling for war with Britain and retired to his estate at Chanteloup in the Loire.

The duc himself was an avid patron of the arts and his taste for exquisitely crafted objects, a quality shared by many in the Rothschild family, is reflected in this display. One of the highlights is a tiny but stunningly detailed enamel-painted gold box by the Van Blaremberghes that shows in miniature scenes of Choiseul’s spectacular chateau (destroyed in 1823) and gardens at Chanteloup and on loan from the Metropolitan Museum, New York. But the pièce de resistance is the magnificent desk depicted in the portrait and referenced in its title. The desk made by the master ebeniste Simon-François Oeben (c. 1725-86), was at one time owned by the English Rothschilds and was displayed at Mentmore, another of their family homes. Oeben, together with his brother Jean-François made many pieces for Madame de Pompadour and members of court. The desk is reunited with the portrait for the first time in 150 years and to be able to view the two together is a vivid and exciting experience.

This exhibition and the new acquisition gives visitors to Waddesdon an insight into Choiseul the man and his times. It also demonstrates how the French Renaissance-style Buckinghamshire home to four generations of Rothschilds is not simply a monument to the past as so many historic houses can be. Instead, with the present Lord Jacob Rothschild living on the estate and actively involved with the National Trust in its management, the manor actively sustains the spirit of its creator Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild who built it in the 1870s as a home in which to entertain lavishly and as a showcase for his many French ‘gimcracks’ – as he liked to refer to his fabulous objets d’art.

The Choiseul exhibition can be seen at Waddesdon until November 1st.
Waddesdon Manor
Near Aylesbury
Buckinghamshire HP18 0JH
Tel: 01296 653211
http://www.waddesdon.org.uk/

Pictures:

- portrait 'Etienne-François, duc de Choiseul at his desk' by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

- aerial view of Waddeson Manor

Party for Paine!

by Kathryn Hadley

Events are planned across the country this summer to mark the bicentenary of Thomas Paine’s death on June 8th, 1809.

A seven-month festival of events will notably run in Thetford in Norfolk, Thomas Paine’s birthplace, throughout the month of June until November 7th. The festival begins with a special celebratory Re-enactment and Heritage weekend this weekend. Events will include exhibitions, talks, plays, concerts and street entertainment. It will end with a Bicentenary dinner on Monday evening.

Here is selection of some of the displays, exhibitions and talks organised over the weekend.
- Thetford’s Thomas Paine
Ancient House Museum, White Hart Street
A new exhibition featuring the Dabos portrait of Paine on loan from the National Portrait Gallery.
- The Thomas Paine collection: an archive display
Thetford Library
A display of items from the library’s Thomas Paine Collection and the Norfolk Records Office.
- Paine the Engineer
Charles Burrell Museum, Minstergate
A display celebrating Paine as a bridge-builder.
- Tom Paine’s Plain Words
St Peter’s Church, White Hart Street
In this informal lecture Andrew Barlow will discuss the success of Paine’s writing in terms of his style and his ability to reach out to a wide audience.
- Made in England: Paine’s Radicalism
Tanner House, Tanner Street
Ted Vallance will consider Paine’s experiences in England, arguing that they were fundamental to the development of his radical political philosophy.

The festival will continue until November with a series of interesting talks and lectures.
- Trevor Griffiths: These are the times
Saturday June 13th, 7.30pm
United Reformed Church, Mere Street, Diss
Trevor Griffiths, whose play A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, a musical dramatisation of Paine’s life and times, premieres at the Globe Theatre this autumn, will read and discuss extracts from his play.
- Autumn Lecture Series – Royalty and Revolution: The World of Thomas Paine
September 18th, 8pm
Williamson Hall, Thetford Grammar School, Bridge Street
In the first of the Autumn lecture series, Brian Way will provide an introduction to the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which saw the birth of the modern world and the growth of industry, science, capitalism and socialism. The series will continue until November 7th, with a final lecture by John Keane who will discuss Paine’s pioneering visions of a new politics for the elderly.

