Sunday 13 December 1663

(Lord’s day). Up and made me ready for Church, but my wife and I had a difference about her old folly that she would fasten lies upon her mayds, and now upon Jane, which I did not see enough to confirm me in it, and so would not consent to her.

To church, where after sermon home, and to my office, before dinner, reading my vowes, and so home to dinner, where Tom came to me and he and I dined together, my wife not rising all day, and after dinner I made even accounts with him, and spent all the afternoon in my chamber talking of many things with him, and about Wheately’s daughter for a wife for him, and then about the Joyces and their father Fenner, how they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd, and a strange rude life there is among them.

In the evening, he gone, I to my office to read Rushworth upon the charge and answer of the Duke of Buckingham, which is very fine, and then to do a little business against to-morrow, and so home to supper to my wife, and then to bed.

25 Annotations

First Reading

Bradford  •  Link

"about the Joyces and their father Fenner, how they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd, and a strange rude life there is among them."

Surely the teaser for yet another Restoration sitcom?---like the old "Married With Children." Nice to see family values remain constant over the centuries.

Terry F  •  Link

-------------------------------------
HEARD ON CAMPUS
-------------------------------------
"This is just like Sex and the City!"

-- Drama students, open being introduced to the witty, topical and frankly sexy Restoration-era comedies of the 17th-century playwright John Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh's plays are the inspiration for artist-in-residence Amy Freed's play Restoration Comedy, the centerpiece of Stanford Summer Theater's 2006 Festival.
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/new…

Vanbrugh's plays are after the Diary - he will be born next month (Jan 24, 1664). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John…

cumgranosalis  •  Link

Lost
'...but my wife and I had a difference about her old folly that she would fasten lies upon her mayds, and now upon Jane, which I did not see enough to confirm me in it, and so would not consent to her...."

Jesse  •  Link

"fasten lies upon her mayds"

I take this that Elizabeth habitually complained of the maids lying. I'm sure Pepys would rather not have to deal with it ("consent to her") unless there's more than "enough" evidence. There's probably plenty of frustration all around. Elizabeth's frustrated about the (probable) lying, not getting the proper respect &c, the husband not standing up for her (yet again - their "difference") and so forth. Pepys probably wishes that Elizabeth would learn to manage the damn help. Jane's probably got her own list.

Mary  •  Link

"my wife not rising all day"

Elizabeth seems to be having a pretty rotten time this month; this looks like the fifth day running that she has stayed in bed nursing her cramps, which is an unusually long time.

andy  •  Link

they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd,

another beautiful expression to drop into the conversation at dinner table!

jeannine  •  Link

Elizabeth seems to be having a pretty rotten time this month.
I am wondering if this extended bedrest isn't in part due to or related the healing of her "hollow sore place" which we started to hear about in November?
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Xjy  •  Link

"all honey ... all turd"
There has been something much freer about Sam's entries recently, less anal retentive (heh) pour ainsi dire...
Maybe his new-found comfort regarding his status and earning power and his easier interactions with Bess are starting to pay off in the diary entries.
Also he's been writing and writing and writing for years now, so it's about time he reached a new plateau of expressiveness :-)

Robert Gertz  •  Link

Speaking of "all honey...and then all turd...", Sam.

"So how were things with 'Lord' and 'Lady' Pepys?" a visiting John Jr. eyes the returned Tom.

"He's p-pulling it in but was cagey about the details. Can't believe he went on about how the Joyces get on with each other after listenin' to his Bess' yellin' for him all afternoon to come up sos she could go on about their maids. And one of the girls told me, he's the roving eye out again. One of Sir Will Penn's girls now..."

jeannine  •  Link

"how they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd, and a strange rude life there is among them"
I wish I didn't have such an overpacked day ahead as ever since I've read this I've been stuck thinking of words that rhyme with honey and turd. There is a very bad poem in there somewhere just dying to be written!

Pedro  •  Link

A very, very bad poem.

Jeannine is searching for a word,
One that, well, rhymes with turd.

The Aussies, for honey
Will come up with Dunny,

And the English with Richard the Third.

A. Hamilton  •  Link

Restoration frolics

Maybe we're going through a revival of interest in Restoration drama.( A lot of Gertz sounds grounded in the genre.) This week I saw " The Beaux's Stratagem" at Washington's Shakespeare theater in an excellent production. It has been playing to packed houses for a month. The version staged here is a "collaboration." In the 1930s Thorton Wilder set out to update the 1707 Farquhar comedy for a Broadway production, but didn't complete it. Several years ago Wilder's literary executor, his nephew Tappy, found the unfinished draft at the Beineke Rare Book Library at Yale and burst out laughing as he read (to the horror of a nearby scholar -- it must have been like the scene of the London club silence in Top Hat). Some time after that, Tappy Wilder met the Washington D.C. playwright Ken Ludwig and asked him if he'dlike to take up where Thornton Wilder left off. Ludwig, a lover of the period, leapt at the chance, and the result is delightful and, on hearing, largely seamless. One reviewer suggested that the "author" of the final product should be called "Farwildwig."

