The story of shopping

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We all love a bit of retail therapy, so with shops finally able to re-open, our curator Liz takes a look at shopping throughout history…

Along with many other ‘non-essential’ local shops, St Neots Museum reopened its shop on the 16th June, after a closure of almost three months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Planning the reopening of the museum shop set us thinking about the history of shops and shopping! For thousands of years people have traded food and other goods and services. Since the rise of the Greek civilisation around 700 BC and into the later Roman period (500 BC to AD 400) a wide variety of shops and markets were well established across Europe. Although we don’t have any evidence (yet!) for Roman shops in St Neots, we do have evidence for the Roman roadside tabernae (later corrupted to tavern) at Godmanchester (Durovigutum) along the Roman Ermine Street, less than ten miles from St Neots.

In St Neots, we believe that the top end of the High Street where the road widens at the crossroads with Huntingdon Street marks the site of the Anglo-Saxon market place. The fact that this part of the High Street was known as ‘sheep street’, perhaps refers to an animal market on the site.

St Neots Market Square, about 1900

The origin of St Neots’ market

It was the monks of St Neots Priory who developed the town’s current large market square in the AD 1130s, as the shopping mall of its day. Situated right outside the walls of the monk’s Priory and next to the busy river crossing, between the Great North Road and the City of Cambridge, it was ideally placed to encourage market trading and provide the monks with an income from the stall rents. Some stalls gradually developed into permanent shops along the outer wall of the Priory, known for many years as ‘shop row’. Victorian and Edwardian photographs show the old wooden stalls used on St Neots Market Square, which look almost unchanged from their medieval predecessors.

Shopping in the 19th and 20th centuries

Adam Bailey – Tea Dealer & Grocer, billhead from 1831, 20 High Street

The earliest evidence we have for the interior layout of a local shop comes from a billhead found in a local scrap book. On the 1831 billhead of Adam Bailey, Tea Dealer & Grocer, appears a small drawing showing a Georgian grocers shop. Male shop assistants stand behind long wooden counters while smartly dressed women make their purchases. Did St Neots have such a shop? Or was it an idealised scene? We will never know, but it does show us how Mr Bailey wanted his customers to think of his shop.

From the time of the Industrial Revolution, in the later 1700s, a vast new range of consumer goods began to be produced, and by the early Victorian period new shops were opening and selling everything from groceries and sweets to medicines, furniture, household china and ornaments. With the development of the lock-stitch sewing machine from the 1850s, mass produced clothing also began to be sold. Despite this new consumer boom though, older ways of shopping still continued. A photograph from about 1860 in the museum’s collection shows John Chamberlain, a Victorian pedlar, who sold nuts, cakes, sweets and packets of seeds from the baskets he carried to customers in local St Neots pubs.

Plum’s Café, 31 High Street, taken from their paper bag

In Victorian England, the delivery of groceries from local shops was an accepted way of life, and new online shopping services today reflect the earlier practise of leaving your shopping list with the grocer and waiting for your items to be delivered to your home. An image of Plum’s, the Victorian confectioner and café on St Neots High Street, taken from one of their paper bags, shows a delivery van waiting outside the shop ready to deliver orders.

As the consumer boom developed in the Victorian period, one way that shops tried to attract customers was by displaying their goods. They might hang goods on the outside of their premises, as many clothing and footwear shops did (for example Barratts), or display them on the pavement outside their shops. Many photographs of the town from the early 1900s show household goods and furniture displayed in this way. One photograph in the museum collection shows a fascinating display of household goods outside Franks High Street furniture shop (now Brittain’s), including a piano and a treadle sewing machine being loaded onto a cart, presumably ready for delivery.

The First and Second World Wars

International Stores 1916

The First World War brought huge changes to everyday life, and one striking change to the shopping experience was the introduction of woman staff, or ‘lady grocers’. to grocery stores. The International Stores in St Neots even felt the need to take out advertisements explaining that employing women allowed their male employees to join the army. A photograph in the museum’s collection shows the new female members of staff in their Great War uniforms, standing alongside the remaining male staff outside the shop on St Neots High Street.

As thousands of women took up paid employment to support the country’s huge war effort, many had their own income for the first time in their lives. Retailers were not slow to pick up on this opportunity and adverts for women’s clothes began to appear in the local paper, the St Neots Advertiser. Thomas Armstrong’s shop on the market square was the leading drapers and milliners in the district in the early 1900s, and their adverts for fashionable women’s clothes appear regularly on the front page of the paper during the First World War. Today, Armstrong’s shop is the Estate Agent, Haart, on the market square.