Lewes in East Sussex, where Paine lived for many years, will also be holding a festival from July 4th to July 14th.
- Setting the Scene
July 4th – July 19th
Lewes Town Hall
An exhibition designed to provide a deeper understanding of Thomas Paine and his influence in the first rumblings of revolt in America and the United Kingdom.
- Taking Liberties
July 4th – July 14th
Lewes Town Hall
A display on loan from the British Library’s ‘Taking Liberties’ exhibition, which was on show until the beginning of March, showing the struggle for the hard won rights and freedoms that underpin the modern assumption of British liberty.
- The Tom Paine Forum
July 4th, 10am
The festival in Lewes will formally open with this open discussion featuring leading scholars of 18th-century political thought who will each discuss one aspect of Paine’s life and work. Speakers include Professor Gareth Stedman-Jones (University of Cambridge), Professor Jon Mee (Warwick), Dr Mark Philp (Oxford), Professor John Barrell (York) and Professor Iain Hampsher-Monk (Exeter).
- Thomas Paine, the Enlightenment and Dark Ages
July 10th, 6pm
The Sheriffs Room White Hart
As part of the White Hart Debate series which run form July 7th until July 11th, Sir Harry Kroto will share his thought on atheism, deism and freethinking questioning how close Paine got to absolute enlightenment.
- Presentation and discussion of new Thomas Paine research
July 10th, 7.30pm
Anne of Cleves, Southover, Lewes
Paul Myles, Colin Brent and Seth Gopin will present their latest research on Paine’s pamphlet The Case of the Officers of Excise, written and published in Lewes in 1773.
- Paine’s Progress – The Life and Times of Thomas Paine Esq
July 12th – July 14th
The Grand Marquee, Southover Grange Gardens, Lewes
www.lewesrep.org.uk
Set in New York State in the summer of 1808, the plays charts Paine's reflections upon the triumphs and tragedies, and the loves and losses of his life.
- In Lambeth
August 1st – August 8th
Lewes Theatre Club, Lancaster Street, Lewes
http://www.loveandmadness.org/

Set in Britain in 1789, on the eve of the storming of the Bastille, the play tells the story of the meeting and ensuing debates about revolutionary change between Thomas Paine and William Blake. Jack Shepherd’s play was first performed at the Dulwich Tavern in July 1989. Twenty years later, the playwright will star in the current production, which will tour the UK and Eire from mid-January until mid-April 2010.

For further information on the festival of events in Thetford, visit http://www.tompaine200.org.uk/
For further information on events and exhibitions in Lewes, visit http://www.thomaspaineandlewes.com/

For further information on Thomas Paine and his enduring impact, read our latest free feature article by David Nash The Gain from Thomas Paine

For an insight into how Paine forms a link between the two great revolutions of the 18th century, read our article Tom Paine in France For further information about the impact of Paine’s American pamphlets published between December 1776 and December 1783 under the general title of The American Crisis, read our article Paine's American Pamphlets

Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money

by Kathryn Hadley

Amongst the various anniversaries being celebrated this year is the bicentenary of the death of the British industrialist, Matthew Boulton (1728-1809).
Boulton was the first to introduce the steam-powered mint in his Soho Manufactory, built in 1762, and is often considered the founder of modern coinage. From 1775 onwards, he worked in partnership with the Scottish engineer James Watt. In 1797, he was granted a Royal Mint contract to strike copper coinage at Soho and Boulton & Watt steam engines and minting machinery were exported worldwide for the first time.
To mark the anniversary, 'Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money' opens today at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The exhibition features over 140 coins, tokens and medals produced by Boulton’s team during his lifetime and explores the art of making money from a variety of perspectives, including mechanical art, fine art and the art of making a profit.

For a programme of the various events organised throughout the year, a biography of Matthew Boulton, picture gallery, bibliography and links to websites containing information on Boulton and archive collections featuring Boulton-related material, visit www.matthewboulton2009.org

For further information on Matthew Boulton and his efforts to reform the coinage system and to fight against counterfeiters in the Midlands, read our article The Birmingham Coiners, 1770-1816

Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money
Until May 16th, 2010
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TS
Telephone: 0121 414 7333
www.barber.org.uk

Handel: A Charming Brute?

by Derry Nairn

George Frideric Handel has many fans. No less than Beethoven called him 'the greatest musical composer who ever lived'. Jimi Hendrix once lived in his former dwelling in London where Ruth Rendell is the main benefactor of the Handel House museum. His bed, in which he died precisely 250 years ago, forms the centrepiece of 'Handel Reveal'd', a new exhibition opening there this week. The shortened bed (Handel slept sitting up) is a modern reconstruction but, like the rest of the museum, is authentic in its detail. The Handel expert Christopher Hogwood calls the setting for the museum 'a film-set house'.

This is in part thanks to a painstaking inventory of the composer's possessions which was carried out at 23 Brook Street upon his death. Back then, of course, Brook Street and the surrounding Mayfair area wasn't seen as upmarket. Handel was the first occupant of his home, built to attract aspiring middle class tenants. Although he nurtured and retained important connections at court, and died a rich man, both Handel's political and financial fortunes endured peaks and troughs.

