Aah I see what you are saying. The stocks or rather the stones behind them which I said were likely for the auctioneer to be stood on during an auction you are arguing they are the base of a former market cross?
For myself whatever the purpose of the stones behind the stocks were originally it must have been popular going off of the wear. I wonder which war the so called War Memorial commemorates?
In the past, arguing hasn't proven a very effective way to express my ideas. Especially when I'm unsure of the evidence and my logic. Being funny seems to get people's attention. Having - at last - realised this, I'm working on being funny intentionally. So I'll proceed in that vein.
You suggested the steps may have been an auctioneer's stump and/or the base a gibbet. But perhaps, like me, you are still wondering:
What is that? What is that for?
It would be in the spirit of the IHASFEMR thread to answer with shorthand like:
Yes, it may well have been for auctioneering. Cattle -> chattel -> the Mayor of Casterbridge's wife...
But given the difficulties we face when trying to recover so much missing history, a different approach might help with this one. It's just possible that some irrelevant-seeming thought might prove very relevant to our recovering the real purpose of those Swineshead steps. And perhaps to recovering missing parts of the history of technology.
I'd also guess the memorial commemorates WWI. I'll visit Swineshead and report back. And I think you are completely correct to highlight the wear on the steps. In fact you could have taken the words right out of my mouth. Step wear on old structures is possibly a useful clue to solving one of Life's Big Questions: for how long was chewmanity around before mudflood's complex mother-catastrophe changed things? I'll take a straight edge to see if I can measure the step wear. I think 'depth of wear (millimetres)' would equal something like:
The product of:
'Variable A: traffic level'
x
'Variable B: length of time in use'
x
'Factor C: type of footwear' (hobnails or leather)
x
'Factor D: weight of average step-user'.
I used to know a pharmaceutical industry statistician who could take a list of measurements for quantities like 'depth of wear (millimetres)', then derive from it the value of each of its individual factors. A skill that looked like magic to me. I think she's busy promoting vaccines now.
I hadn't thought of the intimidatory nature of having a gibbet looming over the stocks. It's a very good point. Nevertheless, I still think there may be more to those worn steps than a well-used gibbet. And to the stocks. However, for the moment I'll leave the stocks out and take a swing at the gibbet:
Gibbet:
- gallows
- an upright post with a projecting arm for hanging the bodies of executed criminals as a warning
I question the narrative around gibbets and the rest of the hangman's tool-set. Along with hanging as a useful method of execution. I accept that it's showy. And, as the video captioned '
Freshly cut ingredients, attractively presented' in
post-101535 demonstrates, showy is effective. Showy draws happy, expectant crowds. I also accept that still-warm - perhaps still jerking - bodies may have been slit open; their blood drained and sold as 'merch' at the end of the show.
But I suspect hanging may - of all things - be the most cargo cult-ish of all our cargo cults. In particular,
the hangman's knot has always puzzled me. It's over the top. It is uses a lot of rope to fashion a Rolls Royce among knots. Why do it? When hanging was allegedly as common as a trip to Tesco, why roll out the Roller? A Ford Fiesta would be good enough and weigh less on the rope budget.
I suspect we've been strung along and that real hangings used
the scaffold knot. It has a slightly higher failure rate - but not much higher - and fatigues less rope. Its failures might not be a bad thing. Failures - especially sporadic and unpredictable failures - are a guaranteed crowd pleaser. They are the casino's business model. Handled appropriately, every failure could be turned into viral marketing for your gibbet.
If you really wanted to hang people as a lesson or a spectacle - or both - you wouldn't use thick rope. It's too valuable. You'd use the same materials, techniques and mind-set used for snares. Sinew and cord so thin it can barely be seen. Perhaps later into the Industrial Revolution you'd switch to the thinnest viable piano wire. You'd plan for it, equip for it, and rehearse it over and over again. You would use technology to enhance the drama until the visual severity of a well-executed hanging was indistinguishable from magic.
I could be wrong. Maybe it's the showman in me that thinks this way. Perhaps I should get a life. I do need to hang out more.
