One Fine Day E-Book

Ian Marchant

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 519

Beschreibung

A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, bringing pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England vividly to life on the page. One day Ian Marchant, acclaimed author of books on music, railways and pubs, decided, as all men of a certain age must, to have a dig around his family history. Surprisingly quickly, a web search informed him that his seven-times-great great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. So far, so jolly ... Life-loving diarist Thom - who liked a drink and a game of cards - feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. With fascinating detail we learn about Thom's family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud; about beer, the wife's nights out, his own job troubles and their shared worries for their children. But as Ian digs deeper beyond the Sussex diary's bucolic portrait he discovers a subtext - a family descended from immigrants, with anti-establishment politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability and cash crises - just as their country does three centuries on. 'When I was reflecting late one January evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere towards its end. Old Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked - and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it.' Rich with immersive detail, One Fine Day draws a living portrait of Marchant family life in the 1720s and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent, illness-ridden) became the England of the 2020s. 'Elegiac, consistently funny, deeply moving.' - Richard Beard 'Ian Marchant is one of England's most original writers. One Fine Day is a masterwork.' - Monique Roffey

Leseprobe

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in 2023 by September Publishing

Copyright © Ian Marchant 2023

Illustration copyright © Julian Dicken, Moonshake Design 2023

The right of Ian Marchant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781912836994

Ebook ISBN 9781912836963

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

For my daughters, Esme, Eleanor, Victoria and Stephanie.

For my brother, Trapper ‘Christopher’ Blastock.

For my dad, and ascendant second cousin once removed, Ralph Foxwell.

Blood is thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood.

Contents

Prolegomenon

I.Good and Quickly seldom meet

Discoverie

II.It is a poor family that hath neither a thief nor a whore in it

III.There needs a long time to know the World’s pulse

IV.Who would be a gent, let him storm a town

Discernment

V.Say no ill of the year till it be past

VI.Death keeps no calendar

VII.Get thy spindle and thy distaff ready, and God will send thee flax

VIII.Speech is the picture of the mind

IX.A maiden that laughs is half-taken

X.He who hath much pease may put the more in the pot

XI.A good name keeps its lustre in the dark

XII.Music helps not the tooth-ache

XIII.Who draws his sword against his Prince must throw away the scabbard

XIV.It’s not the gay coat that makes the gentleman

XV.Apothecaries would not coat pills in sugar unless they were bitter

Disposal

XVI.None is a fool always; everyone sometimes

Envoi &c

XVII.Life is half-spent before we know what it is

Antiquity is not always a mark of verity.

Prolegomenon

in which the Author wishes himself on the Slow Road through Ideal England, travelling from where he is to where he is from.

I.

Good and Quickly seldom meet

The Old Grammarye, Broad Street, Presteigne, Radnorshire. Sunday, the 29th March, 2020. A cold day.

One fine day, when all this is over, I will take again the slow road, and drive across England to visit my long-ago family in Sussex.

There is a fast way to drive from here to there. It’s 220 miles and, apart from the first fifty and the last thirty miles, it’s all motorway. I use it only in dire need. It takes me around six hours; four-and-a-half hours driving, plus an hour or so sulking about in service stations drinking insipid coffee, whilst disliking people just for being there.

The slow road is shorter by about ten miles, but it involves no motorways at all, and will take more like nine hours. This time is made up of six hours of actual driving, and three hours of footling around – a stop for lunch, a poke about in a charity shop or an interesting church, a stop for tea, possibly a nap. I’ve evolved this slow way over the last thirty-five years. You could put Presteigne to Newhaven into your sat-nav until forever, and you’d still not find the way, not all of it. I cross the Lugg Bridge from Radnorshire into Herefordshire, skirt Leominster and Ledbury, and bridge the Severn at Maisemore. I go round Gloucester, up Birdlip Hill, and onto the fast road to Cirencester. But then, as I come into subtopian Swindon, rather than heading down to the M4 by where the Honda factory used to be, I turn left, and take the road to Fairford.

I always look forward to stopping by the old town. It has easy parking, good coffee, efficient public conveniences, and the only full set of medieval stained glass to be found in any English parish church. Dating from about 1500, when the church was new, the windows depict the life of Christ, from the Old Testament prophecies of His coming, to His sitting in final Judgement. The Fairford windows are a great and glorious expression of Christendom’s high noon. They were imported from Burgundian Flanders for the opening of the new church, one of the last ‘medieval’ churches built in England before the Reformation.

When travelling through northern France and the Low Countries, it’s almost commonplace to see glass of this quality, but in England, there is just Fairford. The odd window has survived in other churches, here and there, and the cathedrals have hung on to a fair bit of their medieval glass, but most of the stained glass you see in English parish churches is Victorian or later. The survival of a complete set of late medieval stained-glass windows is a kind of miracle, because 1500 was not a great moment to be depicting the life of Christ in stained glass in England. Before the Reformation, churches were polychromatic with dazzling colour, but by the 1540s the stripping of the altars, the whitewashing of the wall paintings, and the smashing of the glass had begun. It was as if colour were a sin that had to be purged from the body of the Church. Protestant Reformers would condemn depictions of Christ as idolatrous, sacrilegious, and, above all, popish. The only way to learn about God was by reading the Bible in black and white, not by gawping at technicolour windows.

A century later, during the English Civil War,1 iconoclasm became Parliamentary policy. ‘The Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’ gave an air of respectability to the thugs who were kicking your church in. No one is quite sure how the Fairford windows survived the Civil War, but the best bet is that the churchwarden had the foresight to take them down, and to bury them in a field until the hostilities were through. Every other church got its windows smashed up. Imagine your local church – the windows, the statues, the pictures – kicked in, desecrated, in just the same way, and for just the same reasons, that the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

The Civil Wars were between fathers and sons, friends and neighbours, between this town and the next. Death hid behind every hedge, was waiting down every street. In 1650, the Puritan divine Richard Baxter wrote, ‘if you had seen the general dissolution of the world, and all the pomp and glory of it reduced to ashes, if you saw all on a fire about you, sumptuous buildings, cities, kingdoms, land, water, earth, heaven, all flaming about your ears, if you had seen all that men laboured for, and sold their souls for, gone … what would such a sight as this persuade you to do?’

It’s a good question. We shall find out, I fear, in our own age of pestilence, famine, and war.

