Category: Oxfordshire

The Death of Amy Robsart

8/9/2019

Victorian artist Edward Matthew Ward is famous for his English Civil War paintings, my favourite being The Concealment of the Fugitive by Alice Lisle, whose execution, I have written about before. His 1866 work 'Leicester and Amy Robsart at Cumnor Hall' covers an earlier time, depicting the relationship between Robert Dudley and his wife Amy Robsart. Ward takes his inspiration from Walter Scott's book Kenilworth.

Amy, as you can see, is depicted as a tragic, romantic heroine, whose true cause of death, on the 8th September in 1560, has never come to light.

Amy Robsart, as you will know was the wife of Elizabethan courtier Robert Dudley who sent away her servants from her house at Cumnor Place in Oxford, was later found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs with a broken neck and two wounds on her head. The coroner found that she had died from a fall downstairs; the verdict was 'misfortune' therefore an accidental death. History has looked at Amy's death three ways, she died as a result of an accident, she took her own life or she was murdered. The letter, dated the 24th August 1560 you see in the image below was written by Amy to her tailor in London which reads

'Edney, with my hearty commendations this shall be to desire you to take the pains for me as to make this gown of velvet which I send you with such a collar as you made my russet taffeta gown you sent me last, & I will see you discharged for all. I pray you let it be done with as much speed as you can & sent by … the carrier of Oxford, & thus I bid you most heartily farewell from Cumnor this 24th of August.'

Your assured friend,
Amye Duddley

Amy Robsart was dead fourteen days later, did she plan to take her own life, ordering a new dress as she does in the letter you could argue suggests not.

Is Amy's story been turned into a melodrama, but was there more to it than meets the eye?

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Jethro Tull

21/2/2018

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It was during the reign of George III that England underwent an agricultural revolution. Men like Berkshire born Jethro Tull, who died this day in 1740*, invented new farming methods that would improve the lives of those working on the land.

Jethro Tull's plans for a career in law and politics were derailed due to ill health. Following his marriage, he moved to one of his father's farms in Oxfordshire. It was not long after this move into farming that he discovered that the old way of planting seeds was not very efficient. In the latter part of 1699 Tull worked on his ideas for a seed drill which he had perfected by 1701, before then furrows were dug by hand and the seeds were planted too close together. Tull's drill had a rotating grooved cylinder, not only did it prove to be cost-effective but it made the crop easier to weed.

Jethro Tull's other invention with the aid to improving farming methods was a new plough. This plough had special blades that cut deeply into the soil and resulted in the grass and roots being pulled up and left on the surface to dry, these newly ploughed fields can be seen up and down the country and especially on the land that surrounds my village as you can see in the last of the images below.

Thanks to Jethro Tull and other innovative and forward-thinking landowners farming output almost doubled. The increase in the use of crops grown as food for animals allowed farmers to keep more livestock and this meant more meat was produced and sold in the markets to feed the growing population, this revolution saw the introduction of not only the new systems of cropping and but also of selective breeding.

Interestingly, it has been argued that the agricultural revolution did not happen at all, that the increase in farm production was a slow progression of events beginning in the mid-sixteenth century and ending in the eighteenth.

Jethro Tull was buried on the 9th March 1740 in the village of Hungerford in Berkshire and is buried at St Bartholomew's Church in Lower Basildon where his gravestone can be found today.

Bibliography
* - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 1924

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The Death of Amy Robsart

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