Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (& Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, & Myths [Third Edition]

By Susanne Alleyn

This is not a book on how to write historical fiction. It IS a book on how NOT to write historical fiction.

If you love history and you’re hard at work on your first historical novel, but you’re wondering if your medieval Irishmen would live on potatoes, if your 17th-century pirate would use a revolver, or if your hero would be able to offer Marie-Antoinette a box of chocolate bonbons . . .

(The answer to all these is “Absolutely not!”)

. . . then Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders is the book for you.

Medieval Underpants will guide you through the factual mistakes that writers of historical fiction—both beginners and professionals—most often make, and show you how to avoid them. From fictional characters crossing streets that wouldn’t exist for another sixty (or two thousand) years, to South American foods on ancient Roman plates, to 1990s slang in the mouths of 1940s characters, Susanne Alleyn exposes the often hilarious, always painful goofs that turn up most frequently in fiction set in the past.

Alleyn stresses the hazards to writers of assuming too much about details of life in past centuries, providing numerous examples of mistakes that could easily have been avoided. She also explores commonly-confused topics such as the important difference between the British titles “Lord John Smith” and “John, Lord Smith” and why they’re not interchangeable, and provides simple guidelines for getting them right. In a wide assortment of chapters including Food and Plants; Guns; Money; Hygiene; Dialogue; Attitudes; Research; and, of course, Ladies' Underpants, she offers tips on how to avoid errors and anachronisms while continually reminding writers of the necessity of meticulous historical research.

NEW expanded 3rd edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spyderwort Press
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310013522

Susanne Alleyn

Susanne Alleyn has loved history all her life, aided and abetted by her grandmother, Lillie V. Albrecht, an author of historical children's books in the 1950s and 60s. Happy to describe herself as an insufferable knowitall about historical trivia (although she lost on Jeopardy!), Susanne has been writing and researching historical fiction for nearly three decades. She is the author of A Far Better Rest, the reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities (Soho Press, 2000); the four Aristide Ravel Mysteries (St. Martin's Press); and The Executioner's Heir: A Novel of Eighteenth-Century France.Nonfiction includes Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer's (& Editor's) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, & Myths (2012); A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion (2014); and The Weirder Side of Paris (2017).

Book preview

Introduction

This is not a book on how to write historical fiction. There are many good books out there, including Persia Woolley's How to Write and Sell Historical Fiction and Kathy Lynn Emerson's How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries, that do an excellent job of that.

It is a book on how not to write historical fiction.

About fifteen years ago, when I was a member of a certain online discussion list for writers (published and unpublished) of historical fiction, a hopeful unpublished member posted some chapters of her work in progress, a romance set in 11th-century England, and asked for comments. I imagine she was naïvely eager to hear from other members about how good it was, and how they could hardly wait for her to finish it so that it would become an immediate bestseller.

Unfortunately, this poor soul proved to be a painfully, hopelessly untalented writer, with a very shaky grasp of vocabulary, punctuation, and grammar. But even if she had been blessed with the most beautiful and perfect of writing styles, her complete lack of any realistic conception of life in the past, of people's attitudes in past centuries, or indeed of solid, general historical knowledge whatsoever would have doomed her; the extent of her historical study had probably been one book about the Norman Conquest and the not-very-attentive reading of a few third-rate bodice-ripper romances.

The first page of this writer's sample chapters included (this is supposed to be England in 1066, remember):

• A character lighting up a cigar [Tobacco originated in the Americas, which, if it's slipped your mind, weren't discovered until 1492; and smoking cigars—rather than pipes—didn't really become popular until the 19th century.]

• Two characters chatting, while sitting on a leather sofa, in a roadside inn's cozy lounge [11th-century English roadside inns were not remotely cozy and had neither lounges nor leather-covered furniture; and no one in Western Europe had had anything like a sofa since the days of the Roman Empire.]

• One character casually mentioning that, since the Conquest and the accession of King William (October 1066), he had just been on a trip to the Far East and had had a good time seeing China [Two centuries before Marco Polo spent years on his history-making, overland journey from Venice to China and back, and when a traveler was lucky if he covered forty miles a day—did this fellow get to China, and back to England, within two months by going to Travelocity.com and buying a discounted airfare?]

• One character greeting another with You look great. [Ouch. Just ouch.]

There were probably many more hideous howlers of this sort, but (mercifully) I've forgotten them…

Most anachronisms and errors in published historical fiction, from now on to be referred to as HF, aren't this obvious or ludicrous. But plenty do crop up, and many common errors keep on reappearing from book to book to book because inexperienced writers (and sometimes even experienced writers and their editors) haven't done their homework properly.