Perhaps this isn't so surprising, however, when the tumult of the era is considered. Both Handel and his music played witness to great events at a time of massive flux in British society. The Jacobite Uprising and the South Sea Bubble occurred during his lifetime, as did an explosion in the open political dissent of the coffeehouses. His 1727 naturalisation as a British citizen - a personal request of King George I, himself a German 'import' - is indicative of the increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of the capital city. Handel's music is associated both with Italian opera, the X-Factor of its day, as well as with the new middle class playgrounds of the time, such as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

An anonymous wit of the day described the relative importance of these issues thus:

"Are you High Church or Low?
Whig or Tory;
Are you for Court or Country?;
King George or the Pretender:
But are you for Faustino or Cuzzoni?
...There's the question" *

Handel adapted well to the changing times. He sold sheet music from a shop on the ground floor of 23 Brook Street, while composing and performing upstairs. His health was also tested. At various times Handel experienced obesity, binge eating, and paralysis. He died blind. As Hogwood says 'he would persist in the face of an apathetic public, an altered musical taste, and rumours of a decline in his powers'.

As one moves between rooms on creaky timber floors and specially-widened staircases (for musical instruments), little imagination is needed to picture the great Hanoverian bulk doing the same. A menu of Handel's likely daily diet hangs on one wall. On another are a collection of portraits spanning youth to old age. These include a death mask. A stunning reproduction of an 18th century harpsichord sits in the main music room. Its my firm conviction that musical instruments should never be kept behind glass cases, and, thankfully, Handel House's curators have chosen to let musicians come in and play regularly on this wonderful example.

Despite very few personal accounts or letters, and the distractions of caricatures and Victorian anecdotes, the life and (more interestingly) times of this intensely private man has been successfully reproduced. A visit to Handel Reveal'd is highly recommended. Mark April 14th in your diary - there is free entry and music performances all day at Handel House.

*Popular Italian castrati singers of the day.

Handel's Houses

Back in 2001, Daniel Snowman looked at two museums located in the composer's German and English residences. Here we reprint the article in full to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of London's adopted Hanoverian composer.

One of the first things people tell you in Halle, a small Saxon town in eastern Germany two hours south of Berlin, is that, in the decade since German reunification, many of its brighter young citizens have left to seek fame (or at least fortune) elsewhere. It is a story prefigured by Halle’s most famous son, the composer Handel, who was born there in 1685 but died in London at his home in Brook Street, just off Hanover Square, in 1759. The Halle birthplace has long contained an exhibition of Handel’s life and work; this month, London follows suit as the Handel House in Brook Street opens to the public.

Halle was in the heart of the German Democratic Republic and is only now emerging from forty-odd years of Communism and, before that, the iron grip of the Nazis. Today, as part of reunited Germany, Halle is in the Land of Saxony-Anhalt and is ruled from nearby Magdeburg – just as it was when the archbishops of Magdeburg wielded power in medieval times and when Luther emerged in the 1520s.

Dr Handel, the composer’s father, was sixty-two when his illustrious son was born. As a young man, he had trained as a barber-surgeon, a vocation given much scope by the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the end of the war, declared that the archbishopric of Magdeburg was to become a secular duchy administered by the incumbent Duke Augustus of Saxony and that, on his death, it would pass to the electorate of Brandenburg. Dr Handel got on well with Duke Augustus, mending his arm in a successful operation and becoming his private surgeon. Wealth and kudos followed, and the doctor bought a substantial new residence for himself and his family in Halle.

The Duke finally died in 1680 – at which Halle (like Magdeburg itself) became part of the rapidly rising state of Brandenburg, to be ruled henceforth from Berlin. Poor Dr Handel lost much of the prestige and income to which he was accustomed. Two years later, his wife died. But he must have been resilient, for he picked up the threads of his career as a surgeon and remarried a woman nearly thirty years his junior. Their son, Georg Friedrich Handel, was born on February 23rd, 1685, a citizen of Brandenburg-Prussia and subject of its ruler, Frederick William ‘The Great Elector’.

Handel was baptised the next day in the Liebfrauenkirche, the late Gothic church that dominates the Halle marketplace. The baptismal font is still there, as is the Reichel organ on which the adolescent Handel would play a few years later. The great ‘Red Tower’ across the marketplace from the church can also still be seen today; so can the austere Calvinist cathedral a short walk away, where, aged seventeen, Handel became organist, and the Moritzburg and Giebichenstein castles. And Halle still contains the house where Handel was born and in which he lived until he left town for Hamburg in 1703.

