TOILET HUMOR Chapter Two

 

I find it odd that although many people know his name, almost no one knows he invented a device you use - we all use - several times a day. His father, Sir John Harington senior, was an acquisitive accountant, who for ten years relieved the King of money intended to feed the starving Royal army. 

Instead, the senior Harington (above) piped the funds into his own accounts, buying a poo-pourri of properties far from suspicious noses - estates such as Oakham, Lordshold, Burley, Exton, Ridlington, Cottesmore, Stretton, Clipsham, Greetham, North Luffenham and Leighfield Forest . 

But these feculent felonies came to an abrupt end in 1548 when a religious fanatic named John Bradford turd him in, and Harington had to wash his hands of some of the money. His bum deal got worse in January 1549 when our patriarchal hero was arrested for treason, because of the stupidity and treason of his patron,  Sir John Seymour.

‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

It took two swings of the ax to separate Seymour's treasonous head from his shoulders (above), but it proved even more difficult to taint John Harington as privy to any of Seymour's reginacidal plots. Harington's punishment was to be discharged from the royal court in the spring of 1550. But he still held onto his properties, which were earning almost £6000 a year in rents. 

Out of power, Harington gambled, and inserted himself in the household of 15 year old Elizabeth Tudor (above), even writing her poetry in 1554 when Bloody Queen Mary locked the Protestant princess in the Tower of London. Harington was ecstatic when Elizabeth was released a few months later, but I doubt he gave a shite when Bloody Mary sentenced his old servant, the moralistic John Bradford, to burn at the stake in 1555 (below)

“Said he could wish, and did (as for his part) All Cuckolds (drown) in the Thames, with all his heart. But straight a pleasant Knight replied to him, I hope your Lordship learned how to swim.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

In 1559, John Harrington senior married Isabella Markham, Maid-of-Honor to now Queen Elizabeth Tudor. As a wedding present Good Queen Bess gave John an estate called Stoughton Grange (above), about 70 miles northwest of London. In was small compared to those estates he had acquired with his ill gotten booty, but it was the royal thought that counts. Then, in 1661 Isabella Harington gave birth to a son, John junior, and Queen Elizabeth pledged at the boy's christening to stand as God Mother for her “Boy Jack”.

“Best fishing in troubled waters.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

John Harington junior (above)  was educated in the law, but when John senior died in 1582, the ambitious and handsome young man concentrated on becoming a success at court, where everything depended on Elizabeth's mood. He once wrote to a friend, “The Queen doth love to see me last (jacket) and said “Tis well enough to be cute." I will have another made liken to it.” Rising and falling by his wits and his poetic cleverness, he was alternately famous and infamous at court for his  risque poetry and epigrams. After ten years of such effort John Harington had passed through the sphincter of history , and come out smelling like a Tudor rose. So in 1596, John decided to share with humanity what he had learned in the passing.

“A Courtier, kind in speech, cursed in condition, Fell to a flattering and most base submission, Vowing to kiss his foot, if he were bidden.  My foot? (said he) nay, that were too submissive. But three foot higher you deserve to be kissing.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

John's most lasting work was titled “A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of the Ajax” - the Greek hero whose constipated ego (“No man but Ajax can conquer Ajax!”) drove him to fall on his own sword. According to John, the name Ajax was a synonym for “A Jake”, meaning a joke, and so often referring to toilet gags that the name became pseudonymous with the toilet itself. John noted in his essay on Jakes, “...many had recognized the problems of “a stinking privy” but little had been done to correct it” So in his little book John progressed from documenting “privy faults” to suggesting improvements to “privy vaults” - to the design of the Jake itself.  John believed that if he built a better toilet, the world would beat a path to his bathroom door.