Terry F  •  Link

"Rushworth upon the charge and answer of the Duke of Buckingham"

"When Charles's second parliament met on the 6th of February 1626, it was not long before, under Eliot's guidance, it asked for Buckingham's punishment [for a failed attempt to take Cadiz, etc.]. He was impeached before the House of Lords on a long string of charges. Many of these charges were exaggerated, and some were untrue. His real crime was his complete failure as the leader of the administration. But as long as Charles refused to listen to the complaints of his minister's incompetency, the only way in which the Commons could reach him was by bringing criminal charges against him. Charles dissolved his second parliament as he had dissolved his first. Subsequently the Star Chamber declared the duke innocent of the charges, and on the 1st of June Buckingham was elected chancellor of Cambridge University. " http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/G…

Bob Blair emailed that it "surprises me that [Rushworth's 'Historical Collection'] cited hundreds of times by Hume, Macaulay, Ranke, Gardiner, Firth, and so on to the present day hasn't been scanned" and available in digital form. It was also consulted by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln.

cumgranosalis  •  Link

there be a lass named honey
who lived with her bunny
who thought it be funny
when eating her curd
would shout out that word
turd,
so it could be heard.
then went on eating her urd
but it went unheard
so then got a fright
and said Oh! shite.

A. De Araujo  •  Link

"my wife not rising all day"
Methinks it might be a case of SAD(seasonal affective disorder).I don't remember how did she fare those past winters but i will check the future ones
inshallah.

JonTom Kittredge  •  Link

Restoration frolics
Last year, I tremendously enjoyed a production of Sheridan's "The Rivals" by a local company here in Boston. They billed it as a "Restoration Comedy." For my part, if they can call a play that, which was written 115 years after the Restoration, then I think "Sex in the City" qualifies as a "Victorian Melodrama."

jeannine  •  Link

Thanks Pedro and Cumgranosalis! It was definitely a line that just couldn't be missed!

cumgranosalis  •  Link

Honey :This be an age when 'nutin' be sacred. Wren Chr. [son of a Reverend], taking his bachelors wanted to find out out about the birds and the bees and what they they bee upto , so he designs glass Palaces and Castles, the bees did not like their privacy being misused, so did immediatly cover'd the glass in honey.
Extracted from John Evelyn July 1654 and his visit to Waddum Oxon and the eminent John Wilkins who was not of the usual mold of trusting Aristotle but investigating the the real world , on Wren's glass apiary .
The scientific way of keeping thy bees and and having thy honey too.

Pedro  •  Link

More on the bees and honey, and John Evelyn...

Adding to Mr. O'Salis's post above, being a summary from John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity by Gillian Darley...

John Evelyn was on a tour to show his wife the English countryside, when he was entertained by John Wilkins at Wadham College in Oxford. It was here that he met Wren for the first time. Wilkins showed him the garden where he was mesmerised by the glass fronted beehives designed like "castles and palaces" which revealed the mysterious processes within.

It appears that Evelyn ordered a beehive two years later, and in his Elysium Britannicum he wrote...

"I should fill a volume, not a chapter onely, to deal with the culture of the bees for all of the living creatures...the bee is the wisest...and approaching to the understanding of men. Both architects and builders, they preside over a city, King, Empire, Society, occupied on public business, peaceable, loyal and affected to Monarchy...reading a lecture of obedience to the rebels in every garden."

Glyn  •  Link

Great research, Pedro. And we can see from the above that they assumed that the most important bee was a king - we now know that it's a queen.

dirk  •  Link

Today the Rev. Josselin's daughter, born more than two weeks ago on 26 November, was christened. Here's his diary entry for today:

"God good to me and mine in many outward mercies, the lord accept me and mine and delight in me to do me good. offered up in faith my little Rebekah to the lord in baptism. god in mercy bring it under the bond of the everlasting covenant. the lord good to me in his word, good in my friends society, with whom I returned most hearty thanks to god for his goodness to me. and mine, and begged his presence and blessing with us to the end, and to see the god of Jerusalem, my friends here together(,) we had a cheerful banquet and away."

"A cheerful banquet" -- so things haven't changed that much in 343 years...

Michael Robinson  •  Link

Bees in Shakespearian metaphor

... Therefore doth heaven divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavor in continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience. For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.

Henry V, Act I scene ii, 183 - 189

Second Reading

Sasha Clarkson  •  Link

The censorious Revd Wheatley missed one today: perhaps "turd" was a word he was unaware of?

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