I don't want to underplay the important clue that is the hangman's knot. I am not claiming it is merely a 'show' knot. I think the hangman's knot could unravel the very real mystery of gibbets. A cargo cult clue we can use to ensnare this thoroughly-sanitised aspect of chewman history and splatter it with Truth.
Another weird aspect of gibbets is their location. Often way out of the village; often on a hill. Why? I get why you'd put them where the toiling peasants could see them. But if your slaves really have such poor memories, why not site the gibbet amid their hovels? Where everyone can see its gruesome payload every time they check the weather? Indeed, use it to check the weather.
Well, that is - of course - the case at Swineshead. And, as you noted, the Swineshead gibbet is close to a coaching inn. This is another clue to one of its real, original functions. I'll come back to this once I've finished cleaning our minds of mainstream nonsense about how hangings worked.
A few years ago, one of the Sunday newspapers ran an article that described - in loving detail - the process of hanging. The journalist dangled in front of his readers a systematic and thorough preparation process ideally suited to the sensitivities of 20th Century England. It included:
- Inspection of the gallows' integrity.
- Inspection of the rope's integrity.
- Creation of the perfect noose and knot combination.
- An artisanal - yet perfect - assessment of the required drop.
- Followed - about 15 minutes later - by the start of a quite astonishing clean-up process.
The last two parts of cleanup were:
- Careful washing of every single part of the corpse and its soiled crevices.
- Placing the now perfectly clean body in a pit of quicklime, then covering it - reverently of course - with shovel-loads more quicklime.
I expect a human body would achieve peak-productivity in such pre-mortem moments. Mine would. But the described level of care went far beyond even today's
Health and Safety biohazard handling requirements. Especially for bodies about to be transformed into miniatures of the Chilterns.
It brought me up with a jerk.
I thought:
When I checked
Wikipedia's Albert Pierrepoint page, I saw my second fear confirmed:
an English hangman who executed between 435 and 600 people in a 25-year career that ended in 1956.
What kind of record-keeping is that?
To my ever-lasting regret, I was so caught up in this revelation, I forgot to check Wikipedia's page about the journalist. Nevertheless, that article spawned IHASFEMR. It conceived the first thought - the neuronal equivalent of first cell division.
I thought: perhaps the Pierrepoints - aided by the British State - were selling corpses to medical universities. It's not unthinkable: the State specifically
formalised that sideline on 22 May, 2020. But, given the stories you hear about Dennis Nielson and all that, I began to wonder if the Pierrepoints had tapped a market that only buys from the most discreet suppliers. The 'leisure market' if you see what I mean. If so, then limited supply and the need for utmost discretion would guarantee premium prices. This is the kind of low cost, high-price market sector that business adores. I thought perhaps I had discovered - over-shadowed by the celebrated economic contributions of the 'Pink Pound' - a small, highly profitable contribution made by the 'Stink Pound'.
Two circumstantial pieces of evidence supported this conjecture:
- The Government (meaning the Prison Service and the then Inland Revenue) turning a blind eye to the obvious book-cooking - and perhaps crook-cooking - by the Pierrepoints. I presume the authorities got their cut.
- There is a visible sub-sector of this market. Only just visible, it hides in plain sight as the 'realistic fake corpse' market.
If the realistic fake corpse market is new to you, see:
On these two sites, you will see advanced 'Halloween dummies' on open sale. But turn up your intuition level... Turn your intuition level right up to volume 11 and you will see love dolls being openly sold to people who are 'exploring their relationship' with putrefaction.
It would be unfair to call these products 'gateway corpses for beginner necrophiliacs'. So I won't. You make your own call. The main thing is: we should not judge 'The Other'.
If what I am saying seems 'out there', I assure you it isn't. I was introduced to
Distefano over 20 years ago by my corpse-obsessed then-wife. Its product line seems to have been more upmarket in those days. My then-wife became my ex-wife and went on to become a respected cop, which proves these interests are as Establishment as it gets.
By my count, that is three pieces of evidence that support my conjecture.
Anyway, that's how we got to here, to IHASFEMR. So let's now take a look at a similar word to 'gibbet': 'giblet'.
