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11 Re-examining the contribution of Dr Robert Toope to knowledge in later seventeenth-century Britain: was he more than just ‘Dr Took’? Jonathan R. Trigg Had made dead skulls for coin the chymist’s share, The female corpse the surgeos purchas’d ware…1 This chapter presents a reflection on, and assessment of, the life, career and work of the little-studied seventeenth-century physician and ‘Renaissance man’ Robert Toope. He is currently, perhaps, chiefly known for his correspondence on wide-ranging, eclectic, subjects with the likes of fellow antiquarian John
was evidenced. Yet the poet of St Erkenwald imaginatively conjures instead the shock of the Saxons, who do not yet conceptualise corporeal preservation as a miracle. Tellingly, Schwyzer ( 2006 : 7) uses the example of Iron Age bog bodies at this point in his study to evoke the rupturing effect of such a discovery, and likens Erkenwald’s disconcerted flock to those of British Museum visitors, gathered around Lindow Man – ironically (given the original authorial locus of the poem), one of Cheshire’s own prehistoric ‘bog bodies’. In the poem, the discovery causes
scholarly meetings. In Egyptology, knowledge is created, discussed, and refined in every space from the university or museum office in a disciplinary center out to the unceremonious field site and back. In early Egyptology, network hubs tended to be in metropolitan cities all over the world. Societies like the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society, in London), institutions such as the Cairo Museum, British Museum (London), the Oriental Institute (Chicago), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Louvre (Paris), the Museo Egizio (Turin), and the Berlin Museum were all
of life, to be placed beyond the human ‘grip’, as Fontijn ( 2020 : 58) puts it. The examples that follow are drawn explicitly from bog sites, yet of course these were situated within other wetland deposits from rivers, lakes and springs, as well as dryland deposits in pits, ditches and caves. These comparative examples are well reviewed in Aldhouse-Green ( 2002 ), as are the shrines and sanctuaries of late Iron Age/early Roman Britain and Gaul. However, the purpose of this chapter is to focus more explicitly on the bog as a distinctive realm of deposition. The
Introduction: ‘exposed for a sight’ The first attested ‘exhibiting’ of bog bodies appears to be the Hope couple, who died in a snowstorm in the Peak District of northern Britain in 1674 (see Chapter 2 ). Following their burial on the spot when the snow had melted, they lay undisturbed in the ‘peat moss’ for ‘twenty-eight years and nine months’ when the curiosity of the locals got the better of them. Dr Charles Balguy, the medic from Peterborough who had grown up in Hope, attributes this interest to the parishioners’ knowledge of peat’s preservative properties
the later Bronze Age to late Iron Age/Roman period, c. 1200 BC– AD 400, when we see a swell in dated interments in bogs across Ireland and Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands (Turner and Briggs 1986 : tab. 19; van der Sanden 1996 : fig. 92). It is these latter countries that will form the basis of research here. As argued above, this study is not only timely but pressing. Peatlands represent the world’s largest natural terrestrial carbon store (Page et al . 2011 ; IUCN 2019 ), with a crucial role to play in carbon sequestration as a
, open, dark-brown pools form within the moss (van der Sanden 1996 : 22). These pools are bare of vegetation and framed by hummock-building colonisers such as the ‘crimson’ mosses of Sphagnum magellanicum , S. rubellum and S. Plumulosum that gave rise to the local name of the ‘red bog’ (van der Sanden 1996 : 22). The hummocks themselves can span several metres, rising 10–20 cm above wetter hollows and spanning 1–10 m (van der Sanden 1996 : 25). This is the classic landscape of the Atlantic raised bog found in Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and some
would be read by others as covert support for Irish resistance to British rule: a historicist relativising of conflict (Hufstader 1996 : 61) that risked an elision of Iron Age and nationalist ‘sacrifice’ (Lloyd 1985 ). Yet as Heaney ( 1999 : 3–4) himself argued, by the late 1970s–1980s ‘both sides were ready to die, in a more or less religious self-sacrificing way for the preservation of their land’. Some saw this as mere apologist verse, ‘a symbolic partaking of bloodshed through “silence’’’ (Sanders 2009 : 89)? Heaney ( 1980 : 56–7) refuted this, arguing that he
indicating that this was a healthy adult individual at the time of his death: the thin section presented in this article (Denton 2003 : fig. 2) also suggests an almost immediate cessation of decay, suggesting the head entered the bog soon after decapitation. A C 14 sample from the right-hand side of the facial tissue yielded a date of 1800 +/– 70 years BP (Ox-A-1430), which placed him firmly within the Romano-British era ( not the Iron Age). The second programme was led by John Prag and Richard Neave between 2000 and 2001 (see Prag and Neave 1999 ; Denton et al
certain death: the Solway Moss ‘armed figure’ on horseback (Lyell 1838 ), and the Summersdale, Slamannon, Alford and Kilsyth bog bodies from Scotland (Cowie et al. 2011 ) are likely to all represent post-medieval conflict victims, fleeing a pursuer. In Ireland and the British Isles, bog bodies were readily attributed to Anglo-Scots or Anglo-Irish conflict as well as clan violence and religious persecution (such as the execution of Covenanters, see Cowie et al. 2011 ). Yet where tartan cloth, saddlery and arms were found in association with such remains (e.g. Torr