I love finding local events to include in books. They can be fun inciting events, or random bits of action, or just a bit of historical authenticity. It’s the little things like this that add verisimilitude and depth to a book (at least in my opinion). One of my go-to sources for this kind of thing is The English Year by Steve Roud. It’s an absolutely fabulous book that goes through the whole year listing events and celebrations all over England. I’ve used something out of it for every book.

The Stamford Bull-Run, 18thC

So, if we were dropped into Georgian England this week, what might happen? Well, if it happened in the city of Samford, we might get trampled by bulls. On Nov 13th (or the 14th if the 13th fell on a Sunday as it did this year), the Stamford Bull-Running took place up until the 1839 when it fell afoul of reformers.

Stamford (photo by SmileyRose – Wikimedia Commons)

According to local tradition, the custom was started in the 12th century by William de Warenne, 5th Earl of Surrey, after he saw two bulls fighting in the meadow. When the butchers tried to part them, the bulls ran into the town. The earl so enjoyed the resulting ruckus (and giving chase) that he decreed it would be an annual event.

A jug commemorates Ann Blades – a Stamford bull runner in 1792 (photo by Roger from Derby, UK Wikimedia Commons)

The city would block off side streets and board up windows. At 10:35AM the church bells would ring, alerting people to clear the street, and then the bull would be released and the crowd of “bullards” and their dogs would chase it through the main thoroughfare. When they reached the bridge, the bull would be tossed over into the water, and then pursued into the field, slaughtered, roasted and eaten (later the meat was sold off cheaply, rather than cooked and consumed on the meadow).

 
By the late 18th century, bloodsports (and anything that involved riotous celebration by the poor and working class) were falling out of favor. The local paper in 1785 commented:

 
“Monday last being our annual bull-running, the same was observed here with the usual celebrity—several men heated with liquor got tossed by the bull, and were most terribly hurt, while some others more sober had little better usage. What a pity it is so barbarous a custom is permitted to be continued, that has no one good purpose to recommend it, but is kept as an orgy of drunkenness and idleness to the manifest injury of many poor families, even tho’ the men escape bodily hurt.”

The bull-run became a major cause for reformers, and was first banned in 1788, but the powers that be were unable to suppress the custom and eventually gave up trying. The cause was again taken up in 1824 by the newly formed Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and ending it (by turning the tide of local opinion) was their first major success. [ok, so this was an entirely unexpected discovery when I chose this topic, it’s a twofer for anyone wanting to write an authentic reformer hero or heroine!).

So, happy St. Brice’s day! Be glad you weren’t trampled by a bull.

I love primary historical sources. Cornell University has just made public a database of historical fugitive slave ads, including one for a slave who ran away from George Washington! (Oney Judge escaped our first president and went on to marry a free black sailor and live out the rest of her life in New Hampshire; sounds like wonderful inspiration for a romance to me).

Advertisement for a fugitive slave in the Oppenheim (New York, 1824) (via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library)

Though these ads we can discover details of the true lives of the enslaved, and hopefully find inspiration for creating works of fiction that reflect the diverse reality of the past. We can see what they wore, what skills they had, what work they did, and even what ruses they used to escape (we can also see the cruelty of their enslavers exposed in the descriptions of the scars they bore). But more than that, we can see that they were there. That they were real. That they had hopes and dreams and that they fought for those dreams every bit as much as we do today.

But, Isobel I hear you say, I write UK-set historicals. Well, there is another, similar database for researching this topic in the UK: Runaway Slaves in Britain. The ads of slave sales taking place in the UK in the 18th century send my imagination running wild. So many stories waiting to be told…

One of my favorite books to revisit when I’m trying to imagine Georgian England is Gretchen Gerzina’s BLACK LONDON. There are many free blacks from the era with whom some of us may be familiar: Francis Barber, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Elizabeth “Dido” Belle, Jonathan Strong, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. There is also the ever present black groom, footman, and page who are seen in art and mentioned commonly in letters and printed sources. What interests me most though is the thriving community of free blacks that clearly populated London. There were Africans sent directly by their families to England to learn English (mostly to further trade). There were shopkeepers, clerks, athletes, and musicians (LOTS of musicians!). Much of what we know about this community comes, sadly, not directly from them, but from their being mentioned in the news or by racists complaining about them. I’m going to quote directing from BLACK LONDON here (p.24):

Portrait possibly of Francis Barber, attributed either to James Northcote or Sir Joshua Reynolds

“A newspaper article from 1764 refers to ‘no less than 57 [black] men and women’ who held a party filled with music at a Fleet Street pub. Dozens of black people sat in the gallery at the famous Somerset suit in 1772, and hundreds celebrated afterwards at a Westminster pub…[Philip Thicknesse] complained in 1778 that, ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place.’ In other words, not only must a viable communal network have existed, but it could be quickly and effectively mobilized for the purposes of social and political action, even at a time when their political clout seemed non-existent.”

So, when picturing Georgian London, remember black Londoners existed then as now, not in isolation, but in relation to one another and to the community at large.

Sorry this post is late, but in the fog that is our current existence, I hadn’t processed that my post day was Juneteenth until last night. So I scraped the “historical tea” post I had planned and got up to write up something new today.

I think we’re all familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation. I was always taught that by this act, Lincoln freed “the slaves”. But this was not true. He freed only the enslaved people in the Confederacy, and there were slave states that stayed in the Union or were under Union control at the time. Enslaved people in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, parts of Louisiana, and those counties of Virginia that were soon to form the state of West Virginia were not freed January 1, 1863, but had to wait until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865.

In the District of Columbia, compensated emancipation had been enacted in April of 1862. The District’s 900-odd slaveholders were forced to free their slaves, with the government paying owners an average of about $300 for each (it also paid each emancipated slave $100 if they agreed to immigrate to Haiti or Liberia), so the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply there, either (which is important it terms of the Fugitive Slave Act still being enforce for those still enslaved in the Union states and controlled territories).

And as we know, the proclamation was unenforceable in the states that seceded, leading to enslaved people to remain in bondage until the Union gained control. In Texas, General Gordon Granger announced federal orders on June 19, 1865, proclaiming that all people held as slaves in Texas were free. And today we celebrate that delayed justice.

So Happy Juneteeth. May you and yours be safe in these uncertain times, and may justice prevail in the many cases of state-sanctioned violence against black citizens that we’re still seeing today. If you’d like to support a black author and read a great Juneteeth story, I highly recommend Kianna Alexander’s historical novella Drifting to You.