My paternal grandfather, Charles Jesse Marchant, was a carpenter by trade, and he helped to build RAF Fairford during Hitler’s War. It was planned as a base from which gliders could be flung into Normandy on D-Day, and it still has a role today. The runway at Fairford is the only one in the UK long and strong enough to host heavy US bombers (or to land the Space Shuttle), so it was used to launch B-52s during both Iraq wars, and also in the illegal 1999 NATO bombings of Belgrade. In July every year, RAF Fairford is home to the Royal International Air Tattoo, where war fans can see their favourite weapons of mass destruction close up, and take selfies with them.

As the warplanes climb into the sky, the Cotswolds open up beneath their wings. There below, like a collage made from antiquated greeting cards, is a vision of Ideal England, a rural idyll of farriers and coachmen and jangling horse brasses and stamping shire horses pulling the plough through the honest English soil; of goodwives in shawls spinning by their open thatched cottage doors, hollyhocks reaching for the never-ending sun; of ruddy-faced yeomen supping nut-brown ale before an open fire in a welcoming inn.

Ideal England has several regions in addition to the Arcadian Cotswolds. There’s Grim Oop North, divided into Bluff Yorkshire, moors and mountains and vets and if tha’ ever does owt for nowt, do it for thissen; and Breezy Lancashire, donkey rides on the beach for a tanner, Elsie Tanner with a ladder in her stockings, and Fred Dibnah up a ladder on the chimney of a dark satanic mill. There’s the Coast, tanned fishermen with wise lined faces sitting on lobster pots mending nets or pointing out to sea with their pipes; and the West Country, which is a cross between Arcadia and the Coast, but with smocks and cider.2

And then there is Sussex, good old Sussex, home to some of England’s most potent myths about itself. When people think of the white cliffs, they are not really thinking about the Dover cliffs, which are a bit grubby, and overlook a lorry park, but the brilliant white cliffs of the Seven Sisters, a chalk sine wave rising in pitch towards Beachy Head, with the meanders of the Cuckmere River in the foreground. This is probably the best-known ‘view’ in England, as the dozens of tourists gathered in the car park at Exceat Bridge to take photos against the backdrop of the cliffs attest.

If anyone knows just one date and one place in Sussex history, it’s 1066 and All That, the Battle of Hastings, where the last English king, Harold II, died trying to save England from the Conqueror. The story of the English defeat was made into the Bayeux Tapestry, so that, later, Nigel Farage could wear a Bayeux Tapestry tie with his checked shirt and raspberry-coloured corduroy pantaloons.

Dad’s Army was set in Ideal Sussex. Walmington-on-Sea is supposed to be in Sussex (though much of it was filmed in Thetford, in Norfolk), and Captain Mainwaring is the best-known (albeit fictional) alumnus of Eastbourne Grammar School. That final V sign, bouncing up and down in the TV show’s credits; that’s Sussex telling Hitler to fuck off. My stepfather Ralph Foxwell, born in Pevensey in 1926, was in the Home Guard, and he stood sentry duty over the Seven Sisters. He was in an ‘Auxiliary Unit’ – the platoons of young men who were trained to operate as guerrillas behind the German lines, should the invasion come. He is a trained killer; aged ninety-five at the time of writing, I still wouldn’t like to take him on.

I have heard his war stories all my life, and they are all set in the Sussex Downs. One thing that has always struck me about them is the immediacy of the Battle of Britain for people living in Kent and Sussex. The fighting was overhead, sometimes only a few hundred feet overhead, day after day, watched by children in their holidays from school. My stepdad and his brother were (somewhat feebly) strafed by a JU-88 bomber, whilst they were haymaking on the Glyndebourne estate. They watched the dead bodies of Canadian soldiers being unloaded from barges at Newhaven bridge after the Dieppe raid. A week after D-Day, they fished hundreds of life jackets from the Sussex Ouse, carried almost to Lewes by the incoming tide. Doodlebugs grumbled over the Downs and across the Weald, looking like they were on fire, on their way to do one last round of damage to London.

Like most of the few remaining old people who actually took part in Hitler’s War, my stepfather is anti-jingoistic and pro-European, but it can be hard sometimes to hear his peaceable Sussex burr above the baying voices of those for whom Ideal England is Alone Then, Spitfires over the White Cliffs of Dover, Two World Wars, One World Cup, giant poppies hung from street lights Oi Oi In-ger-land. This version of Ideal England is the revenant Empire, risen from the grave to possess men in their sixties and seventies who learned history and politics from old copies of Commando comic, and who have come to believe that they fought in the war themselves.

Land of our Birth, our faith, our pride,

For whose dear sake our fathers died;

O Motherland, we pledge to thee

Head, heart and hand through the years to be!

That’s Rudyard Kipling, from Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906. Kipling’s patriotic fervour for the land of England was, in particular, for the Sussex countryside around Burwash where he lived out his days. Pook’s Hill is in Sussex, and Sussex, for Kipling and many of his readers, represented the Motherland.

I’m just in love with all these three,

The Weald an’ the Marsh an’ the Down countrie;

Nor I don’t know which I love the most,

The Weald or the Marsh or the white chalk coast!

Also Kipling, also from Puck of Pook’s Hill. The marsh is hard to spot these days. Much of it has been built on. The Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation is the fifteenth largest in the UK – population 474,485, according to the 2011 census. The M23 divides Sussex in half top to bottom, and the A27 quarters it. Gatwick fills the sky. Red lights pulse from the windfarms out at sea, and on the horizon container ships like floating islands pass up channel on their way from Shanghai to Felixstowe or Rotterdam.

The ‘Down countrie’ and large parts of the Weald have been institutionalised, and are now part of the South Downs National Park. Folded within its breast is another Ideal Sussex, not just different from, but opposed to Kipling’s, which I call Bloomsbury Country. Rodmell village second homeowner, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, despised those she saw as members of the jingoistic and vulgarian hoi polloi. And not just generally, but also in particular. She loathed the people of the Ouse Valley, such as my family, calling them ‘white slugs’.3 Whatever the area around Lewes and Glynde once meant to the Bloomsbury Set (something to do with authenticity, as it usually does with people who want to get their head together in the country), what is left, if you are not careful, is a pale impression of a place, a Charleston Farmhouse tote bag, distressed pastel-painted creative hub in a converted stable block sort of place. A boutique festival sort of place, an artisanal gin Michelin-starred pub, Airbnb Country Living place, a defanged, disenchanted landscape where there’s a Range Rover Evoque round every nook and corner, and where whimsy is queen.