“New friends are no friends; how can that be true? The oldest friends that are, were sometimes new.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

John's instructions for a better toilet, what came to be called a “water closet”,  were relatively simple. “In the privy that annoys you, first cause a cistern... to be placed either in the room or above it, from whence the water may, by a small pipe...be conveyed under the seat in the hinder part thereof ... to which pipe you must have a small cock or washer, to yield water with some pretty strength...Next make a vessel of an oval form, as broad at the bottom as at the top...place this very close to your seat....” Even John had to admit that his water closet was not a radical new invention, writing   “...it is but a standing close-stool easily emptied”. But, “..this being well done, and orderly kept, your worst privy may be as sweet as your best chamber.”

“Fair, rich, and young? How rare is her perfection, Were it not mingled with one foul infection. I mean, so proud a heart, so cursed a tongue, As makes her seem, not fair, nor rich, nor young.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

The book was immediately popular, and went into three printings. I can even imagine Queen Elizabeth (above), reading John's book while sitting on the flush John she had installed in her palace. But she thought John's John too noisy - it frightened her. And the book was also a failure as a sales tool for flush toilets.. You see, John was not a plumber, he was a poet. To poets, everything is an analogy, even poop. 

So John spent most of his book drawing the analogy between the sewage that clogged the Thames River, and the human sewage that clogged the Queen's court. John considered his political opponents literal shits.  But Queen Elizabeth had learned at an early age that to keep her head she could never completely trust or completely offend the powerful and wealthy egos constantly maneuvering for her affections. And John's “New Discourse” had offended too many. She ordered her “Boy John” to leave her court.

“Fortune, men say, doth give too much to many: But yet she never gave enough to any.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

John (above) was allowed back in a few years. Elizabeth could never stay mad at her “saucy Godson” for long. But neither could she trust him for long. Sent to keep an eye on an Irish military expedition headed by the Earl of Essex, John accepted a knighthood from the ambitious Earl.  The expedition was a failure, and Elizabeth suspected a plot was brewing. Essex was thrown in the Tower, and John was once again exiled from court.

“Faustus finds fault, my Epigrams are short, Because to read them, he doth make some sport: I thank thee, Faustus, though thou judges wrong, Ere long I'll make thee swear they be too long.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

When good Queen Bess died in March of 1603, she was succeeded by James I (above), the son of Elizabeth's greatest rival, Mary Queen of Scots. John Harington tried to attach himself to the new king, but it was a bad fit, and he was never invited to court. John Harington, inventor of the flush John, died in 1612.  He left behind nine children. But his invention of the flush toilet never caught on because he had solved only half of the number one problem, which is where do you put number two. If humans were ever going to return to the Garden of Eden toilet, they must solve both halves. The pipe that carried the poo from the loo, would have to end someplace - which made it somebody else's problem.

“From your confessor, lawyer and physician, Hide not your case on no condition.”

Sir John Harington 1561 - 1612

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Toilet Humor - Chapter One

 

“I advise you, if you are anxious to be read of, to look for some boozy poet of the dark archway who writes verses with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk which folk read while they shit”.

“Marcus Valerius Martialis” Rome, 70 C. E.

I am assured the average healthy human produces an ounce of poo for every 12 pounds of body weight, dropping a log anywhere between 3 times a day to once every three days. Our foul, stinking meadow muffins are so putrid a blind leopard with a head cold could track a human through a stink weed swamp. The only reason we were not hunted to extinction is that we used to live in the trees, where our “stinkies” magically disappeared when dropped.

“What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?’ Answer: A key.”

Sumarian joke, 2, 500 B.C.

This “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” hygiene worked until 3 million years ago when we started to spend time on the ground. It must have been a short transition, as proved by our still smelly merde. But as long as our populations remained mobile we could usually outrun the lions and tigers and bears, and defecate away from where we hunted and gathered. When the ice ages restricted our outings, our Cro-Magnon siblings filled so many sheltering caves with aromatic and putrescent paleo-feces, we drove our Neanderthal roommates to prefer the cold outdoors to our proximity.

Strepsiades ; “Do you see this little door and little house?...This is a thinking-shop of wise spirits....

These men teach, if one give them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong.....They are minute philosophers, noble and excellent.”