The house remained in the possession of the family until the 1770s. On the centenary of the composer’s death, in 1859, a statue was erected in the centre of the marketplace and there was talk of the house being acquired by the city. This finally happened in 1937. Two years later, war broke out and it was not until 1948 that the house, properly renovated, was opened to the public as a museum. In 1985, the tercentenary of Handel’s birth, the adjacent property was added. Today, the extensive upper rooms contain an excellent portrayal of Handel’s life and work, a soundtrack (in English if required) sensitively integrated with excerpts from his music, as well as a display of early musical instruments. Downstairs, musical performances can be given to audiences of a hundred or more. The first Handel Festival was held in Halle in 1952; this year’s (in June), in venues all over Halle and beyond, was the fiftieth.

Halle couldn’t hold Handel. His prodigious talent demanded a larger stage. In Hamburg, he played in the opera orchestra and composed several works which were performed there. He travelled to nearby Lübeck (like Bach a couple of years later) to meet the organist and composer Buxtehude. Buxtehude seems to have offered Handel a post as church organist which he turned down – supposedly because a condition of taking the job was marriage to Buxtehude’s unenticing daughter. In any case, Handel’s interests were rapidly turning from the liturgical to the dramatic. It was opera that interested him, and that meant going to Italy. For four years, Handel absorbed the musical culture of Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples, befriending not only influential composers such as Corelli and the Scarlattis, but also the aristocratic and ecclesiastical magnates who supported them. He returned to Germany in 1710, armed with recommendations to several of the most brilliant courts, notably that of Hanover. By the end of the year we find Handel – still only twenty-five – in the largest, liveliest city in the world, London, where his reputation was confirmed by the success of his new ‘Italian’ opera, Rinaldo.

Handel returned to Hanover where he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector. It was a quiet, civilised life, but Handel seems to have been aching to revisit London. The Elector agreed he could go, on condition that he return ‘within a reasonable time’. Once back in London, however, Handel’s obligations to Hanover seem to have slipped his mind as he built up a successful career, secured in 1714 by a pension for life granted by Queen Anne. Later that year, Anne died and the House of Stuart was succeeded by the House of Hanover. Handel’s former employer was now his king.
Did the new monarch, George I, resent his former employee’s truancy? Did Handel’s Water Music, accompanying the king’s barge ride up the Thames, reconcile monarch and musician? The story probably contains more legend than fact, though the two men renewed their friendship soon enough. Handel, almost as great a celebrity as the king, lived in a succession of grand homes, among them Burlington House and the Chandos estate at Cannons. In 1723, he took a lease on a newly-built house in Brook Street. This was to be his home until his death in 1759 and it was here that he wrote the great oratorios of his later years, including Messiah.

This month, the house opens as the Handel House Museum. The Director, Jacqueline Riding, has planned her display by theme. Thus, the first room introduces visitors to the vigorous social and cultural life of London in the 1720s, while another suggests something of Handel’s character and private life (including a full-tester bed dressed in crimson). The front room on the first floor, the largest in the house, is where Handel is believed to have held rehearsals and entertained. Here, images and artefacts evoke the musicians and others with whom Handel worked, while the centrepiece is a working harpsichord for use by professionals and students as well as for concerts and other public events. A fourth room is devoted to composition.

‘The idea,’ says Jacqueline Riding, ‘is that the visitor will wander through interiors closely resembling those Handel would have known, looking at images associated with Handel’s life and career, whilst hearing music as visitors during Handel’s lifetime would have heard it.’

The museum also comprises rooms in the adjacent property (built at the same time by the same developer, and restored with equal care) which will provide space for temporary exhibitions, education activities, an audio-visual room and a small shop.

The thematic approach of the Handel House Museum nicely complements the essentially chronological display of its sister museum in Halle. Handel, I like to think, would have approved of both. Was he German or English, people still ask? The answer is that he was both. Handel (like Holbein, Prince Albert or Nikolaus Pevsner) was one in a long line of distinguished immigrants to Britain who, by their artistry and entrepreneurship, enriched the cultural life of their adopted country and thereby the wider world.