And lest you suspect that I’m against whimsy, I live as far away from the real world as I can manage, in a chocolate-box town on the border of Wales and England, in a 500-year-old cottage, where I sit in my book-lined study, smoking my old pipe, writing on an antediluvian word processor. Whimsical psycho-topography is my genre, after all.

There is still a long way to go from Fairford to Newhaven, in every possible sense. I bridge the headwaters of the Thames at Lechlade, then follow the Vale of the White Horse to Wantage, before crossing the high Berkshire Downs to the Newbury suburb of Speenhamland. On past Greenham Common and Watership Down, past Jane Austen’s Chawton and Gilbert White’s Selborne, I enter West Sussex in a wood somewhere between the villages of Liss and Rogate.

Sussex is where I grew up.4 It’s where my mum and Ralph Foxwell were born and where he still lives. When I was twenty-one, I moved to Hove, and lived there for eight eventful years. My mother died in Brighton, my daughter Charlie was born in Brighton and my daughter Minnie grew up there. Brighton, Lewes, Hastings, and even Peacehaven are full of family and friends, people I like and love and have loved. But Newhaven is my town. I went to school in Newhaven, Meeching County Primary and Tideway School and Sixth Form. I took my class identity from Newhaven and the Lower Ouse Valley; long on proud working class, but with a twist of embittered landless peasant. I had my first kiss and my greatest heartbreak in Newhaven. I played in the best band from Newhaven, ever, and lost the tapes. In the autumn of 1985, in a downland combe running parallel to the A259 between Newhaven and Seaford, I spent a rewarding few days as the Buddha, due to the ingestion of large quantities of Nepalese temple balls. I stopped being the Buddha when I found God in Bishopstone churchyard, manifest in a sea fret that sparkled like Lurex. I have told these stories since I started writing, stories about how I am from Newhaven, and proud. But ...

I never really felt I belonged to Sussex. I was born in Shalford, in Surrey, and lived there till I was five. My birth father, Alan Raymond Marchant, was from Surrey, and so was my grandpop, Charles Jesse. As far as I knew, so were all the Marchants, ever. And my mum might have been born in Sussex, but she lived in the Surrey village of Ewhurst from the age of two until she married my father, aged twenty-three. Even though we moved when I was five to a village in Northamptonshire, I still spent much of my school holidays at my respective grandparents’ houses in Surrey, in Ewhurst and Shalford, which became, for me, enchanted places, my own Ideal England.

Ewhurst is tucked under the southern lee of Pitch Hill, and in my memory is surrounded by greenwoods veined by streams and studded in spring with countless primroses, basketfuls of which I would pick with my grandmother, before walking back to her almshouse cottage to make posies tied with wool for me to take round the village to her friends and neighbours. My parents and Ralph’s parents were married in Ewhurst church; Ralph’s brother was born in the village, and he has an aunt in the graveyard. My grandmother, two aunts and an uncle, and now my mum, are all buried there too.

Shalford was my first home; its places were my first places, the first things of which I was aware. The church with its copper spire, out on the Guildford Road, is the church where I was christened. The Parrot, next to the River Wey, was where my father and my uncle went to after cricket on the green, and so it became the first local, outside which I would be left sleeping in my pram while my dad drank Guinness and my mum had a Babycham. Grandpop Charlie’s always mysterious and wonderful builders’ yard, smelling of Douglas fir and putty, was the first workplace, and on the first walks, up to St. Martha’s, or along the Pilgrims’ Way, or on the riverside path into Guildford, I heard my first histories, and my first myths. Surrey was home, my childhood Eden, from which I was plucked.

When I was ten, my parents split up, and my mum took us from Northants to stay with her family in Newhaven, where she married her second cousin, Ralph Foxwell, who ran a small farm with his brother. But Surrey was where I identified with, not Sussex. Really, in Newhaven, my home town, I’m an incomer. In Sussex, I’m from off, from away, just as much as I am here in the largely imaginary Welsh county of Radnorshire, where I first moved aged twenty-eight, because I could no longer hack living in Brighton. Ever since I was a lad, I’ve had an issue with Sussex, or, at least, with Ideal Sussex, with myths like Kipling’s Motherland and Mrs. Woolf’s ‘Bloomsbury Country’. Neither seemed to match the hard-scrabble existence of Newhaven, or the reality of Ralph’s life on the land. Sussex, I felt, was just not for me. I wasn’t even from there.

And yet, tonight, I long to drive once more on the slow road through Midhurst and Petworth, Pulborough and Storrington, Steyning and Bramber, through Preston Village and Falmer, and down the Kingston road, through Rodmell and Piddinghoe, and come home at last to Newhaven, where my mum and old Ralph Foxwell will be waiting at the door, anxious for my arrival.

Discoverie

in which the Author discovers both his family tree and the parlous state of his health, makes himself a cup of instant coffee, undertakes a perilous sea journey, travels to the Dawn of Time in Wallonia, uncovers his family’s part in bringing the arms trade to England, and arrives in Sussex at last to relate how the Fortunes of War enabled his ancestors to acquire a Gentleman’s Estate.

II.

It is a poor family that hath neither a thief nor a whore in it

My mum was anxious for as long as I knew her, and with good reason, I guess. Her father abandoned his home in 1940, leaving my grandmother, my nine-year-old uncle and my seven-year-old mother destitute; destitute, but very much cheered by his going. My mother’s life up to that point had been one of grinding poverty and horrifying physical abuse. When her father left, their lives became just the grinding poverty, and therefore much more bearable. But she lived in fear that someday he would come back and savage her with his belt and fists, as he had every day of her hard childhood until the day he left. She bore the mark of him on her back and her arms to the end of her life.

This fear morphed into a recurrent nightmare. She told me about these night horrors a few months before her eightieth birthday, in 2013. She said it was because she still wasn’t utterly sure that her father was dead, though he would have been about 110 years old. She wanted to know for certain that he was. Dead and buried.

All my mother knew was his name, which was Albert Edward Bulbeck, and that he was born in Cuckfield, Sussex, in 1901. It would not be easy. My mother’s people are from the deepest countryside, landless peasants who went into service as housekeepers and coachmen, or who worked as platelayers and brickmakers and private soldiers, dirt-poor Anglo-Saxons who hid themselves away in the vast forest of the Weald for a thousand years. They have left little trace, except in the shape of the fields, the lay of the hedges, the turn of the lane.