Act I, Scene I. The Clouds by Aristophanes 424 B.C.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, humans settled down in settlements and started farming. Human populations mushroomed, as did our fecal matter. This led to the first great invention to deal with scheisse – sewage. Whoever was running things in the palace at Knossos on Crete 3,000 years ago, could pass a BM without ever having to see or smell it, as the constantly running water in the palace pipes instantly removed the royal turd from proximity to the royal nose. This may be the origin of the Robert's Supreme Court legal precedent that rich people's poop don't stink.  But, of course, the palace pipes had to end somewhere, and the property values just downstream must have plummeted, along with the the owner's odor and ardor.

“Eat lettuce and soft apples eat: For you, Phoebus, have the harsh face of a defecating man."

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E..

It was King Tarquin in 600 B.C.E. who first mixed socialism and sewage, when he built Rome's 16 foot wide Cloaca Maximum, aka the central sewer, aka “the big poop hole”, atop the cities' 100 foricae, public latrines, where King and commoner alike could discharge a brownie without having to give it a second thought. 

This sanitation reduced the city's death rate to a mere 30,000 a year, allowing the population to top one million during the first millennium. But that didn't last. After the Romans threw out the Etruscan Kings, they privatized new additions to the sewer system, producing some very rich crap merchants – from the Latin “crappa” meaning chaff, or rejected material. But squeezing every ounce of profit from the poop populi left the sewers leaky and often in disrepair and disconnected. Thus Rome suffered a series of plagues that killed over half the population every few decades. Where upon the patricians took their money and fled to the suburbs, like Ravenna and Constantinople, where they didn't have to smell poor people's poop.

“Apollinaris, doctor to the emperor Titus, had a good crap here.”

Graffitti on a wall in Herculaneum, Italy 79 C.E.

The fall of Rome brought on the dark ages, which meant even royalty were reduced to making night deposits in a chamber pot, a sort of portable latrine. Of course the wealthy had servants to dump their “cacha” (Latin profanity for poop) , usually in the nearest street, which became a sewer, from the old French “seuwiere”, meaning a drain cut in the ground. This was also the origin of the “High Street”, as the most valuable address, because, as any populist will tell you, shite runs downhill.

“With your giant nose and cock, I bet you can with ease When you get excited, check the end for cheese.”

Marcus Valerius Martialis 70 C.E.

By the 16^th century, the 200,000 subjects living in the fetid putrid sewer of London, then the largest city in Europe, were dropping dead daily from anthrax, measles, whooping cough, strep throat, syphilis, child bed fever, malaria, polio, tetanus, and cholera, to name but a few of the infectious endemic illnesses. In addition there was an epidemic of influenza from 1557 to 1559 that killed 5% of  the city. The first half of the century saw five waves of the “Dreaded Sweats” or “English Sweats” that killed tens of thousands within 24 hours of affliction. The Black Death or Bubonic Plague swept through London in 1563 (17,000 dead), 1578 (3,700 dead), 1582 (3,000 dead) and 1592 (11,000 dead). And the cause was obvious, even without a viable germ theory.

“This Nicholas just then let fly a fart, As loud as it had been a thunder-clap, And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap; But he was ready with his iron hot, And Nicholas right in the arse he got.  Off went the skin a hand's-breadth broad, about, The coulter burned his bottom so, throughout, That for the pain he thought that he should die, And like one mad he started in to cry, "Help! Water! Water! For God's dear heart!”

The Millers Tale – The Cantabury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1478

By 1600, the largest tributary of the Thames, the Fleet River (old Anglo-Saxon “fleot”, a tidal inlet), once called “The river of wells”, had been an open sewer for two centuries. Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary, penned a tribute “On the Famous Voyage”, praising two lads who dared to boat down the 100 yard wide “ merd-urinous” stream. In the stone lined channel “Hung stench, diseases, and old filth, their mother...pills and eke in potions, Suppositories, cataplasms and lotions...the grave fart, late let in parliament.” At last a dead cat floats to the surface and curses the travelers. “How dare Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season, When every clerk eats artichokes and peason, Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat) Tempt such a passage? When each privy's seat, Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat Urine and plasters?” But the waters of the Thames barely noticed the Fleet's filth, so contaminated were its own. The only thing more dangerous than being a child raised in sewage soaked Elizabethan London, was being Elizabeth in the the same place.

