A Secret City within a City

On November 9, 2019, the Corporation of the City of London will celebrate its 804^th Lord Mayor’s Show. This Corporation is also called the Square Mile. It is the richest financial center in the world (with a few conspiracy theories thrown in). So it is an extremely wealthy and powerful place. It is home to some 7,000 people.

Keep in mind, there are two Londons, the one discussed here is the ‘secret city.’ It is unique with its own complicated history: a city within a city and a country within a country. (The other London is Westminister). Before the Romans came, the city was Caer Lud, said to be founded around 130 BC. Lud was a Celtic king. Then came the Romans!  At one time the city, then called Londinium, was the capital of the Roman province of Britannia........then followed the Saxons, the Jutes, period of abandonment, resettlement, and so on to the present day!

The city within the city

The Corporation has its own government.  The mayor of the city of London has no jurisdiction over the Corporation of the city of London, neither does the monarchy. The Corporation, however, has a representative, the remembrancer, in parliament to watch for the Corporation's interests. Laws passed in parliament do not necessarily apply to them. The Corporation has its own flag and coat of arms.The Corporation also owns property outside its border.

Coat of Arms

Even way back when the British crown was replaced with Parliament, the Corporation of the City of London retained its own laws and practices, its assets and its ancient privileges persisted. The corporation itself is 950 years old. There is some clamor for change today. However, zeitgeist lives on. Imagine you can handle something 2,000 years old for real right there in the Square Mile. If you are ever in London, you can step into the ruins of London's Roman Amphitheatre and discover the hidden history. And who knows what else is there to be discovered if any of those layers underground were to ever be revealed. 

Flag

Petticoats, Tails and Teachers

Tuxedo tails is the height of elegance in men’s wear today. And boys wear dresses to get christened. And the doctored images we see of macho pirates in the movies, history may have fooled us. Some of those pirates may have worn dresses. The pirates of that time lived before cameras. And Cristobal Colon (aka Christopher Columbus) who knows what he wore!

Franklin D R

The petticoat has a long and interesting history in Europe and later North America.  Some men wore them as part of their dress (yes like dresses) ensemble all the way into adulthood. A sword at the side was one way of distinguishing men from women as they both wore dresses. Both boys and girls, in Europe and America wore dresses until the boy generally was breeched as his signal into male hood. It was easier to potty train that way, one would assume. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Smithsonian - 1884), wore a dress until the age of 6 or 7 when he was breeched. Who knows what poor people wore, since their story is not in recorded history?  Ragged hand me downs possibly.The throwaway society did not exist then. The petticoats demise happened shortly after WW1, but the fashion industry has been known to tinker with petticoats occasionally. 

Several vintage images circling around on the internet showing a teacher’s contract have been claimed by many. This was common for school districts of North America in the 19^th and early 20^th century. The one in this picture is from 1923. At that time women’s suffrage was a huge issue between liberals and conservatives. (No politics intended).  Among other things our dear teacher was never to be married and had to stay away from the company of men. And she needed permission to leave town. That list is indeed laughable today. I don’t think the rule about ice cream will fly with today’s teacher. That she had to wear two petticoats, not one, well, if worn by today’s teachers, might be quite a radical fashion statement. Why not? The sisters of old survived wearing them,  winter and all.

Modern epigenetic theories may yet come to the rescue of those men who are more comfortable packaged in dresses. They may, however, have to forego the sword at the side. How could they drive the SUV with a sword? If history was rewritten, Johnny Depp in a dress prancing around in Pirates of the Caribbean would probably not have been resulted in those films raking in the billions of dollars. Those tails that are the summum bonum of the tuxedo fashionistas are after all the remnants a dress that was left open to reveal the petticoat underneath. One is left to wonder what the world would have been like had selfies been around in those bygone days.

1507 - A Bygone World, on the Doorstep of Discovery

Geographical Exploration: Waldseemuller'sUniversalis Cosmographia (1507)

Imagine the challenge of having to carve a wood stamp (for printing) so large; it needed to be done in 12 separate blocks. It had to be large because they were preparing to print a map of the world!! This ancient art form of woodcutting goes back thousands of years. The method uses a relief technique in which the images are carved on the surface of a block of wood. Woodblock printing as it is also called exists today as a unique hobby. When this map was being made, it was shortly after Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the new world. Since this map was created in Europe, it reflected the latest discoveries that were known at the time (early sixteenth century) by the Europeans. It shows that they knew a lot about Africa and China but very little of the western hemisphere. This is the first time that both the Pacific Ocean and America were recognized on a map. America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. Can you imagine having a whole continent named after you? There is only one copy of this map left and is the most expensive map in the world. It is housed at the U.S. Library of Congress. And it was bought for $10,000,000. The map is supposed to be created using ‘Ptolemy’s projection’. How did the mapmakers figure out where north was? I think they almost had the shape of America right, if not the size. I wonder how many flat earthers were around at that time and what they thought happened when a person arrived at the end of the Pacific Ocean. Did people fall off? This is an enticing peek into a bygone world. There is no North or South Pole. Cape of Good Hope seems almost to be an afterthought. How did the wood cutters match up the different pieces? Where did they get the ideas of the shape and size of countries from? What was the daily life of the woodcutters like? How many months did they spend on making this map? Did the project outlive them? Did they have families? What were their work spaces like? If only one could travel back to this time of discovery in Europe just for a day!

Compare this to the map of the world today!

Anyway here's the formal scoop:

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map grew out of an ambitious project in St. Dié, near Strasbourg, France, during the first decade of the sixteenth century, to document and update new geographic knowledge derived from the discoveries of the late fifteenth and the first years of the sixteenth centuries. Waldseemüller’s large world map was the most exciting product of that research effort, and included data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages of 1501–1502 to the New World. Waldseemüller christened the new lands "America" in recognition of Vespucci ’s understanding that a new continent had been uncovered as a result of the voyages of Columbus and other explorers in the late fifteenth century. This is the only known surviving copy of the first printed edition of the map, which, it is believed, consisted of 1,000 copies. Waldseemüller’s map supported Vespucci’s revolutionary concept by portraying the New World as a separate continent, which until then was unknown to the Europeans. It was the first map, printed or manuscript, to depict clearly a separate Western Hemisphere, with the Pacific as a separate ocean. The map represented a huge leap forward in knowledge, recognizing the newly found American landmass and forever changing the European understanding of a world divided into only three parts—Europe, Asia, and Africa.