My wife Hilary took it on. After months of research in record offices, in the old newspaper library in Colindale, and online, she established that my grandfather Albert, the terror of my mum’s life, had died in 1980, and was buried in Ipswich. What’s more, Hilary established that after abandoning his first family, Albert Bulbeck went on to have a second in Suffolk.

Unknown until a few weeks before her eightieth birthday party, my mother now had two half-brothers and a half-sister. We contacted this other family, and one of the half-brothers, Alby, was more than happy to be in touch. He visited my parents in Newhaven a few times, and always called at Christmas and on my mum’s birthday. After he had married my mother, Ralph Foxwell came off the land, where he had worked his whole life, and got a job as a fork-lift driver on Newhaven’s North Quay. Uncle Alby was a master mariner, captaining small coasting vessels in and out of the ports on the east and south-east coasts. We are as sure as we can be that they met, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Alby regularly unloaded stone setts and beech boles from Rouen at the North Quay under Ralph’s supervision, without knowing that they were half-brothers-in-law.

On finding out that her father was dead, my mother’s nightmares stopped, and never came back. Her anxiety turned into a scar, rather than fear of a present danger. Genealogy was therapeutic, and helped my mum to sleep free from terror, or the terror of her father’s return, at least. It gave us a bunch of new relatives, too. As an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? it would have it all.

An important part of Hilary’s research involved using one of the well-known online genealogy sites. As a prudent Ulsterwoman, she had only bought a three-month subscription. In early 2019, the site offered one extra free day, as an inducement to return. What to do with it? Her family is hard to trace, because most Irish birth records were destroyed in the 1920s.

‘Shall I have a look at the Marchant side?’

‘Sure. Thank you. Not much to find, I suspect.’

I told her what I knew.

I was born and christened in Shalford, just to the south of Guildford. My father grew up in Shalford, though he was born in Farncombe, three miles away. My grandfather, Grandpop Charlie Marchant, was a carpenter and builder who had his own small firm, Marchant and Cheale, based in an old-fashioned builder’s yard just outside Shalford. His father, Thomas David Marchant, had been the baker in Bramley, the next village south through the heathy woods towards Cranleigh. His nickname, like a few old-fashioned baker boys, was ‘Lardy’, and he’d passed it on to my grandpop, my birth dad Alan, and even me, after I’d been dumb enough to tell some pals at school about the hereditary nickname.

Grandpop Charlie Marchant’s sister was called Marjorie, our beloved Great-Aunt Madge. She told us cousins that her father, Thomas Marchant the baker, never revealed to anyone where he was from, except to say that he’d run away from home. Aunty Madge said that she thought he was from further south, from the seaside maybe, but that he’d never said any more about it. Charlie and Madge and their brothers and sisters never knew where their father was from, or anything about his family.

That was all I had to give Hilary to go on. I expected little. I made a lovely cup of tea, smoked a pipe, and watched some Argentinian narrow-gauge railway videos on YouTube.

An hour later, she emailed me this:

Jean-Jacques de Marchant. Born 1435 in Namur, Belgium, died 1518. 14 x great great-grandfather

Jean-Baptiste de Marchant. Born 1466 in Namur, Belgium, died 03/02/1540, buried in Couvin. 13 x great great-grandfather

William Marchant. Born 1520 in Preston, Sussex, died 18/12/1558 in Preston. 12 x great great-grandfather

Miles Marchant. Born 1545 in Preston, died 13/12/1605 in Edburton, Sussex. 11 x great great-grandfather

Richard Marchant. Born 1584 in Edburton, buried Horsham, Sussex, 14/11/1625. 10 x great great-grandfather

Thomas Marchant. Born 1615 in Albourne, Sussex, buried Albourne, 4/08/1686. 9 x great great-grandfather

William Marchant. Born 1648, buried Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, 17/08/1706. 8 x great great-grandfather

Thomas Marchant. Diarist. Born 23/03/1676, died Hurst, 14/09/1728. 7 x great great-grandfather

William Marchant. Born in Hurst, 26/10/1701, died Hurst, 16/12/1776. 6 x great great-grandfather

Thomas Marchant. Surgeon Born 1731, died Hurst, 17/08/1802. 5 x great great-grandfather

William Marchant. Surgeon to His Majesty’s Powder Mills. Born in Hurst, 1759, killed 13/12/1790 in Waltham Cross, Essex. 4 x great great-grandfather

John Marchant. Born in Hurst, 1786, died, 22/04/1848 in Brighton Workhouse. Buried in Hurst. 3 x great great-grandfather

Thomas Marchant. Born in Hurst 01/01/1807, died 02/09/1872 at Bridge Farm, Cuckfield, Sussex. 2 x great great-grandfather

Elkanah Marchant. Born in Hurst, 09/02/1841, died December 1931 in Burgess Hill, Sussex. Great-great-grandfather

Thomas David Marchant, born in Hurst, 1871, died 1928 in Bramley, Surrey. Great-grandfather

Charles Jesse Marchant, born Bramley, 29/03/1904, died 20/09/1984 in Witley, Surrey. Grandfather

Alan Raymond Marchant. Born in Farncombe, Surrey, 13/11/1931, died 06/05/2010 in Waterford, Ireland. Father

I stood over Hilary’s shoulder while she showed me her workings.

‘How sure are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m as sure as I can be after a first look.’

‘But why did it take twelve weeks or so to find out that my mum’s dad is dead, but in an hour you’ve got back almost 600 years?’

The answer is that tracking down the Bulbeck line, and then tracing Albert Bulbeck’s other family, had involved proper hard research, because no one else had done the necessary graft in the records to link his two families up. Hilary had done the work, and entered the data, so now it was available through the Ancestry website. For the Marchants, however, a lot of other genealogists had already sifted through birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns, parish registers, denisation rolls and other proofs of existence in time. She, we, were the fortunate beneficiaries of this work. In the space of an hour I had acquired a pedigree. I am still not sure how I feel about this. This is not who I am; or, perhaps in light of this discovery, not who I thought I was. I had a working-class upbringing, in a working-class town, and I had a working-class education. I do not quite pass, even now, as a middle-class person; and certainly not as someone with a pedigree of any kind. In fact, lack of a pedigree has always been a source of pride. Look where I’ve got, from where I started, that sort of thing.