“In vain, the Workman showed his Wit, With Rings and Hinges counterfeit, To make it seem in this Disguise, A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes...So Strephon lifting up the Lid, To view what in the Chest was hid...So Things, which must not be expressed When plumped into the reeking Chest; Send up an excremental Smell, To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Petty coats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”

Jonathan Swift “The Lady's Dressing Room” 1732

After years of living under the constant threat of a charge of treason, Elizabeth Tudor put on the crown in 1558 as a 25 year old paranoid anorexic, subject to panic attacks. Living just above the level of common sewage, the nobility survived eating slightly spoiled food, prepared by unwashed hands, unevenly cooked in polluted water. This lead to repeated bouts of stomach cramps, mild fevers, headaches, watery diarrhea and vomiting, which lead to dehydration. This gastroenteritis would rarely prove fatal to an otherwise healthy adult like Elizabeth, but it killed one in four of all infants and a quarter of all surviving children by the age of 10. However salvation from this rising tide of poo was offered in 1595 when a member of Elizabeth's court invented “The John”. Except he called it the “Ajax”, for a very punny reason.

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WONDERING ABOUT THE DEATH PENALTY

 

I might have voted guilty along with the rest of the judges in the Perry trial, even though one of the defendants had been charged with being a witch. That was Joan Perry. And she was hanged first. The authorities expected her eldest son, Richard, freed from Joan's witchcraft, would then confess. 

But to everyone’s surprise, after Richard, too, was dead, the youngest boy, John, whose confession had led to the execution of his entire family,  recanted. Still the judges remained certain. So John was duly hanged as well. If I had been the judge, I like to think that John's recantation would have led me to have second thoughts. Of course, by then it a little was too late. (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/eggcorn.html)

The story behind this wonder takes place in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswold of England. "Chipping" is an old Welsh word for market, and “wold” is Welsh for an upland meadow, so this was a market town amidst the rolling limestone hills and open fields which were once the property of the Saxon King, Harold.

Under the invading Normans it became sheep country. In 1340, in Chipping Camden, the wool merchants were already so wealthy they built a hall on the High Street, using the honey-colored “Cotswold stone” as facing.

Even today the single street running through Chipping Camden looks as if it were untouched since the middle ages. In fact, this western corner of England was a violent incubator for the industrial revolution.

It is human nature that wealth surrounded by poverty seeks a moral justification. So it was no accident then that the Nuevo-rich Calvinist wool merchants in the Cotswold welcomed a belief in predestination – the certainty that they were wealthy because God predestined them to be wealthy before they had even been born. Thus the wealth of the cruel and vain was God’s will. Of this the Calvinists were certain. And they were certain that opposing them was to oppose God’s will.

In 1615, at the very start of the English civil war, the local lord, Sir Baptist Hicks, burned down his own manor house, rather than see it fall into the hands of the Calvinistic Parliamentarians who dominated Gloucestershire. Then  in 1649, these dead-certain Calvinists had grown so frustrated they beheading their intransigent King and suspected Catholic, Charles I.

 But the Calvinist experiment in government came to an end on New Years Day, 1660 when soldiers under Colonel George Monck crossed the River Tweed at the village of Coldstream, thus earning the regiment supporting the restoration of the monarchy the eternal and future title “The Coldstream Guards”.

A month later they were in London, and in late April, Charles Stuart, son of the last King of England, was crowned Charles II, the next King of England (above).  Monarchists returned to power all over country. In Chipping Campden it was Lady Juliana Campden, Baptist Hick's daughter, who occupied one of the few buildings not burned down by the Calivinsts (below).  But if anybody thought the restoration of the monarchy was going to return Britain to stability, they were about to suffer a very rude awakening.