We HF writers all make mistakes. None of us has lived in ancient Rome or 11th-century England or 19th-century America and we can't possibly know every single detail of events and everyday life and what a person living in such an era would take for granted. There's probably not a historical novel anywhere that doesn't have some errors or anachronisms in it, whether teensy weensy or so painfully obvious that you wonder what the editor was smoking to have missed them. I've made a few mistakes that ended up in my own published novels. But I caught at least some of them in the end (or other people did) and I sure won't make those particular mistakes again.

The teensy weensy mistakes are the ones that (thank goodness) will only be caught by the handful of scholarly experts across the entire globe who have made a career out of that particular obscure subject. If you mention, as I did in my own novel The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, the Montansier Theater in Paris in 1786, probably only people who have advanced degrees in the history of late-18th-century French theater are ever going to catch that and snicker briefly because they remember that the real Montansier Theater in Paris—as opposed to the Montansier Theater in Versailles—wasn't founded until 1790.

Oops.

Yes, I was careless and goofed there, while trying to add period color, with a tiny, unimportant, incorrect detail, because I didn't check my facts. Fortunately, there aren't that many readers out there with advanced degrees in the history of late-18th-century French theater.

The big, honking, obvious howlers, however, the howlers that many, many non-expert but well-read readers will know are dead wrong, are the ones that no self-respecting author/researcher should commit and no editor should let him get away with—though they often do.

Never mind, the amateur writer thinks, when she gives her knight a cigar without wondering whether or not people smoked cigars in the 11th century, because she's much more interested in describing the effect of the heroine's sex appeal on the hero's manhood: Nobody will notice.

Never mind, the professional writer thinks, when he's describing the food at Emperor Marcus Aurelius's banquet, but is too busy or lazy to look up the histories of individual foods and find out whether or not tomato and basil salad dressed in olive oil (a nice modern Italian dish) could actually have been served there. Nobody will notice.

Yes, they will.

Some people will notice.

Inevitably, some people who know their history will know that both tobacco and tomatoes come from the Americas, were unknown in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and couldn't possibly have shown up in Norman England or at a Roman emperor's banquet, and now the author's just set him- or herself up with them as a sloppy researcher whose historical details (and who knows what else?) can't be trusted. If you dress your aristocratic ancient Roman heroine in a toga, for instance, or give her a dinner involving tomatoes, just about anybody who has studied ancient Rome—or even anybody who has read a lot of (more reliable) historical fiction about ancient Rome—will say "Whaaat?"

Because before you write your Roman novel, you'd better have learned at least enough about ancient Roman life to know that only men wore togas, and enough about world history and food history to know that tomatoes didn't make it to Europe, Africa, and Asia until the 1500s (CE) at the very earliest. Displaying this kind of blatant ignorance about basic facts will, most likely, get your book tossed across the room by 95% of its readers, who love ancient Rome and read lots of HF about ancient Rome and have picked up lots of details about life in ancient Rome, and now you've just proved that you know less than they do and your historical research is not to be relied upon.

Some people will notice, and the mistakes will drive them crazy, and if you make mistake after mistake they'll soon resolve to never, ever read another book of yours.

* * * * *

This guide is intended to point out, remind you about, and help you keep your historical fiction free of, not only the big honking howlers, but also the many, many lesser gaffes and howlers that keep turning up again and again in all kinds of HF written by authors who should know better. Its focus is primarily toward European/American history, since my own specialized knowledge is centered in Europe and the 18th century in particular, and the great majority of historical fiction written in English is set in Europe, the Europeanized Americas, or the ancient Mediterranean. Many topics here, however, can be applied on a broader scale to fiction set in other cultures, regions, and eras. Ancient Persian warriors and 14th-century Japanese samurai, after all, didn't have cigars or tomatoes any more than 11th-century English knights did.

I am also writing from an American perspective and primarily for North American readers and writers, but I hope readers from other nations will enjoy this book, find it useful, and not take offense.

May we never again read about Dark Ages peasants eating tomatoes; unbelievably plucky/feisty, liberated medieval heroines with names like Dominique; 18th-century travelers crossing Europe or the Atlantic in a week; slang that's sixty years ahead of its time; and many, many other such common anachronisms of fact and attitude…

Onward!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Basic Rules You Need To Keep In Mind That Will Help You Avoid the Silly Mistakes

General Rule No. 1

Never Assume

There's an old wisecrack that goes: "Never assume something, because when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me."

This is especially true of writing and researching historical fiction.

Never assume anything about the details of historical events or daily life in the past! (Which is another way of saying Do your %*#¿$!%¥%& research!)