Giblet:
- an edible visceral organ of a fowl —usually used in plural
- giblets plural, archaic: odds and ends: "the great ladies with their grace, lace, and giblets" - Peter Hawker
I don't know who Peter Hawker was or where he wrote that. But I do know who John Byng was and where he wrote the below. From John Byng's
The Torrington Diaries, Vol III, p98, at Skipton Castle:
a most inconvenient, miserable, tatter'd place it is, with neither beauty of building, nor pleasing antiquity; but a melancholy wretchedness of bad old rooms, some miserable tapestry, and some (basely) neglected pictures, especially one of the Countess, with a child in her hand
Yes. She had big hands.
Now, adding to
feralimal's findings about liquor and gravy:
To make gravy, you may want to fortify it with neck and giblets while the turkey cooks (or chop the giblets and saute them with some shallot…
Source
OK, let's board the gravy train:
Britain, 1908:
Iron Age gibbets. Note the bowler hat. Source
Britain, 1934:
My proposal for replacing the NHS home care service with McDonalds rail deliveries. Source
America, 1908:
For the interested, details of more American mechanisms are
here. In short, this is how you engineer pick-up and drop-off of cargo by a moving vehicle. Without requiring it to stop.
Referring back to
the Lincolnshire Life quote in
post-106260.
Later on, coaches would also leave their mailbags at the Wheatsheaf and it was from here that villagers would collect their letters – in effect the hotel was Swineshead’s first Post Office.
That was part of my response to your very relevant question in
post-106259:
Was it a coaching inn at one point prior to the houses construction?
Yes it was. And it was a mail pick-up and drop-off station too. Among John Byng's most common diary entries are his references to picking up his mail, replying to it, and talking with innkeepers about postal delivery times.
Hotels and inns that acted as post offices were called 'posting stations'. From a page
about Thorney, Cambridgeshire:
Thorney was, during this time a Posting Station and the Dukes Head Inn stood on the south west corner of the traffic lights at Abbey Place and the Wisbech Road. It was demolished after it fell in to disrepair towards the end of the nineteenth century.
I think you're going to tell me I've made a great case for Swineshead's old cross base being the remnant of a parcel pick-up and drop-off point. And Thorney's too. But I think you're also going to tell me - gently and sensitively - that there was no railway line running past Swineshead's Wheatsheaf, nor past Thorney's Dukes Head Inn. That I should drop my case. But that you'll hang on a little longer to hear what I think Pierrepoint's ridiculously over-sized knot was really about.
I thought we might reach this point. I feared a post whose only obvious merits are its gallows humour and hard-earned knowledge of the sexual preferences of necrophiliacs would quickly lose reader interest. People want facts. Preferably facts about things they find interesting, not facts about things I find interesting.
So I've cut and pasted a short diversion into materials science. Specifically, bow-making. Bow-making and what bow-making tells us about the suppressed history of materials science.
All bows are equal but some bows are more equal than others. Or at least, are better-known than others. We begin with a quick examination of the English longbow. Starting with a quote I'm sure I once heard at the dinner table in the mid-90s. That the simple longbow:
Simple because it is made from a natural laminate. Source
English longbow staves combine the contrasting properties of yew's sapwood and heartwood. Source
Just to drive the point home:
- Yew heartwood tolerates and recovers from compression very well.
- Yew sapwood tolerates and recovers from tension very well.
So, cut correctly, yew staves supply two woods pre-bonded to each other. From one tree.
We're told English warbows - the taller man's version of today's 1.8m (72 inch) longbow - presented draw-weights up to 150lbs. Possibly more. This tolerance for being tensioned and compressed, then released into super-fast recovery, is what makes yew's natural lamination so suitable for warbows.
The Japanese used short bows and longbows. The french also fought with longbows. So-called 'English' longbows are made from European Yew (Taxus baccata), which is found all over western Europe. References to yew and yew woodworkers can be found as far south as
Évora in Portugal. Says Wikipedia, the 'celt' word for yew - 'ebura' and its variations - is found all over western Europe. Eboracum was the Latin name for York. Which itself isn't a million miles from the word 'yew'.