Three months later, on Thursday, 16 August,  1660, the 70 year old William Harrison set out for an eight mile walk to collect rents for his mistress, the Lady Juliana Campden. His first stop would be two miles away in the village of Charingworth. And he expected to return home before dark with his purse filled with rent money. But come sunset, Mr. Harrison had not returned.

 At about 9 p.m. Harrison's servant, John Perry, was sent out to look for the old man at Charingworth and Paxford. The next morning Harrison’s own son went out to search for them both. The son found John Perry, who explained he had been looking all night for Mr. Harrison, to no avail.  Together they continued looking, and later that morning found William Harrison’s hat, slashed by a knife, and his shirt, caked in blood.

Suspicion quickly fell on Harrison's servant , John Perry.  Over several days of constant questioning and torture, John Perry told several stories but finally admitted he had suggested his own mother and brother should rob William Harrison and murder him.  And even though Joan and Richard both insisted on their innocence, the investigators felt certain that John had not lied, since he had implicated himself . No sane person would admit to that, even under torture.  Ponds and streams and wells were searched for poor Mr. Harrison's  body, or the rents he had collected. No trace of the old man or the money was found. The Perry family were held over the winter for trial.

On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, fifty lunatics (most of them ex-soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s Calvinist army), stormed into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and started roughing people up. They shot one poor fellow who talked back to them. They were preparing the way, they said, for the return of Jesus Christ, whom they intended to crown the next King of England.  It took an armed band of militia to chase the loonies out of the church.

Three days later the same loonies  stormed a prison and tried to free the prisoners. None were insane enough to come out of their cells. This time it took the loyal Coldstream guards to trap the loonies in a couple of taverns.  The leaders were tried for treason, hanged, drawn and quartered. It seemed there was such an air of un-certainty hanging over England, the citizens had become inspired to begin to demand certainty. 

In April of 1661 the Perry family were brought to trial, quickly convicted and duly hanged, one after the other. And if there were second thoughts after John's gallows recantation, they were put aside. Such was the need for certainty.

For even if Joan, Richard and John Perry had not killed poor Mr. Harrison, it was important that justice was seen to have been done.  And then in 1662, wonder of wonders, William Harrison walked back into to the village of Chipping Camden, certainly alive and allegedly well.

When questioned the old man (he was now seventy-two) told a murky tale of being set upon, stabbed, kidnapped, hustled aboard a ship, and sold in a Turkish slave market. He escaped, he said, when his new master died.  Mr. Harrison claimed he then became a ship hand, and the ship brought him back to England.   As others have noted, “The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false.”  And as a Mr. Paget noted, “much profit was not likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave…especially as the old man was delivered in a wounded and imperfect condition.”

So if not kidnaped to a Turkish prison, where did Mr. Harrison disappear to for 8 months in 1660?  Given that transportation in that age was mostly limited to “shanks mare”, William Harrison might have walked far enough that no one would recognize him,  But he must have been close enough to Chipping Camden to have heard, in those eight months, of the trial and hanging of his accused murderers. And yet the old man did not return to save those three lives.

But why did Mr. Harrison wait two years to return? Why not sooner? Why did Harrison return at all? And why did John Perry tell such wild tales?  Why did he send his own mother and brother to the gallows? Why did he not recant until the last moments of his life?  Could torture, the standard method used for questioning at the time, have produced  false testimony?  Perhaps the human soul is the real mystery, and not certain at all,   

In the end, all we know for certain is that John Perry, Richard Perry and Joan Perry were slowly strangled at the end of a rope, as punishment for a crime which they not only did not commit but which never happened.  Every thing else about this case is a mystery and a wonder. It is the Camden Wonder.

It is also a wonder that, 300 years later, juries remain so certain that they continue to take the lives of those accused, when they have no earthly reason to be so certain, and certainly no heavenly justification either.

http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/

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