Thursday 25 October 1660
All day at home doing something in order to the fitting of my house. In the evening to Westminster about business. So home and to bed. This night the vault at the end of the cellar was emptied.
Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
All day at home doing something in order to the fitting of my house. In the evening to Westminster about business. So home and to bed. This night the vault at the end of the cellar was emptied.
Friday 26 October 1660Wednesday 24 October 1660
10°C / 50°F
(monthly average for October 1660) About
There are no journals available for this date.
This night the vault at the end of the cellar was emptied.
L&M: “Turner, Pepys’s neighbour charged the Navy Treasury on 26 October with 31s. 7d. for this operation.”
Sam’s working hours seem, to say the least, irregular.
Vault at the end of the cellar, was this the leaked “house of business” contents from next door?
Thank goodness! another odious government job dispens’d . and there I thought S.P. went looking for People[on the 20th] to do the the work, silly me: I ‘m glad I was not the “putter in” of light.
“….which do trouble me, but I shall have it helped. To my Lord
Sam’s irregular hours of work
This is a point that recurs regularly. Unlike, for example, apprentices, who were required to work certain hours and days, Sam is employed to fulfill a particular office and to see that its business is taken care of. When there is a lot of work on, he will work very long hours; in slack intervals he will not be obliged simply to keep his office seat warm until a notional ‘knocking-off time’ is reached but is free to go about other business, either his own or more personal errands for Sandwich.
It occurs to me that this is where the boy may eventually come in handy; he could be left in the office at such times in order to run and find Sam if urgent business were to crop up unexpectedly.
“It occurs to me that this is where the boy may eventually come in handy; he could be left in the office at such times in order to run and find Sam if urgent business were to crop up unexpectedly.”
Mary’s remark is important here. We forget how fast news could spread in pre-comms days. The messenger boy was the old equivalent of the mobile and they ran about everywhere (Rome was full of em, for instance). The Rialto, the Forum, any busy marketplace was a portal with lots of physical links (runners) to other sites of interest…
Jane asks about the “vault” which was emptied.
Yes, I think this was the container of the … you-know-what … from the neighbor’s “house of office,” and being full it had overflowed into poor Sam’s cellar. Now that it is emptied, the nuisance will (we hope) stop.
xjy speaking of communications in earlier days:
Last night I watched a documentary about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Queen Elizabeth’s time, roughly a century before.
It was mentioned that with a system of relayed signal fires - “beacons” - on high summits, the current estimate is that a pre-arranged message could go from the south end of England to the north end (Carlisle, specifically) in 40 minutes.
Signal fires —
Did the documentary tell how the content of the messages was communicated — did they have an equivalent of the Morse code?
Beacons
“Till Skiddaw saw the fire that burned on Gaunt
Nix, the message had to be pre-arranged, because the light simply had to be lit, and the next station light theirs. It was a yes/no situation, or perhaps 1-0 binary.
“The Spanish are coming! Call out the militia!” for example.
A lot more efficient than Paul Revere.
Poor joke (sorry) but the point is that something traveling at the speed of light is faster than a man on horseback. I think they were experimenting with chains of semaphore stations and heliographs around this time (Adam Hart Davis?) but don’t think they were particularly successful.
It still took 4 to 6 days to get a message from London to Edinburgh because that was the fastest a team of horsemen could ride. (Probably slower than in Roman times, because the horses were no better and the roads were much worse.)
Paul Revere
Actually, Paul Revere used the light-signal method as well. He started his ride on a lantern signal from the tower of Old North Church in Boston, indicating that the British were coming, and how. As Longfellow had it,
“One if by land, and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be.”
Semaphore
Semaphore (as a regulated system of communication, with a recognised protocol) was first introduced by the French military in the mid-eighteenth century and was fairly soon afterwards used in England (and elsewhere) too. Not to say, of course, that there could have been no earlier experiments in this direction earlier than 1750-ish.
The use of the heliograph was known from very early times, but in a cloudy,damp climate like ours could hardly be relied upon for the seam-free transmission of important messages. Even the sunniest, summer morning can start off with thick mist.
Re Mary’s comment on the French military use of semaphore …. I remember in “The Count of Monte Cristo” there is a description of a system with large windmill-like machines relaying messages by semaphore over long distances. It refers to messages being transmitted from Marseille to Paris in a matter of hours along the relay in the Napoleonic era. Of course, the Count subverts the system to his advantage at one point.
Re Glyn’s comment on Semaphore
Later on in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Royal Navy did set up a chain of large mechnically operated semaphores to communicate news between London and Portsmouth.
Beacons as alarm signals and for expected messages probably pre-date any written record.
The Romans had a fully developed sytem of signalling which allowed them to send any message letter by letter. More at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/tech_03.shtml