Pepys Show: Dancing Mania, Valentines, and an Arquebus Headshot
Pepys heard some wild stories in February 1662
This day by God’s mercy I am 29 years of age, and in very good health, and like to live and get an estate; and if I have a heart to be contented, I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world, for which God be praised. So to prayers and to bed. — February 23
February 1662 was a month of bad weather. On the eighteenth, taking a break from his vow of avoiding the theatre, Pepys arranges to go to the opera with his wife and Sir William Pen, but finds the streets “full of full of brick-battes and tyles flung down by the extraordinary wind the last night (such as hath not been in memory before, unless at the death of the late Protector).” So he sends word home to forbid his companions from going to the show, but finds they’ve already left and decides to join them after all. Days laters, he’s at the coffee-house and hears about the damage across England: the forest of Deane lost a thousand oaks and as many beeches, the estate in Brampton has sustained twenty pounds of damage.
And the bad weather didn’t just strike in England. In Argier (Algiers), a great storm and tempest hit the mole and sunk many ships, “So that God Almighty hath now ended that unlucky business for us; which is very good news.” If only that were so, Sam. On the twentieth, Pepys receives news that there’d been an attack a week prior, in Tangier, in what’s now Morocco. In January, a Portuguese garrison had kidnapped thirty-five girls and 400 head of cattle, but the Moors (that doesn’t feel like the right term but I’m not sure what is, apologies) either intercepted the raiding party or made a counter-attack, liberating the girls and cattle and killing the aidill (Portuguese commander) with a headshot from an arquebus and killing eleven or twelve knights. The remaining Portuguese sought and received refuge with the English in Tangiers, and the report has only now made it to Sam. The Portuguese will soon be out of Morocco and the English in, with Pepys serving on the important Tangier Committee.
On February third Pepys describes the wedding anniversary celebrations of his neighbour Sir William Batten:
Among other froliques, it being their third year, they had three pyes, whereof the middlemost was made of an ovall form, in an ovall hole within the other two, which made much mirth, and was called the middle piece; and above all the rest, we had great striving to steal a spooneful out of it; and I remember Mrs. Mills, the minister’s wife, did steal one for me and did give it me; and to end all, Mrs. Shippman did fill the pye full of white wine, it holding at least a pint and a half, and did drink it off for a health to Sir William and my Lady, it being the greatest draft that ever I did see a woman drink in my life … (Pepys leaves to take care of some business at the office) … and at last home, and, being in my chamber, we do hear great noise of mirth at Sir William Batten’s, tearing the ribbands from my Lady and him as if they were a newly-married couple. So I to bed.
February also has Valentine’s Day, and the tradition at the time was that a woman’s valentine was the first person she met of the opposite sex (excluding one’s spouse and relatives), with men being responsible for getting little gifts for the women. Writes Pepys, “I did this day purposely shun to be seen at Sir W. Batten’s, because I would not have his daughter to be my Valentine, as she was the last year, there being no great friendship between us now, as formerly. This morning in comes W. Bowyer, who was my wife’s Valentine, she having, at which I made good sport to myself, held her hands all the morning, that she might not see the paynters that were at work in gilding my chimney-piece and pictures in my diningroom.”
It’s also the beginning of Lent. Last year there was some halfhearted talk of going back to more serious fasting after Lent had been forbidden during the Cromwell regime, but now people seem to be split on the question. When Pepys is out with the two Sir Williams, Pepys and a captain eat roasted veal but both Sir Williams abstain.
There’s some fun natural history this month as well, with Pepys meeting a guy named Mr. Templer, “an ingenious man and a person of honour he seems to be.” Templer tells Pepys about serpents known to live in the wastes of Lancashire, big enough to feed on larks: “They observe when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place themselves with their mouths uppermost, and there, as is conceived, they do eject poyson up to the bird; for the bird do suddenly come down again in its course of a circle, and falls directly into the mouth of the serpent; which is very strange.”
Templer, “a great traveller,” also reports this fascinating custom: “speaking of the tarantula, all the harvest long (about which times they are most busy) there are fidlers go up and down the fields every where, in expectation of being hired by those that are stung.” This is one of those things that I had to look up. Apparently the story here is that tarantula bites were thought to be responsible for the mysterious dancing mania. Dancing mania was falling off in the 1600s, but with the malignant spirit of puritanism frowning and suppressing anyone trying to have a bit of fun, stories of tarantula bites might have allowed people to excuse the odd dance or two. Still, the idea that fiddlers wait at harvest fields for people to be bitten? It strikes me as a bit farfetched. Probably not so much an actual knock-on economic effect so much as Templer pulling the wool over Pepys’ eyes.
On the twenty-second Pepys writes to his father that the sons of the Lord of Dorset brought their father into disgrace by getting locked up for robbing and killing a tanner (named Hoppy, according to wikipedia). Days later, Pepys learns from a news-book (precursor to a newspaper) that the boys claim they thought they were pursuing a thief, and that it was all a big mix up. Pepys’ comment: “But I doubt things will be proved otherwise, as they say.” Apparently Johnny Vegas plays one of these wayward sons in the Johnny Depp movie The Libertine, which I don’t think I’ve seen.
Pepys is also learning music (he composes a song, by which I think he means not songwriting but figuring out the notation of a song he’s heard elsewhere) and abstaining from drink, though by the end of the month he figures this stance is doing him more harm than good.
Finally, Pepys ends the month with corporal punishment, beating his boy Will with a rod for refusing to go to church. Pepys notes, “the rods were so small that I fear they did not much hurt to him, but only to my arm, which I am already, within a quarter of an hour, not able to stir almost.” It reads kind of funny, like an overly literal play on ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,’ but it really brings home how awful these people could be to their social inferiors. Their other boy-servant, Wayneman, will get shipped off to Barbados next year, and Pepys thinks he’s doing the kid a favour, saving him from the gallows. Christ.
And so to bed.
Plays
Feb 5: At noon Sir W. Pen dined with me, and after dinner he and I and my wife to the Theatre, and went in, but being very early we went out again to the next door, and drank some Rhenish wine and sugar, and so to the House again, and there saw “Rule a Wife and have a Wife” very well done.
Feb 18: I went thither and there saw “The Law against Lovers,” a good play and well performed, especially the little girl’s (whom I never saw act before) dancing and singing; and were it not for her, the loss of Roxalana would spoil the house. So home and to musique, and so to bed.
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