One ancestor in particular made me do that thing in cartoons where a character’s eyes come out on stalks.

Thomas Marchant. Diarist. Born 23/03/1676, died Hurst, 14/09/1728. 7 x great great-grandfather

Diarist? What diarist? Why did no one tell me I had a diarist for an ancestor? Is writing somehow hard-wired in my DNA, a recessive gene, maybe, that lay dormant until the day I submitted a short story to Doctor Who Monthly and came runner-up in the over-fifteen story writing contest, aged twenty-eight?

And what diary?

This diary:

It was easy to find, a short Google search away, a click on Amazon. My great-grandfather Thomas the Baker’s attempt to cover up his origins had come to naught, in a couple of hours one Tuesday evening, a hundred years after his death.

Thomas Marchant kept his diary, with a few breaks, between 29 September 1714 and 7 September 1728 (Old Style). It was passed down through the family, until in the mid-nineteenth century some 5 per cent was transcribed by a distant relative, the Reverend Edward Turner, and published in the Sussex Archaeological Society journal of 1873. E.V. Lucas used extracts from these transcriptions in Highways and Byways in Sussex, published in 1904, as have various social historians over the years. The diary itself was thought lost, but in the mid-1990s one of the members of the Hurst History Study Group, another descendant of Thomas called Anthony Bower, tracked down the current owner, who allowed copies to be made for the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester. It is from one of these copies that the volunteers and friends of the Hurst History Study Group made their transcription of the whole text, which they published in 2006.

And so I am in the extraordinary position of knowing what my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Marchant was doing on pretty much any given day 300 years ago.

As an example I’ve chosen the 16th of March.

Three hundred years ago, with a quill pen, by the light of a candle lantern at Little Park Farm in Hurstpierpoint, old Thomas wrote this in his diary:

The 16th March 1720 Thursday. A wet day. The boys win’d barly, 8 quarters. I were at William Nicholas’s in the morning teaching him to make ox harness. Dick Wood shooed the carthorses. Thomas Hamper’s man hew’d a tree. Paid old Dick Banks 1s for his son for mending 2 augers.

Three hundred years later, with my Lamy fountain pen, by the light from two daylight spectrum bulbs at the Old Grammarye in Presteigne, this is what I wrote in mine:

16/03/2020. A beautiful day, cold and clear. Coronavirus is here. Drove into Leominster for usual weekly shop at Morrisons. It was like Christmas, but much less jolly. The lass on the checkout said it had been mad for days. No loo roll, pasta, flour, beans, tinned toms, long-life milk, etc. Staff frantically filling shelves as fast as they could. Picked up a book on order at Rossiter’s – Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy’. Lass there said that they too had been as busy as Christmas, as people stocked up on reading material.

In the eve, HM Govt ordered new restrictions. All pubs, bars, theatres to close. Increase social distancing. All large gatherings stopped. Self-isolate for 14 days if you have it, or come into contact with it. Over 70s avoid going out, only essential journeys to be taken, etc., etc. It’s clearly heading for lockdown like in Italy. I checked our store cupboard – if they locked us in tonight, I reckon we could last a month. Thank goodness for Brexit stockpiling.

It falls on us to live in hard times. We thought that everything was going to be fine tomorrow, because it was fine yesterday. Now we can only hope that everything will be fine again, one fine day.

Lockdown became, for me, a chance to meet Old Thom Marchant and his family and friends, to inhabit their world, to share their concerns. Thom and I had to stay at home, and learn to live with one another, like millions of other families across the Earth. We had no choice but to sit by the woodburner and tell tales.

The social historian Lawrence Stone wrote: ‘If the historian of pre-nineteenth-century society seriously wants to pluck at the skirts of truth, she is obliged to use common sense and arguments of probability to apply correctives and supply lacunae.’5 If I wanted to know something of the world of Thom, the diary was not enough, not by itself. I wanted to explore what might be regarded as circumstantial evidence; and, of course, the historical imagination, without which the past can never truly be brought to life.

We have much in common, Old Thom and I. We are husbands and fathers who are trying to support our family and our communities. We both like to stroll about the town, see a bit of street theatre, hang out backstage, meet our chums and go for a drink, especially on Saturdays. We are both susceptible to inexplicable headaches on Sunday morning. We are both communicant members of the Church of England. The words I hear in church on a Sunday are very often the same that he would have heard in 1714, as we share the Book of Common Prayer. We both whistle at least one common tune. We both like cricket, a bit, though we are neither of us fanatics. We both seem to enjoy the company of women, a lot. He paid people to shave his head – so do I. We are both political animals, we are both interested in new ideas and we both have some understanding of science.

There are differences too, of course. His body temperature was, on average, higher than mine, because I have access to anti-inflammatory drugs and antibiotics. His world, however, was colder than ours, because he kept his diary in ‘the little ice age’ when global temperatures were on average 2 degrees colder than they are now, and Frost Fairs were held on the frozen Thames. His calendar was different from ours – his was the so-called Julian calendar, whilst ours is the more accurate Gregorian. He was eleven days ahead of us, and his years started later.6 Until 1752, when England adopted the Gregorian system, New Year’s Day was 25 March, Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months till Christmas. This is why some of the diary dates I use might seem out of kilter; the year starts in March, so an entry for February 1720 comes after September 1720.

There’s a sense too in which actual time moved differently. The writer Jay Griffiths argues that just as each place has a genius loci, a spirit of specific place, there was once also a genius temporis, a spirit of specific time. This spirit seems to have died as time began to be standardised with the arrival of the railway timetable in the 1840s, but there would once have been Hurstpierpoint time. Thom had a clock, but it would have been set by the sun, or perhaps with reference to a more advanced clock at Danny House, the big house just outside Hurstpierpoint where he spent much of his leisure. There would have been no use for what we would regard as ‘accurate’ time, just a need for neighbours and communities to broadly agree what was when.

His days do seem to move differently from mine in March 2020. He packs a lot in. He is busy running his farm, conducting business, dining out with friends, helping to administer the parish, watching cricket, setting up a school &c, while I was in the house with my wife and step-daughter, looking out on silent streets, wondering what was to come, with little to do except to try and find a way to listen to Thom, to remember and reimagine the world we have lost.

