A VIRAGO IN MINIATURE, EXETER, 1841

 "A dwarfish Amazon, named Eliza Marshall, who appears to be emulous of the fame of Lady Barrymore,  and whose visits to the Guildhall,  unlike  "angels' visits few and far between," are of continued recurrence,  was charged with being drunk and disorderly.

"She was fined `10s and costs , or in default of payment, a month's imprisonment.

"As Milford, the night watchman, was conducting this virago in miniature to the lock-up, she suddenly made a violent attack upon him, scratching his face and drawing the blood copiously from his nose.  For this second offence she was ordered to be brought up tomorrow."

*

This Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, (10th April 1841)  typically brutal, police-court report is perhaps of interest only in so far as it mentions Lady Barrymore.   

Until her miserable death in 1832 "Lady Barrymore", properly Mary Ann Pearce, had been, for one or two years only, the cosseted mistress of the obscenely wealthy and decadent aristocrat, Richard (Hellgate) Barry the seventh Earl of Barrymore, (hence Mary Pearce's "title", unto which she had no right), and subsequently she was famous only for drunkeness, appearances in court and assaults upon watchmen.

No doubt Eliza Marshall's sins were scarlet but it wasn't her fault that she was small!

The angels quotation is from  Thomas Campbell's poem The Pleasures of Hope.  

 "What though my winged hours of bliss have been / like angels' visits few and far between...."

Campbell was still alive when Eliza Marshall bloodied Watchman Milford's nose.  

Oh to have lived in an age when words like emulous and copiously were flung to the people that they might leap and catch them and when the words of poets were read and remembered and quoted in the Exeter newspapers!

Nowadays language becomes less  elegant by the day.  Only today I read in Devon Live:

"A train passenger has received praise after they refused to give up their seat to an elderly woman.  The female passenger defended her decision .... &co."  (my emphasis)

How daft can you get?

   

TRENCHER CAPS, EXETER, 1841.

 From the Western Times, March 13th, 1841:

"Every body in this city has seen the Diocesan school boys parade the streets in their trencher caps.   Bishop Phillpotts enforces this daily airing in the open streets by way of advertising the existence of the school.

"Some of the lads look lank and hungry,  We hope their trenchers are filled at home as well as their trencher caps are out. 

"But we neither publish, hint, nor insinuate aught that would imply a doubt of the fact."

*

The Western Times liked a pun as much as it disliked Bishop Phillpotts.  The insinuation is, however much we are assured that there is none, that the twenty-six or so schoolboy/choristers of the cathedral's school were being half starved by a penny pinching Bishop, Dean and Chapter.

A trencher cap is nowadays more usually called a mortar-board.    Both appellations attempt to be pleasant.  It is called a trencher cap, say some, because, upside down, it looks like a trencher coming to table with a bowl upon it but certainly it is so called because the flat hats look like trenchers (wooden plates or platters) at the dining table.  Hence the Times' somewhat heavy pun.   

I wonder whether these caps were worn by schoolboys elsewhere.   

The lank and hungry boys must have looked cute in their 'academic dress' as they passed through the streets of Exeter, just as do the somewhat plumper graduates of the Open University these days.