Most of the factual errors in our historical fiction don't come from what we don't know: they come from assuming that what we already do know to be correct (for example, that tobacco and tomatoes are found everywhere on the planet) was also correct a hundred or a thousand years ago.

Check your facts. Check them again.

Never assume something was true then because it's true now!

Never assume that something was true in 1100 or 1500 because it was true in 1800!

Look it up!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1

Anachronisms

"Anachronism: (from the Greek ana [up, against, back, re-] and chronos [time]) A chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of person(s), events, objects, or customs from different periods of time.

"A prochronism occurs when an item appears in a temporal context in which it could not yet be present (the object had not yet been invented, the verbal expression had not been coined, the philosophy had not been formulated, the technology had not been created, etc.)."

adapted from Wikipedia

Anachronisms, or, to be exact, prochronisms, make up most of the howlers in HF. They can be, in their mildest form, minor errors in scene-setting, the unimportant bloopers we can snicker at but, depending on how tolerant we are, disregard up to a point—for instance, a scene in which Martha Washington puts up a Christmas tree at Mount Vernon in the 1770s, although the Christmas tree was almost entirely unknown in Britain and America, except in German immigrant households, until the 1840s (see Chapter 11).

But then there are the downright appalling, inexcusable, oh-dear-lord-did-this-author-ever-do-the-most-elementary-research-on-the-period-he's-writing-about grand historical catastrophes: In the same published novel that gave us the Christmas tree error above, we're told that the young George Washington (born 1732) studied the life and military exploits of Napoleon (born 1769).

*facepalm*

You just can't make this stuff up.

I've already given a few examples of things that often show up in historical novels that could not possibly have appeared as the authors state they did, simply because they are decades or centuries ahead of their time. I'll continue to discuss the most common anachronisms that are forever turning up in HF because inexperienced authors don't do nearly enough basic research, and because experienced authors don't always take the time to ask themselves, "Wait a minute—do I know this, or do I think I know this? Am I quite sure that this person, item, building, technology, street, expression, attitude, food, artwork, or custom actually existed in the exact period and place I'm writing about?"

In other words, they mistakenly assume…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

2

Let's Start With the Underpants

(This section mentions slightly indelicate subjects.

You've been warned.)

Ordinary men in the Middle Ages wore underpants, of a sort. They were called braies or breeks and they were of plain linen gathered together at the waist, rather like a cross between a loose loincloth and baggy breeches, all held in place by a belt of some kind.

But the simplest thing to remember about women's underwear in past eras is this: They probably weren't wearing any.

This is not to say that wealthy, aristocratic European women didn't wear anything beneath their elaborate court gowns. Of course they did. But the body linen that they wore would have looked much more like the knee-length T-shirts that many of us sleep in than anything ever dreamed up in the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

Through most of history, the undergarment European women wore was a plain, short-sleeved affair of soft linen (not cotton!) that did look like a nightshirt and which fell to between the knees and the ankles—possibly gathered with stitching and/or a drawstring under the breasts to provide a little support. In English it was called a smock (early Middle Ages), a shift (Middle Ages through 18th century), or a chemise or shimmy (in the 19th century, adopted from the French). If the woman wore a corset, it went on over the shift so that the wearer's skin wasn't chafed from the hard bones of the corset.

The corset kept the wearer erect and gave her the proper, fashionable silhouette of her era, with or without a tiny waist—despite the fashion pursued by the upper crust, many Victorian women, especially those who had to work for a living and actually needed to breathe, didn't go for the constricting wasp waist, just a nice curve. A corset did little, however, to improve a woman's bosom; there was nothing like a bra as part of it. Most corsets, over the centuries, either stopped below the breasts and let the shift and gown do the work of supporting them, or, if the corset went higher, it held the bosom in place by simply enclosing it behind a stiff barrier and pushing it inward and, inevitably, somewhat upward. (Corsets, by the way, until the late 19th century, the tail end of the Age of the Corset, were plain and functional, more like a 1950s girdle, their descendant, than anything else—they weren't red or black or trimmed with lace, no matter how they may remind you of a sexy teddy or bustier/basque from the local naughty undies shop.)

And what kind of panties did the pre-19th-century woman wear beneath her shift?

She didn't.

A lot of beginning authors probably have the idea—gathered from movies, no doubt—that women throughout the ages wore lacy knee- or mid-calf-length underdrawers or pantalettes as an undergarment for their nether regions. Costume movies, which are particularly guilty of this anachronism, are rife with ladies' ruffled bloomers in all centuries (see General Rule No. 3, Do Not Borrow Your Information From Other People's Historical Novels and Movies); the moviemakers have to put something on their curvaceous stars for the sake of the PG rating. Movies probably give their heroines lacy drawers in a caught-in-her-underwear scene because they look sexier than a petticoat. But unless it's the middle of the 19th century or later, the drawers rarely belong there.