Early on in the process of reading and understanding the diary, when I was reflecting late one January 2020 evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere towards its end. Old Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked – and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it. He was a Sussex yeoman farmer who worked with horsetraders, dung carriers, hedgers and ditchers &c, but who was also a well-to-do, notable, voting member of Sussex society, who knew and worked with dukes, MPs, cabinet ministers, members of the Royal Society, political exiles and people who were prepared to suffer for their religious beliefs.

Three hundred years ago industrialisation was just at its birth. I remember from the writing of my book about Britain’s railways, Parallel Lines, that the world’s first railway viaduct, the Causey Arch near Newcastle, built for horse-drawn wagons running on wooden tracks, opened in 1725, a hundred years before the Stockton to Darlington Railway. I scoured my memory for other early dates in the Industrial Revolution. Newcomen’s steam engine – 1712. Its function was to pump water from Cornish tin mines, but a hundred years later, when the steam engine moved onto the rails, then Britain would be changed beyond all recognition. Thom’s moment is the moment when that change started to be noticeable, at least to historians.

What else? I remembered O level history, where we studied the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions. Abraham Darby’s blast furnace in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire – when was that? 1710, something like that. But did Darby invent it, or was it just the use of coke that he perfected, rather than charcoal? Were there blast furnaces before those in Coalbrookdale?7 There had to be. It was one in the morning, and I’m afraid I resorted to Google.

Of course, Darby didn’t invent the blast furnace. They had been in use in England for 200 years by the time he worked out how to use coked coal to make iron. Before that they used charcoal. The first English charcoal burning blast furnace was in Buxted, in Sussex, in 1493. And where did they come from before that? My jaw dropped open. Blast furnaces came from Namur. Namur. That’s the place where the first Marchants on Hilary’s list came from.

I got off Google and did proper research.8 I now knew why they came. And far from Thom being a bystander at the dawn of industrialisation – he, we, were complicit in it. The Marchants were one of some 300 families who, between about 1490 and 1600, moved from Namur (now in Belgium) and the Pays de Bray (which is between Dieppe and Rouen) to Sussex. These families brought the technology necessary to mass-produce iron. And thus to produce cannons.

Ernest Straker in Wealden Iron, published in 1931, realised the import of what had happened in Sussex:

In Tudor times, about the close of the 15th century, a new process was introduced from the Continent, and soon after the casting of iron cannon, at first by the help of foreign experts, was commenced in Sussex. This manufacture rapidly grew in importance, and soon led to a considerable export trade, frequently illicit. In our island this was the first step of the change from a practically self-supporting and mainly agricultural community, exporting their surplus produce in an unmanufactured state, to a nation depending for the greater part of its sustenance on manufactured exports, and was intimately connected with the rise of overseas trade and colonisation.

The Marchants carried a foreign virus that would mutate into the industrial system, and then we forgot that we had done so.

Think of what this change has brought us to. We post-moderns are so much the things of the Industrial Process that most of us have no idea how we would survive without it. In 2020, the Process was shown to be fragile, splintering perhaps beyond repair. Everything depends on everything else. A bottleneck in supply lines could mean life or death. China coughs, and the world stockpiles loo roll. Italy locks down, and there are no tinned tomatoes or pasta. Spain and the Netherlands lock down, and there are no fresh tomatoes, either. No one is coming to pick the harvest when it ripens. The grape rots on the vine, and there is nothing to be done.

Consider the all but infinite complexities of the Process upon which we all depend, and which might take nothing more than a nanoscopic speck of DNA and protein to bring it shuddering to a halt.

Consider, if you will, a morning cup of instant coffee, taken in a mug, with milk.

Let’s walk it through.

First, you fill the kettle with water. How comes there to be water in the tap? How does it get into our homes? How is it clean? How do we know? Who looks after the cleaning process? How are pipes maintained and mains flow regulated? How do taps even work?

Let’s allow the water, of which we know so little, into our electric kettle. How does that work? We all know that water and electricity don’t mix, so why isn’t an electric kettle dangerous? Dunno. What I do know is that the bimetallic thermostat which stops your kettle boiling dry and setting fire to your lovely home was invented and developed by a British engineer called John C. Taylor, whose company has sold somewhere in the order of 200 million units. How they work, keeping us safe from the potentially lethal consequences of kettles boiling dry, most of us have no clue. I don’t know what metals are used, or how they are mined and refined, or what the components might be, or how they are wired together. Nothing. I also understand almost nothing of the fantastic fruit of human endeavour that is the electrical generation industry, which brings together the sinister humming nuclear stations, the immensity of biomass stations like Drax, the susurrating windmills standing in the sea, and the system whereby the power is distributed and regulated so that it is safe to be let into our homes and kettles.

Now the water is hot, let’s find a mug. Let’s assume that it’s an earthenware one. The Brighton and Hove Albion League One Champions 2010–2011 mug I’m drinking from tonight is an inexpensive one, but it is still the result of vast industrial effort. The extraction and preparation of clay is a wildly complex business, which has been developed and refined over the last 20,000 years, and now involves high-tech geological expertise, gigantic earth-moving machines, globe-spanning shipping processes and complex world trade treaties (the UK is one of the world’s largest exporters of china and ball clay). All this before one mug has been moulded, fired or decorated. I know nothing about how this particular mug was moulded, fired and decorated, except that it clearly was. I could call the club shop, and ask them where they get their mugs from, but mine is a knock-off, produced by some fly-by-night pirate mug operation to take advantage of the Albion’s triumphant promotion. So I know even less than I might about who the designer was, how the transfers were made, where the mugs were decorated, how they were distributed and sold.

At home, we use Cafe Direct’s ‘Machu Picchu’ freeze-dried Fairtrade coffee. We buy it via a website, EthicalSuperstore.com. We see a thing, we have a line of credit, we click Buy and Hey Presto! The genie delivers all our wishes, even though we know that it’s not actually a genie who grants our every wish, but some poor bastard in a ‘fulfilment centre’. An ethical fulfilment centre sounds especially Orwellian, as I doubt there is much fulfilment, ethical or otherwise, to be had for those who work there.

We have transferred credit from us to Ethical Superstore. In my case, via the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, but how? Unthinkable amounts of capital: financial, human and technological, have gone into creating the system of dream fulfilment that is shopping for wishes via the interweb. Our postlady is called Sue, and our delivery guy is called Karl, that much I do know, but how our stuff gets to them to deliver, and how their vans work, are maintained, fuelled &c, I have but the vaguest possible notion. Nonetheless, coffee arrives, in packs of a dozen.

