Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
All the morning putting things in my house in order, and packing up glass to send into the country to my father, and books to my brother John, and then to my Lord Crew’s to dinner; and thence to Mr. Lewes Philip’s chamber, and there at noon with him for business, and received 80l. upon Jaspar Trice’s account, and so home with it, and so to my chamber for all this evening, and then to bed.
Saturday 22 February 1661/62Thursday 20 February 1661/62
“packing up glass”
good luck Sam!
“Packing up”
I have recently been packing up my son’s things to go down to Sydney so this is much in my mind (never want to see bubble wrap again) -so - what did they use to protect valuables like glass? Paper was quite scarce and expensive. Rags? Scrap wool? And would they be packed into barrels - that all-purpose container of the time?? Wonder if we will read later of Sam fuming about the carelessness of the removalists!
Sawdust would be a good packing material.
I imagine straw would have been plentiful and cheap in those days when horses abounded.
The chronology sounds odd - unless it was common, even in winter when people would tend to get up later, to eat the lunchtime “dinner” sufficiently early for Sam to have a sociable meal and still get to Mr Philip’s chamber for a noon meeting. And yet Sam seems to think he has had a full morning tidying up and sending things off.
Is this schedule of events correct? Surely he didn’t have dinner at Lord Crew’s before 12 noon.
DrCari’s suggestion of straw sounds good, but he could have acquired whatever various materials he needed from the naval stores.
Wood-shavings (and sawdust) is excellent packing material.
Timing looks tight.
We may surmise that Lewis Philips’s chambers were probably quite close to Crew’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but its a goodly step from Seething Lane to Lincoln’s Inn Fields: probably a couple of miles, so about a 40 minute walk.
Perhaps Sam’s “all the morning” is a bit of an exaggeration; it just felt like the whole morning because it was not a job that he particularly enjoyed. Sunrise in London is at present seven minutes past seven, so the mornings are getting lighter and longer.
received 80l
How recieved ? In cash, coin,note. Comments pls
Mary, some notes about time measurement.
Due to the Julian/Gregorian 10 day difference, February 21 would have been equivalent to our modern March 3 (I think). So the sunrise would have been earlier.
Also, at that time noon was defined as the time the sun passed over the meridian.
Because we now use “mean time”, the average day length over the whole year, the time of meridian noon can come before or after the time we call “12:00 noon”. Do a web search for “analemma” for more information, or see, for example,
http://www.analemma.de/english/analem.html
So if you examine the sunrise and sunset times in London on March 3, determine the time exactly between sunrise and sunset, account for the “sun fast” or “sun slow” time, and reset the sunrise time, that would be what Pepys experienced.
London sunrise on 3 March 2005 is at 06:41, with transit at 12:12. So Pepys’ sunrise on 21 Feb 1661/1662 would have been about 06:29.
Saul: I doth think it be coin of the realm: Gold in Sovereign and Silver : no markers or bits of paper , just hard stuff. See money: http://www.pepysdiary.com/background/?c=money
re: Dinner before noon
Remember, as Vincent pointed out in the annotations to the previous day’s entry, Sam is writing for himself, and thus bends the rules a bit. Going by Lord Crew’s for “dinner” may have meant stopping by the household kitchen, where he surely was well known, to grab a quick bite to eat before his noontime meeting. Just because it’s called dinner, it doesn’t have to be a formal affair … it’s just what he calls the midday meal, no matter when he actually eats it (there have been lots of examples lately where he eats dinner well after noon).
Sunrise, sunset…
3 March 1662 Gregorian
= 21 February 1662 Julian (British):
Sunrise Time: 06:41 hours
Sunset Time: 17:45 hours
(probably give or take a few minutes for calculation errors)
Daylight: 11 hrs 4 min
For the morrow: Happy birthday, Sam!
Its worth bearing in mind when trying to work out when Sam might have been abroad that at the latitude of London, approximately 30 minutes of twilight are experienced before dawn and after sunset, that extends the day by about an hour.
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/site/request/setTemplate:singlecontent/contentTypeA/conWebDoc/contentId/345