Handel-Haus
Grosse Nikolaistrasse 5
D-06108 Halle, Germany
Tel: +49 345 500900
Fax: +49 345 50090411

Handel House Museum
25 Brook Street,
London W1K 4HB
Tel: 020 7495 1685
Fax: 020 7495 1759
Email: mail@handelhouse.org

Past and Present meet on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland

by Kathryn Hadley

A sunken ship, which dates back almost three centuries, has been discovered in the Gulf of Finland during a seabed survey for the Nordstream gas pipeline project. The wreck was found, 54 metres beneath the seabed, near the island of Gogland along with the remains of five other ships from a Russian fleet which sank after a storm in 1713. The 16-metre long ship is a Dutch-modelled tjalk, a flat-bottomed military transport ship with a shallow draught particularly adapted to the rivers and coastal waters of Old Frislandia. It is one of the few remaining vessels from the time of Peter the Great and a precious relic of his attempts to build up the Russian navy and transform Russia into a maritime power.
Andrey Lukoshkov, the consultant for the project 'Sunken Ships', explained:

‘It was the time when Sweden and Russia fought each other over supremacy in Europe’s North’.

The ship is remarkably well-preserved and personal possessions and tableware are still identifiable in the captain’s cabin. Scientists now hope to raise the necessary funds in order to bring the ship to the surface and to transport it to a naval museum in Kaliningrad before construction work on the pipeline begins.

The extensive ‘Secrets of Sunken Ships’ project was initiated in St Petersburg in 2002 in an attempt to search, explore and ensure the state registration of the wealth of artefacts and ship wrecks discovered on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland and the Ladoga Lake. 10,000 sunken objects, which chart the history of northern Europe over a period of almost 1,400 years, have already been listed, including planes, tanks, torpedoes, anchors and ancient burials. It is believed that this figure represents a mere 30% of the artefacts which remain to be discovered. For more information on the project, visit the website

www.baltic-sunken-ships.com

For more information on the present struggle for the control of oil and gas and its history during the Great Game, read our latest article
The Great Game: Power Struggles in Asia

Wine consumption then and now

by Kathryn Hadley

Motoko Hori’s study The Price and Quality of Wine and Conspicuous Consumption in England 1646-1759, published in the December issue of The English Historical Review, provides a fresh insight into the consumption of wine in England in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. There were set patterns of wine consumption and consumption increased despite rising prices. The rise in consumption was primarily caused by a general rise of wealth in England. His study is particularly timely in the light of the Christmas festivities and the current financial crisis.

Hori’s research is based on a treatise written in 1723 by John Oxenford, clerk to the inspector general of imports and exports, about the balance of trade in England between the Christmas of 1698 and 1719. Oxenford notably observed that:

‘near as much wine [is] drank now as formerly at double the price to the consumer by reason of the high duties’.

According to Oxenford this rise in the consumption of luxury goods (despite higher prices) could be explained by a general increase in wealth amongst the English population. Hori’s study aims to assess the extent to which wine consumption was sensitive to prices and incomes and thus how far Oxenford’s explanation carries conviction.

Detailed and systematic studies of prices and price movements for the period are relatively few. Hori attempts to expand upon existing studies by examining account books kept by gentry, London merchants and members of professions which cover the period from 1646 to 1759. He compares these account books with the account book of Latham, a yeoman, in an attempt to uncover evidence for the purchase of wine in England from 1646 to 1759.

The figures reveal three general trends. The duties on wine, first of all, increased over the period: between 1600 and 1714 customs duties multiplied threefold. The volume of wine that was also imported increased over the period; nevertheless, prices also continued to rise. This thus suggests that rising prices were a result of increased demands for wine. Lastly, rising prices of wine in the second half of the 17th-century did not lead to a decrease in consumption. It thus appears that there were relatively set patterns of wine consumption, which were independent of price variations and fashion trends.

According to Hori, wine consumption was undoubtedly affected by cultural factors. Wine consumption was fashionable and, as an expensive imported good, was a sign of social status. Consumption by the new rich, especially in London, was particularly visible and was consequently given particular prominence in contemporary accounts. The author argues that what mattered the most was, nevertheless, landowners’ consumption and expenditure on wine because they remained the wealthiest population group in England.

Wine consumption amongst the landowning group responded to set patterns of consumption. Hori thus reaches the same conclusion as Oxenford: increased consumption of increasingly expensive wine was the sign of a general increase in wealth in England.

In the context of the current economic difficulties and festive season, it is interesting to consider the extent to which the reverse is true. Does wine consumption today, in particular over the festive season, follow similarly set patterns? Will wine consumption, this Christmas, fall as a result of the current economic difficulties?

Motoko Hori is a Professor of economic history at Reitaku University situated in the outskirts of Tokyo.

For more information about the history of wine consumption, read our article
Wine & Adulteration

For more information about the consumption of whiskey over the Christmas period, read our article
Scotch Comfort and Joy