It comes in a stylish oval glass jar, with a coffee-coloured plastic screw top. How are jars like this made? How is glass made? Dunno – boiling up sand or something, isn’t it? Where are the stylish oval lids extruded? Dunno. Someone does, of course. A multitude of people could answer this multitude of questions. Here’s the thing – each of us, as industrialised units with industrial functions to fulfil in the Process can understand one tiny part of that Process, but never the whole thing.

For example, I am the sort of person who could have written the guff on the back of the jar about passion, ethical considerations, aroma &c. It says, ‘Grown at high altitudes within the Inca heartland of the PERUVIAN ANDES, this coffee is RICH and FULL-BODIED with dark chocolate overtones.’ I don’t understand how the label was printed, or how it came to be attached to the jar, (presumably through the operation of hugely sophisticated machine tools), but I do know what it’s like to be a penniless hack knocking out nonsensical copy for a pittance. And therefore what it is to need a mug of instant coffee.

We pick up a spoon, preparing to burst the foil lid with a satisfying pop, a pop that a great number of people have gone to a great deal of trouble for us to enjoy. Before we get in, look at the teaspoon. Is it one of the silver-plated ones we got from Aunty? One of the 1990s IKEA ones we got as part of our divorce settlement? One of the ones that we seem to have nicked from De Grays Cafe in Ludlow? All of these spoons are the product of heavy industries of Byzantine complexity, that we have never once given a moment’s thought to.

As to the coffee, which purports to be from the ‘Inca heartland of the PERUVIAN ANDES’ – how in the holy name of Viracocha does it come to be here? Who grows it, how it is grown, or processed, packed, exported, we don’t know. Are the beans processed near to the coffee farms, and are they freeze dried rather than spray dried? How’s that done? What are the various advantages and disadvantages? (Of course, I realise there are hipster readers going, ‘Mate, I know’ – as I say, everyone knows a fragment of the process.)

How can we begin to even imagine how the milk has got as far as our kitchen? It comes from a dairy farm somewhere, but we don’t really know why and how it is safe to drink. We have no clue about how this splash of semi-skimmed in our coffee came to be here, or what happened to the other bit of fat.9 And why hasn’t the milk turned overnight? Dire Straits complained about having to move the refrigerators that we need to keep our milk fresh, and who can blame them, but that’s the least of it.

So much human endeavour, expressed in unthinkably complex industrial processes, carried out by countless millions of workers, has come together at this moment, the moment of you waking up, making coffee and getting ready to go to work, almost certainly as a servant in some way of the Process that has brought this coffee-bean-derived drink to your lips.

Will this system hold? Should it? Who can say? Future readers will know better than I. They will have the benefit of hindsight, while I am stuck in this particular instance of immediacy. But in his diary, Mr. Thomas Marchant, of Hurstpierpoint in the County of Sussex, gives a taste of what everyday life was like before this Great Machine that we live in came to be.

I knew that night in January 2020, when I realised that blast furnaces came from Namur, that I would need to go to see for myself ye olde ancestral home in Belgium. It is so rare for non-aristocratic families to be able to trace their ancestry this far back that it would be remiss of me not to. The Sambre–Meuse valley, the Sillon industriel, with Namur at its midpoint, was the first place in mainland Europe to industrialise. How could this not be a big part of the ‘before’ story? After all, it looked as though my fate, and that of my family, had to some extent been determined by the history of iron working. We were shaped by geology. I decided I would make the trip at Easter.

But later in January, I had a change of fortune. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and not the good kind that you die with, but the bad kind that you probably die of. They told me it was incurable; ‘Manageable, but incurable.’ A diagnosis like this makes you get a move on. I changed my plans, and booked ferries and hotels for the last week of February.

‘No matter what,’ I said to Hilary, ‘we are going to Belgium.’

III.

There needs a long time to know the World’s pulse

The 22nd February 1720. A dry day. Willy and Dick King plough’d in the forenoon. Fetcht the ladder pole from Saddlescomb. My Brother Will here in the evning. My Brother John Courtness here afternoon.

On 20 February 2020 I had an appointment for a biopsy on my prostate, which is much worse than it sounds. A day to recuperate, and then we would be off.

What we didn’t know, as we set out for the Dover ferry on the morning of 22 February, was that the world was about to close its doors, and that we would be the last tourists for we didn’t know how long. We also didn’t know for sure, as we drove through driving sleet and rain from Presteigne to the port of Dover, whether we should be doing this at all. Two days before, the consultant who performed my biopsy had warned us not to go.

‘You could get sepsis,’ he said.

I explained that I was writing a book about my family, and how they were present at the opening moments of industrialisation, and that I quite clearly needed to go to Belgium.

‘Your health is more important than your work.’

My work is high risk, involving as it does sitting about all day squinting at a computer, drinking sugary tea and eating hot buttered toast, smoking the odd pipe, and walking up to Elda’s Colombian Coffee House for a crispy bacon sandwich and a double espresso at one-ish. Little did he know, I sacrificed my health for my work many years ago. A trip to Belgium was the least of it.

I was on heavy-duty antibiotics after the biopsy and had started taking a testosterone blocker, which, I had been assured, would give me the symptoms of a menopausal woman; top of the list, extreme fatigue. I had been told that at some point I would need chemotherapy, sooner rather than later. To listen to his advice would have meant that the trip to Namur could not be possible until chemo was done, and I wasn’t prepared to wait that long. To cancel the trip would cost the £400 or so we had spent on ferries and hotels. I asked my Macmillan nurse (for I suddenly had such a person in my life) what she thought. She argued the case with the consultant and obtained his reluctant consent. But his warning words were on my mind, as you might imagine.

Storms had cut Presteigne off from the rest of the world for much of late January and most of February. It was difficult to find a way out that was not closed due to flooding, and impossible to find a road that was not scarred by potholes. We took the fast road, but it was dark and dreich. We were escaping the consultant and the diagnosis, but we also felt we were somehow escaping Blighted Blighty to travel in the EU without restriction, maybe for the last time. At Clacket Lane services on the M25 we bought the kit you need to drive legally in France and Belgium – the red triangle, the breathalyser, the first aid kit, the spare bulbs, the gilets jaunes and a magnetic GB badge, which we declined to use as we have a Welsh number plate. CYM is much more to our taste. We arrived at our hotel in Dover, ready to catch the 8 a.m. boat to Dunkerque in the morning, and sat miserably in the adjacent Harvester, trying to eat while a bunch of loutish Faragistas at the next table shouted with their mouths full about the human vermin who were crossing the Channel every day in their tens of thousands, apparently.