Conclusion: Whatever your longbow heritage, European yew's qualities were appreciated from York in northern England to Évora in southern Portugal.
We've seen some bow shooting. But we focused on the bow. Let's have a squint at accuracy:
Byron Ferguson demonstrates his eye for circle packing. Source
With that, we've drawn a picture of the basics of archery. We know yew's natural lamination mixes and matches properties of two different tree parts. We can also envision range and accuracy.
Longbows are powerful, accurate and even romantic... but you can't prance around on verandahs with them:
A laminate bow receives its final layer: a simple human shield. Source: Westworld S02 Ep05
Most bows are short compared to longbows. Why? Some 'exhibition' archers claim traditional archery is a misrepresentation. That archery was fast-moving, dynamic and often, very close range. Requiring skills like this:
Unfortunately, using bows in this way is controversial today. Source
Among archers, this video is controversial. Apparently, some say, it's unrealistic. Some say it's faked. Assuming it is genuine, then in my opinion, there are only two appropriate responses to this video: awe (a feeling) and appreciation (a cognition).
Perhaps as a result of buying so many ready-to-use items during their lives, consumer-humans no longer experience the feeling of 'awe' as awe was meant to be felt. That is: as the feeling experienced when we see the abilities someone has developed from their personal struggle with innumerable failures. Instead, consumers confuse the feeling called 'awe' with the feeling called 'jealousy'. I think this may be because consumers don't fail enough. They think achievement is easy. As a result, they are unable to process 'awe' when they encounter it. Their sense of "I can't do that" is transformed into jealousy. Then into anger instead of appreciation. This is not a natural, built-in, fault. It is a stress condition, a symptom of capabilities left undeveloped by insufficient exposure to personal failure, insufficient survival of personal failure, and insufficient overcoming of challenges. Individually and mutually.
Like bows, we humans need to be tillered as part of our development. Tillering develops balance. Beyond that, we need to be stretched if we are are to develop our full power.
Anyway, let's avoid arguing with angry aficionados of weaponry. Armed angry people get killed while arms manufacturers get rich, so we'll look at bow-making instead.
You can make a field-expedient short bow out of a single stave of wood. Some woods are better than others. But most short bows perform much better if you laminate together materials with different properties. In other words, if you imitate yew's natural lamination.
Usual materials for this?
- Various woods and bamboos
- Hide
- Sinew
- Horn
- Bone
I left ivory off the list. I'm not a materials scientist but I understand ivory's brittleness more or less excludes its use in highly-stressed, flexing laminates. And also excludes it from laminates that must take a bashing. Ivory might have potential as a reinforcement in static laminate applications. But if low weight is required, ivory loses to bone.
Choice depends on what you've got and what you want. Stronger bow? More stable bow? Lighter bow? Stiffer bow? Cold temperature bow (think "Artic")? Bone was usually used as a stiffener. It helps laminates resist flexing. Which you might want if all you have is sinew and seal skin.
This clip - from
Making The Lakota Bow, A Bow Maker's Journey - shows sinew being used to increase a bow's stiffness:
It's not as good but it's better. Source
Manufacture can get quite complex:
Laminating a Japanese longbow. Source
It reminds me of a human spine. And then comes the thought: well, what was your body designed to do?
Consider what he's using his body to do. He probably didn't wake up one Saturday morning thinking:
Got the whole weekend ahead. What do to? I know! I'll make a bow out of slivers of wood and bamboo while practicing yoga.
No. He is using techniques taught and learned over time. His knowledge of materials is coeval with his knowledge of technique. That is the essence of materials science and laminates. Knowledge of materials, knowledge of technique. Slivers of knowledge laminated together in the human mind, then expressed through applied expertise into usable products.
And now we close in on the point.
All over the world, there is evidence of a pool of knowledge about the properties and processes required to laminate organic materials. The more difficult the conditions, the more sophisticated the knowledge. I couldn't quickly find clips of Artic bow-making to demonstrate this but I read that Inuit bow laminating techniques are among the most innovative.