Until the mid 1800s, most Western women didn't wear anything resembling modern panties, whether drawers or briefs—unless, perhaps, it was That Time of the Month, when a snug loincloth, holding some rags or other absorbent material in place, was probably welcome. Why?

Well, the rough date when women began to wear modern underwear (meaning loose drawers, and then—considerably later, well after World War I—snug briefs/panties) corresponds, not coincidentally, with the early development of the modern toilet and the modern public toilet—the middle of the 19th century—and also with more liberating female clothing and modern notions of privacy.[1]

Imagine that you're a 13th-century peasant woman on your way to the fields or the market, and that you need to relieve yourself. Do you really want to go behind a tree and squat, and then reach under your heavy woolen skirts and your shift and hitch them all the way up, inevitably exposing yourself to any companions or passersby, in order to untie (no elastic waistbands) and pull down your bloomers or panties?

Imagine that you are wearing a late Elizabethan court gown with a farthingale the size of a cart wheel, or a 1770s ball gown with five-foot-wide panniers, and that you need to relieve yourself. Do you really want to squat over a chamber pot (even one set at a convenient height in a close-stool) while wearing that gown, and then try to reach underneath yards of fabric and the elaborate wicker or whalebone or metal framework of your hoops or panniers, plus a couple of petticoats, plus your shift, in order to untie and pull down your bloomers or panties?

I didn't think so. (And any actress or Civil War reenactor who's worn 21st-century underwear beneath a bulky period gown plus petticoats and hoops would probably agree.)

Without the underdrawers, you just hunker down and spread your skirts, without exposing any part of your bare flesh to prying eyes, and whiz. So much easier and so much more modest (though the lack of underwear also made quick sexual encounters up against a wall a lot easier). That's how women relieved themselves for millennia, even in civilizations like ancient Rome that had toilets at sitting height; ancient Roman public latrines seem to have been unisex because both genders simply sat and spread their clothing decently over themselves while they were tending to their business. (For cleaning up, they used a damp sponge on the end of a stick—the holes in the vertical part of the toilet benches are where you'd poke the stick. Nasty, sycophantic sidekick characters in Roman farces thus were often nicknamed Sponge.)

The very concept of women wearing underpants—garments similar to, and performing the same function as, trousers or breeches, which were worn by men—offended some people. When Catherine de' Medici (queen and dowager queen of France 1547–1589) introduced a type of female underbreeches, called calçon, which were specifically intended for the comfort and modesty of women riding horseback in case their skirts flew up during a hard gallop, her younger contemporaries welcomed them as a useful innovation but certain moralists were shocked: Beneath her skirts, one declared, a woman's ass should be naked as God intended.[2]

Detail of caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson's The Exhibition Stare Case (ca. 1811), in which obese but fashionable Londoners tumble down a notoriously steep stairway; it's abundantly clear that the ladies aren't wearing drawers.

Over 200 years later, Benjamin Franklin, when American minister to France, apparently had a strategic view of a lady in waiting who took a disastrous spill in the palace. He remarked to Marie-Antoinette on the interesting fact that the aristocratic ladies at Versailles—who wore some of the most cumbersome court gowns in history—didn't wear underdrawers of any sort and that the gates of Paradise [were] always open. (It's possible that some women in Franklin's 18th-century America, which had no big court gowns and was a lot more straitlaced—and colder in the winter—than most of 18th-century Europe, had already adopted drawers, with warmth and modesty trumping convenience.) A decade later, during the French Revolution, eyewitnesses recounted that when Marie-Antoinette was about to climb into the cart that would take her to the guillotine, she suddenly asked the executioner to untie her hands, so that she could relieve herself. Keeping it simple with an absence of panties, she slipped into a corner of the prison courtyard, crouched, spread her skirts, and did her business, before proceeding with the journey.

* * * * *

Very recent archeological finds at a castle in the Austrian Tyrol (eastern Alps) reveal the existence of—yes—medieval bras and something that could be underpants—but we have no way of knowing how often they were worn.