The 23rd February 1720. A fine day, small frost. I were at Brighton market afternoon. Lost a ewe this afternoon. Smith set beans. My wife was at Danny afternoon.

On 23 February 2020, the still powerful aftermath of the last of a succession of bitter winter storms was blowing up the Channel, but a break in the weather meant that we could cross, as the wind dropped to Force 7. It was an unattractive prospect. The man at check-in asked if we were ‘going home’, because of what he saw as our French name. No one had asked this before, and it seemed like a good omen; he advised us to take the Calais boat as the Dunkerque boat wasn’t in yet.

The DFDS announcer told us when we boarded that due to bad weather the outside decks would be closed. Hilary is not a great sailor, despite, or because of, a lifetime of Stranraer–Larne crossings in winter. She’s learned to face where she’s going, so we found a table for two next to the forward cafe-bar. I bought us a coffee each, which we clung to as the ship left the harbour and lurched into the weather.

About halfway across that rough crossing, the boat plunged into a huge wave, and Hilary was thrown off her chair, almost hitting her head on the corner of a low table. A young man sprawled with his phone across the adjacent banquette leapt up and held her. I struggled to stand while he helped her over to an armchair. The ship’s bursar came to find us, to make sure Hilary wasn’t hurt, and to give her a small bottle of tepid water by way of compensation. We talked a little with the young man who had helped us. He was a Romanian bus driver, Bucharest to London one week, London to Bucharest the next. He said his English wasn’t great. I pointed out it was much better than our Romanian. He said that he was worried what would happen to his work after Brexit.

We felt triumphant to be landing in France again, against the odds. It seemed so liberating. If I had sepsis, I also had my EHIC card. If Britain was to cut itself off from Europe – well, at least we were here now. We took the coast road north, and stopped for breakfast at a Flunch concession in the Auchan superstore on the outskirts of Dunkerque, which is like a Morrisons cafe if it were run by Heston Blumenthal.

Twenty minutes’ drive later, we crossed into Belgium. I had achieved my ambition. I had come back, after 500 years, to listen for the whisper of the past. Anxious, smelling of piss, seriously unwell and exhausted from the hormones, I didn’t feel like much of a representative of the future. Yet, here I was, back at the beginning of what I am.

Stories should start at the beginning. And in the beginning, as hippies will tell you if you’re not very careful, we were stardust. All that we are, from one point of view, are highly organised systems of various elements formed by nuclear fusion in giant stars, and spewed out into the universe as the collapsing stars violently transitioned into supernovas. Iron is the last element produced by runaway fusion just before the stars go supernova. That’s why there is so much of it in the world. About 35 per cent of the Earth’s mass is a molten liquid iron–nickel alloy, which makes up the planetary core.

Roughly 2,400 million years ago, the oceans were full of dissolved iron, and very little dissolved oxygen. Then, cyanobacteria emerged, the first life capable of photosynthesis, which meant that oxygen levels started to rise. This is known as the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’. The newly abundant oxygen combined with the dissolved iron to make iron ores, either haematite or magnetite, which sank to the bottom of the sea. About 1,800 million years ago, this process stopped, or slowed right down, because most of the dissolved iron had oxidised, so the iron ore deposits we have now mostly date from this vast period of time.

Let’s skip forward a mere 1,400-ish million years to what geologists call the Devonian period, which was between 420 and 360 million years ago.10 Geological periods being on the long side, it is divided into subdivisions, early, middle and late, and then further divided into stages. Three of these stages, the Givetian, the Frasnian and the Famennian are named after present day towns in the Ardennes: Givet in France, and Frasnes-lez-Couvin and Marche-en-Fammenne in Belgium, because those were the places where geologists found the ‘type-site’ samples which enable them to identify geological strata.

One of the most notable markers of the Devonian period was high tectonic activity, as landmasses collided and made new continental formations. Somewhere in one of those stages, most likely the Frasnian (between 382 and 372 million years ago, about the time the first forests appeared), two massive tectonic plates came together with a bump, causing mountains to rise, big ones, and lots of them. This event, or series of roughly contemporaneous events, is called ‘the Variscan orogeny’, and as orogenies go, it was a mother. Its remains run in a band across the northern hemisphere, from the Tian Shan mountains in China, through the Urals, the mountains of the Balkans and Greece, Montblanc, the Harz mountains in Germany, the Pembrokeshire Coast and, in the US, the Appalachians.

The Ardennes Mountain was formed too, bringing with it huge banded layers of the iron which had precipitated into the oceans. Wait another 350 million years or so for the soft bits of the old Ardennes Mountain to get largely worn away (and for humans to evolve), and then you can mine the iron, which is now close to the surface.

About 0.006 per cent of a human is iron, but we each, in the industrialised north, account for somewhere between 7,000 and 14,000 kilograms of processed iron per person, across a lifetime. Think how much iron it must have taken to make that cup of coffee. In this sense, the Iron Age has never ended. But for archaeologists and historians, the term has a precise meaning. It marks a period of time between the moment when producing iron became so cheap and easy that it overtook bronze in usefulness and the date when history starts. It annoys people when I talk about this.

The first part is easy to understand. In the Bronze Age, as you might expect, bronze was easier and cheaper to produce; but there were bits of iron about. Iron collected from meteorites had been known for thousands of years, but it was rare and valued more than gold. One of Tutankhamen’s greatest treasures was a cold-worked knife made from meteoric iron. An Iron Age starts when archaeologists start finding large quantities of iron objects, and bronze seemed to have lost utility and value. This happens in different places at different times.

It’s the second part that drives people mad. How can history have a start date? But of course history has a start. History deals in dates. If something can’t be dated, it’s prehistory. When was the first date? Not, when did the world start, but, what is the first event that humankind can put a date to, and say, Oh so and so happened in the year whenevs? This also happens at different times in different places. In China an Iron Age never really happened, because the written history of China starts well before iron displaces bronze in the archaeological record as the most commonly used metal. In Ancient Greece, the Iron Age ends in 500BCE, with the writings of Herodotus, the ‘father of history’. In Ireland, it didn’t end until about 400CE, and in Scandinavia not until about 800CE.