Permanent laminates require glue. Knowledge of materials science and of materials processing goes into making - and using - glues. Another sliver of acquired knowledge. And I'd suggest that even the hangman's rope is another, simple example of lamination science.
From these concepts, we see a mystery grow. From knowledge of materials to knowledge of technique to the mystery of 'how?' How did humans acquire their knowledge of materials science?
IHASFEMR says: humans were taught this. But that's not the only mystery about it. Another mystery is captured by these questions:
- Why do you see this advanced engineering knowledge applied only to bows?
- Why does Western Europe show so very little evidence of advanced lamination techniques?
I appreciate various products use laminates. Some structural elements and laminated containers do reflect knowledge of advanced lamination materials techniques. But these products are generally for static use. Laminated bows are designed to deliver power, stability, and lightness under high-stress, highly dynamic conditions.
As the gibbet and the catapult and the waterwheel and the cart and wooden ships all demonstrate, a great deal of pre-industrial expertise developed into the heavy engineering of robust wooden products. Strength through chunk. Funktionalität durch Solidität. Awe-inspiring as they are, they distract us from noticing the expertise that goes into making a laminate bow.
Why do we see no record of that expertise being routinely used to solve other pre-industrial age engineering problems? Or to innovate new pre-industrial age products?
I suspect the answers to these questions go something like this:
- Lamination techniques were used.
- Lightweight, highly stressed, highly performant products were built.
- We see only one class of them because the others were suppressed.
Can I prove item three: the suppression claim?
No.
Pointing to something that isn't there and
shouting typing: "Look! See?" won't work. That's the goal of suppression. But I can highlight some enigmas that may show us the edges of suppression.
1. English churchyards almost always have at least one yew tree. Usually more than one.
The explanations for this don't adequately explain why so many yews would be planted in churchyards and not around other old buildings.
2. English churches - and churches in other countries - often have crypts. More than 60 English churches are known to have stored bones their crypts.
Conclusion: We see yew - a component of springy laminates - being grown on the same sites in which bones - a component used to stiffen flexible laminates - were seemingly cleaned, sorted and stored. Could churches have been workshops? Could their alleged function as power generators have been a by-product of needing electricity for laminate materials processing?
3. On his tours, John Byng often comments that all the furniture is missing from old halls and mansions. He mentions furniture in 'the old taste'. Visiting Louth, Lincolnshire, he describes the furniture and extensive grotto built by 'Mr Jolland', the vicar of Louth's
St James' Church (
Google Maps), (
Google Streetview), (
OpenStreetMap), (
Flickr images). Probably Wolley Jolland, vicar from 1780 to 1840. On p354 of
The Torrington Diaries (Abridged Selection), Byng says Jolland built the grotto and its furniture from tree roots and polished horses' bones. Was Jolland eccentric? Or simply a craftsman in the old taste?
4. Clues in the odd use of nouns.
Portuguese word 'bone' (noun form).
Source
'Osso' is the root of 'ossuário' or 'ossário', the Portuguese word for 'ossuary.'
Évora's
famous ossuary (
Google Maps), (
Google Streetview), (
OpenStreetMap), (
Flickr images) is the source of
the image used earlier in this thread. Famous for its 'Roman' ruins, Évora
also held a large part of the slave population of Portugal.
Évora. Portuguese pronunciation.
Source
Which sounds a bit like:
Ivory. English pronunciation.
And not much like:
Marfim. Portuguese word for 'ivory'.
Source
The closest Portuguese word I found for 'ivory' is the word for off-white colour:
Ebúrneo. Portuguese pronunciation.
Source
But it's unlikely the entities who named Évora mistook its ossuary for a stash of ivory. Ivory is easily distinguished from bone by its hatching patterns and absence of the dark flecks that are characteristic of bone. There are good Youtube videos on this but the following clip is more relevant for IHASFEMR:
"No. It's bone." Source: Inferno, 2016
It seems more likely to me that Évora was a place laminate materials were processed. A place as familiar with ivory as it was with bone. And yew. Perhaps it was always named after ivory, but only the bones and the yews remain.