We have to remember that the situation usually determines the solution, and people tend to invent and use the things that are most useful to them. Bras or other kinds of boob-repressors are welcome things to big-breasted women in any place and at any time. Athletic ancient Roman women wore a version of the sports bra, probably just a band of fabric or leather wound snugly around the chest, while exercising. A woman with an oversize bosom in any century would have come up with some sort of binding to keep her breasts in place, though not necessarily the very modern-looking bikini bra discovered at Lengberg Castle (less modern-looking items used for the same purpose were called in the Middle Ages, unflatteringly, shirts with bags).

The underpants are trickier. The discovery in a castle of two pairs of 15th-century panties (actually snug loincloths tied on with ribbons, more resembling string bikini bottoms) does not mean, by a long shot, that everyone wore them. It's most likely that they were used only when their owner had her period, for the sake of keeping that absorbent padding in place; there's not much of a reason for their existence otherwise. But we just don't know, unless someone discovers the lady's diary. And still we have to go back to the whole question of convenience.

Recall: Why didn't 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century aristocratic women wear panties or drawers? Because of the insane inconvenience that would have been involved (even with the assistance of a personal maid) in reaching around and below their enormous, heavy, boxy gowns and frames and petticoats to untie the ribbons on the Lengberg undies, versus the ease and simplicity of sitting or squatting pantless over a chamber pot or pierced stool. 15th-century gowns, on the other hand, were much simpler in their lines, with flowing skirts and fewer underskirts, and didn't have the bulky frameworks that Renaissance and Early Modern formal clothing did.

Why didn't peasant women wear underpants? Because peasants and poor town workers had no privies and practically no privacy. Peasant women and working-class women, when they had to take a leak in the middle of the work day, weren't about to hunt for a private, sheltered place—if they could find one at all—in which they could hike up their skirts in peace; it was far more convenient and modest to walk a few steps from where they were working, whether the middle of the field or the marketplace, and squat pantless on the ground amid the inevitable animal manure, with their bodies and their bodily functions respectably hidden by their long skirts.

The Lengberg Castle underpants—if they were for everyday use and not just once-a-month accessories—were evidently worn by a woman who had neither of these problems. She would have been wearing the relatively simple skirt of the 15th century, and she was an aristocrat with easy access to the castle privy, garderobe shaft, or chamber pot hidden behind a discreet screen. She would have had the privacy to relieve herself in peace, away from rude stares, and would have worn a gown that was fairly easy to reach under in order to untie her string panties. The vast majority of women of her own time would not have had the same privacy; while upper-class women of subsequent centuries who did have the privacy would been hampered by their dresses.

In the end, it comes down to the simple fact that

Reviews for Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am such a book whore - I only have to read a vaguely intriguing review on a blog and I'm sold. Owning a Kindle only makes my compulsive acquisitiveness quicker and easier. I spotted this title here on Librarything, and couldn't resist, in particular because Susanne Alleyn's Aristide Ravel books are some of my favourite F-Rev reads.The author is also a woman after my own pedantic attention to historical detail. Not only does Susanne Alleyn pull up fellow historical writer Anne Perry - 'who should stick to Victorian London' - but also hates the term 'feisty' (originally used to describe a little farting dog) and quotes an episode of Star Trek as a lesson in the misuse of 'thee' and 'thou'! No wonder I enjoy her novels so much.Because I am the type of reader who regularly checks up on historical fiction via Wikipedia and Etymonline - I once went on an Internet recce to find if dahlias were around in late eighteenth century England, for no reason whatsoever - most of the facts and figures Alleyn offers up seemed like common sense to me (women going commando, for instance, for simple convenience), but I found all the chapters very interesting (although I had more fun when she was pulling apart other people's work!) Topics range from anachronisms - of geography, dialogue and attitude ('presentism', which always narks me) - to bloopers and how to learn from the mistakes of others. There is also a helpful bibliography, which could have done with being divided into centuries or eras.Political correctness in historical fiction is my biggest bugbear - that, and Americanisms - so I'm glad that Alleyn writes about 'smart women who worked with what they had to achieve their goals', and not those 'little farting dogs' who cross dress and brandish firearms, denying their femininity in a bid to be more attractive to modern day readers. Film adaptations which dilute or whitewash history to appeal to a wider audience are another crime against time - 'do not trust a Hollywood movie to get more than 50% of its historical facts and/or details right', the author warns.Ms Alleyn and I part company on our opinion of Baroness Orczy - I happen to love her 'romantic fluff', while recognising that she may have overegged the anti-Revolutionary pudding - but for budding writers who want to ditch the 'unbelievably feisty, liberated medieval heroines with names like Shanna', this light-hearted but well-informed guide will show the way.

[gttexas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Whether you're into period mysteries, "bodice rippers", historical fiction, or are a Downton Abby fan, this book should be a must read! Amusing, informative, and downright enjoyable!