Phil Gyford

Articles

Phil Gyford has written four articles:

Annotations and comments

Phil Gyford has posted 772 annotations/comments since 27 December 2002.

Comments

First Reading

About New Palace Yard

Phil  •  Link

New Palace Yard was immediately to the north of Westminster Hall: http://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclo…

Old Palace Yard was to the south of the Hall. Latham & Matthews assume that when Pepys was ambiguous and referred to merely "Palace Yard" or "Palace," he's referring to New Palace Yard.

About Friday 27 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

Each entry should appear at 11pm UK time. These aren't the following days entries however; it's the 27th now and thus the entry for the 27th has been published.

Pepys obviously wrote his entries at the end of the day and I just picked this time kind of at random. Sometimes Pepys obviously wrote his entries later however.

About Wednesday 25 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

For what it's worth, my experience of "forms" was slightly different to that of Grahamt's.

I started at Infant school at around 5-6 years old, where the years where, I guess, numbered 1 to 2 (or 3). Then from age 7/8 you go to Junior school where the years are numbered from 1 to 4, and you leave at the age of 11. Then, as Grahamt says, you go to Secondary school for years 1 to 5 until the age of 16 when you can leave school. If you stay, sixth form is either a continuation of Secondary school or at a Further Education college and consists of Lower Sixth and Upper Sixth years until the age of 18.

This is confused slightly by some schools having Infants and Juniors in one school - I think "Primary school" is the correct term for this. It's all a bit vague though.

In my experience, at a comprehensive school (that's public, rather than private, for Americans), this old system resulted in a student being in, say, "4th year." In the new US-style system the words are changed round so a student will be in "Year 4."

And, of course, what the British call a "public school" is synonymous with "private school"; a private fee-paying institution.

About Saturday 21 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

Those headlines make me think... if only there was a site that provided an RSS feed of headlines from This Day in History, for the 17th century... then I could include them with every day's diary entry!

About Interview on BBC Radio London Tuesday lunchtime

Phil  •  Link

So, I should probably say... the interview was fun and I think it went well. Robert Elms was incredibly enthusiastic about the site, but then he's paid to sound incredibly enthusiastic and obviously hadn't worked out how to leave the front page of the site himself. All the usual questions about how and why I started it, about how it's a big committment, and about how much more interesting it is because of all the annotations. It was about 7 minutes in total.

About HTML changes... CSS guru needed

Phil  •  Link

I've fixed the problem, after a great deal of trial and error, removing lines of CSS until things worked. Netscape was getting things muddled up because of line-heights in some elements of the page, so I've moved these to the stylesheet Netscape can't see. Phew.

About Saturday 21 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

The glossary in Latham & Matthews says that "black" in this context means "brunette, dark in hair or complexion."

About Axe Yard

Phil  •  Link

Wow, that's a great map, thanks Susanna. A shame there isn't anything similar for before the Great Fire.

About Friday 20 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

Goal Feast

Latham and Matthews give this as "colly feast", which is a "feast of collies (cullies, good companions) at which each pays his share."

Quite a baffling entry today all in all!

About Friday 20 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

Jole means "jowl", a cut of fish "consisting of the head and shoulders" according to Latham and Matthews.

About HTML changes... CSS guru needed

Phil  •  Link

Thanks Todd. As long as the text looks OK with IE's text size set to "medium," the default, that's good. The default font size was previously 13 pixels by the way, now it's 0.9em.

About Thursday 19 January 1659/60

Phil  •  Link

Excellent, two great links there from Paul and Martin - thanks! I'll add them to the Further Reading page.

About William Fuller (Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, 1660-66)

Phil  •  Link

Born 1608, died 1675. He was a clergyman and friend of Pepys, and taught at Twickenham, "where Mountagu's son Edward was among his pupils. It was perhaps throught this connection that Pepys got to know him." Speculated by Latham in the Companion volume to the diaries, p152.