08:20 The 6th morning of mine and Lois's stay at our daughter Alison's house in Headley, Hampshire, pet-sitting the family's 2 cats and their tank of tiny marine fish.
I have got up and dressed myself early, because the family have a cleaner, Joanna, who comes on Wednesdays, and cleans half the house for 4 hours - this week it's the ground floor, next week it'll be the upper floor.
10:15 Lois and I go out, partly so that we're not "under Joanna's feet", but also to give Lois a walk: her digestive health starts to suffer if she doesn't get a walk each day - imagine that! It's the opposite with me haha! I don't mind going for walks, but I have to have a "sweetener", and with the Devil's Punchbowl is the Devil's Punchbowl Cafe.
We drive to the Devil's Punchbowl, an incredible natural feature of the Surrey countryside.
the route we take to cover the 5 mile trip to the Devil's Punchbowl
The name of the village, Thursley, means, quite literally, Thor's "lea" or meadow, so that fits too, which is nice! Presumably Thor had quite a nice house there - after all he had his wife, the goddess Sif, to accommodate, as well as multiple mistresses and children: I'd have thought at minimum a four-bedroom, wouldn't you?
...but stop halfway round for a well-earned rest on a bench
14:00 In the afternoon Lois takes the laptop and starts looking at more houses-for-sale in Malvern, where we're hoping to move in the next few months. I'm glad she's doing it - I find it so hard-going looking at all the descriptions: I just haven't got the persistence that Lois shows in so many things..
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch the second programme in the "Lucy Worsley Investigates" historical series. In tonight's programme Lucy is investigating the Black Death - the first visitation to the British Isles of the bubonic plague in the 1300's.
Lois and I, especially Lois, already know quite a lot already about the Black Death as a national phenomenon, but it's nice tonight to see it made to "come alive" through Lucy's perusal of local court records for a little village in Suffolk, Walsham.
Thor and his wife, the goddess Sif
the quiet village of Thursley, Surrey, with some typical larger houses -
this is the village where the god Thor and his wife Sif were once
leading residents, probably in a 4-bedroom minimum, I would think!
It seems that the Devil lived next door, or thereabouts, and he was always tormenting his neighbour Thor - what madness! And Thor used to retaliate by trying to strike down the Devil with thunder and lightning - a convenient weapon for Thor to use, because of course, famously, Thor was the god of thunder.
On one occasion Thor became so cross that he scooped up a handful of earth and hurled it at the Devil, leaving the crater that remains in the county today. And when the mist lies in the valley, it can give the appearance of a punchbowl, hence it's name.
Who knew ? [I hope you've got a reliable source for that information! - Ed]
We start our walk. There's a choice of 5 to choose from:
(1) Sailor's Stroll (1 mile, easy walk with only gentle gradients)
(2) Highcombe Hike (2.8 miles with steep gradients and uneven surfaces)
(3) Hidden Hindhead Trail (3.1 miles, again with steep gradients and uneven surfaces)
(4) Miss James' Walk (1.9 miles - a gentle walk with some uneven surfaces and moderate gradients)
(5) Golden Valley (2 miles - demanding walk with uneven surfaces and steep gradients).
I vote for walk 1 but Lois favours walk 2, and I agree to that, because I don't want to look like a complete wimp. It's supposed to be 2.8 miles, but we have to add another mile to that because we take a wrong turning and have to retrace our steps. What madness !!!!
we start the walk....
Finally I get my reward - we reach the Devil's Punchbowl Café, and have a coffee and a flapjack each, which is nice.
Later I look in the parcel box outside the front gate. Amazon have delivered a new humane mouse trap, which Alison wants us to try out, maybe tomorrow, baiting it with seeds etc - you know the kind of things that mice like to eat - they wouldn't tempt me personally. Call me picky if you want!
Alison says she prefers this new model to the old mousetraps that she bought earlier, and which are a bit on the small side, with a slight risk that the mouse's tail will be trapped by the shutting mechanism, which wouldn't be nice.
The new trap has an attractive name - Motel Mouse - suggesting perhaps a "summer break" that the mice can take advantage of. And a stay in the "motel" is always followed by a little run-around out in a lovely big garden, which seems ideal to us haha!
It's thought that the plague killed possibly as much as half the population - the 6 million people living in Britain in 1348, just before the plague arrived, were reduced to just 3 million two years later. And the reason it was so deadly was that it was our first exposure to the bacterium. When the same plague came again about 300 years later, it wasn't nearly so deadly because a degree of "herd immunity" had been built up by that time. See? Simples!
We knew that the plague helped the country to lurch slowly in the direction of democracy - the shortage of labour because of all the deaths, meant that ordinary people could demand higher wages. So it spelled the end of all traces of serfdom. People also won the right to leave their native villages if they pleased - something banned under the feudal system - and they were granted this because their labour was in demand elsewhere.
One ploughman was bribed by a nearby landowner to take a job with him: the bribe was to offer him some of the nobleman's fine clothes - and apparently the lad wore them even when he was ploughing - I suppose it made his friends and neighbours jealous. But what madness !!!!
I don't think we realised that it also aided the emancipation of women. Before the plague local financial records made no mention of women, who weren't considered "economic units" - they weren't allowed to be classed as head of family or to own their family's business. But all that changed with the plague.
From the village court records, Lucy discovers a woman called Olivia who, before the plague, was convicted of fornication and fined. She had to pay a so-called "child wite" of 2 shillings and 8 pence, because she had given birth to a child out of wedlock.
However Olivia's fortunes took a turn for the better later on. She got married, and later, when the plague carried off her husband, as well as her grandfather, father and brothers, she took on the family business and started to appear in local court records, which recorded taxes etc.
Lois and I discuss at this point how it would have been nice to know if the plague was more lethal to men than to women - just as, we think, there's some suggestion of that with COVID.
Perhaps historians don't have good enough stats to say that one way or the other for sure.
But I think we should be told !!!!!
At least in those crazy far-off times, there were no "supply chain" problems with food, as we have today. Most people grew their own food still, so they didn't have to have it delivered by Sainsburys or Tesco, which was nice!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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