5. Why did the entity who allegedly initiated Portugal's African slave trade - Henry the Navigator - have
his navigation school built high on a cliff? Why not at sea level, preferably where river currents meet tides to create more realistic sea conditions to teach sailing and position-fixing?
6. Stolen History researchers draw our attention to vanilla sky photographs. How do we explain them? How do we explain this seemingly botched photograph of Mount Wilson observatory from
post-102149 and the mainstream version of the telescope's journey up the mountain?
7. Gasbags have a lot to tell us:
One man and a small gasbag. Source: Skankpunk's airship series.
And another:
One man and his rather larger gasbag. Source: Skankpunk's airship series.
I wondered about many aspects of these two clips:
- The gasbags look small. Did they use hydrogen as we know it? Ozone? Corpse gas?
- Are the gasbags roughly the same size?
- What weight is each gasbag lifting?
- Were their experimenters reverse engineering an earlier culture's technology?
- How did these experimenters feel during the moments we see in the two clips?
The word 'joy' wouldn't capture it for me. 'Exaltant' or 'a little scared but exaltant' describe how I would have felt.
Dissatisfied that the nearest I could get to 'a little scared but exaltant' would be to calculate the respective sizes of two gasbags, I set out to design an autonomous airship drone. I wanted to explore an airship's 'challenge environment'; the problems around sensing and control. Using parts from my parents' hoard of
trash discarded appliances.
Working out the algorithms required for the controller code, I began to appreciate the difficulty of reducing risk for airships operating close to ground at zero - or near-zero - ground speed. Like a sailing dinghy, they can't reliably maintain position if they are not making way. And there's no '
heaving to' for airships. Other than being tethered.
And, as you can see in the second airship clip, handling would become even more difficult if you are moving cargo around.
Discovering this problem helps us make sense of some strange stories. Stories about flying ships that trailed 'anchors' on long ropes. Anchors that get hooked on churches and have to be freed. Perhaps it even explains Jack and the Beanstalk.
Thorney is home to an interesting legend. From:
Village History | Thorney Museum:
Legend says that the religious settlement of "Ancarig" (the original name of Thorney) – the place of the anchorites
William of Malmesbury described Thorney as "a little paradise, delightsome as heaven itself may be deemed, fen-circled, yet rich in loftiest trees..."
"A vast solitude is here the monk's lot, that they may the more closely cling to things above. If a woman is there seen, she is counted a monster, but strangers, if men, are greeted as angels unawares."
A reference on that page to 'quiet' and 'contemplative life' made me wonder if the anchorites thought the gods were listening in on their conversations. Perhaps the anchorites were plotting their escape from the manor farm system. The quote: "the more closely cling to things above." caught my eye. Maybe they were trying to escape this domain using the same techniques that desperate Afghanis allegedly used at Kabul International Airport. Clinging on to airships ranging over pre-roads Lincolnshire.
But it seems more likely to me they were simply farmers air-shipping sentient produce.
8. In his comments about Jolland's root and bone grotto in Louth, Byng notes that among Jolland's inscriptions and decorations there is:
not one cross; probably he might fear to give offence.
The destruction of 80% of Britain's 12,500 market crosses by the end of the 18th Century implies widespread cultural revulsion. Does our understanding of the symbolism of crosses allow that used inside Divine Workshops, they may have been stretching frames for the careful extraction of hide, sinew and bone? Does it allow that, outside, they may have been hitching posts for airships? Perhaps Swineshead's worn steps were the slipways of the gods?
And, sometimes, perhaps gibbets support structures for the pick-up loops attached to cargo awaiting pick up?
9. To me, the hangman's knot looks like a marlinspike sailor's hitch. It seems designed to withstand high loads and rough handling. I wonder if the rope winding was there to help it stand upright; to hold its loop upwards ready to catch a hook. Propped up, or perhaps even manually offered up, to a hook trailed from an airship. That airship would have to be built by entities with a wonderful knowledge of lighter-than-air gases and lightweight laminates.
So no, kd-755, I'm not arguing it was the base of a former market cross. I think the available evidence - and the evidence of missing evidence - supports an entirely different use case.
etc. when studying this topic?