Thomas Armstrong shop & advert,1916

Times were hard during the depression of the 1930s, and after the Second World War it was time for another change in shopping habits. Home deliveries fell out of fashion as the motor car and self-service shopping made it possible to take home most purchases immediately.

And today…

Despite a brief flirtation with a shopping Mall in the 1990s (on the Market Square where the Brook and Barter stands today) and the growth of out of town shopping in St Neots and Eaton Socon, the High Street and weekly Thursday market are still the busy heart of our town. Chains and independents alike can be found side by side, owing their location to those medieval market stalls which sprang up over 800 years ago.

If you’ve not yet been into our own lovely shop, do stop by on your next visit into St Neots!

Why do we celebrate the Summer Solstice?

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The Summer Solstice is almost upon us! Days are longer, nights are shorter, and the natural world is full of life. But what actually is a solstice, and why do we mark them in the way that we do? Read on to find out!

First things first! The term ‘solstice’ can be traced back to the Latin word ‘solstitium’, combining the words ‘sol’, meaning sun, and ‘-stit’ or ‘-stes’, meaning standing or still. The name derives from the Romans’ observation that during a solstice, the sun’s position in the sky at noon didn’t seem to change much throughout the day, but instead appeared motionless.

Astronomically speaking…

The Summer Solstice marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the end of spring and the start of the astronomical summer. It takes place between 20th and 22nd June each year, the reason for the shift in date boiling down to the fact that our calendar doesn’t precisely reflect the Earth’s rotation, and so we have to allow some wiggle room!

Both the summer and winter solstices form part of a wider astronomical calendar, flanked by two equinoxes in the spring and the autumn, and other daily and monthly cycles throughout the year. Incidentally, ‘equinox’ comes from the Latin ‘equi’ meaning equal, and ‘nox’ meaning night. On these two dates, day and night are of equal length before the days begin to get either lighter in the spring, or darker in the autumn.

During the solstices, the Earth’s axis tilts us at either our closest or farthest point from the sun. The hemisphere tilted most towards the sun sees its longest day and shortest night (the Summer Solstice), whilst the hemisphere tilted away from the sun sees its shortest day and longest night (the Winter Solstice.)

Prehistoric significance

Now that’s the science of a solstice explained (phew!), but just why do we humans place so much significance on the solstices and the days surrounding them? We know that the solstices certainly held importance for Neolithic humans, who may initially have started to observe the Summer Solstice as a marker for planting and harvesting crops. Stonehenge, our most famous Neolithic monument, was certainly built to reflect the solstices, and it has long been debated whether one of its functions was to act as ancient solar calendar. The site’s megaliths are aligned with the direction of the sunrise on the Summer Solstice, with the sarsen stones lined up to trace the movements of the sun. It’s likely that on the solstices people gathered at the monument to celebrate, though little archaeological evidence remains of the ceremonies that may have taken place there.

Interestingly, Archaeoastronomers (yes that’s an actual job, amazing!) think that the midwinter solstice may actually have been the more important focus for the builders of Stonehenge, due to the entire monument’s alignment facing toward the setting midwinter sun. As you enter the site along the main avenue and walk towards the standing stones, the position of the Winter Solstice’s sunset is the main focus directly ahead, perhaps in the same way that the most important parts of a church are located ahead of you as you enter.  There’s a WEALTH of information on Stonehenge’s association with the solstices on the English Heritage website, and we fully encourage you to fall down that rabbit hole and check it out!

The Summer Solstice throughout history

Our fascination with the solstices didn’t end with our Neolithic ancestors. According to some ancient Greek calendars, the Summer Solstice marked the start of the New Year, and began the one-month countdown to the opening of the famous Olympic games. In the days leading up to the Summer Solstice, the Romans celebrated the Vestalia, a religious festival to honour Vesta, goddess of the home and hearth. Before the rise of Christianity, Slavic, Germanic and Celtic tribes celebrated the midsummer with bonfires, believing that they would boost the sun’s energy and guarantee a good harvest. It was believed that bonfires could also help banish demons and evil spirits. Following the establishment of the Christian church, solstice celebrations were often combined with St John the Baptist’s Day on the 24th June, the date of Midsummer’s Day.

N.B. The Summer Solstice and Midsummer’s Day are actually separate dates, with the later falling on the 24th June. Midsummer is often now referred to as the period of time commencing with the Summer Solstice and leading up to Midsummer’s Day.

Significance of the solstice in Paganism

Today, the celebration of the solstices is mostly strongly associated with Paganism. The Pagan festival of Litha is one of the most important in the Pagan religion, commencing on the eve of the Summer Solstice it celebrates the midsummer and the power of the sun god. Magic is thought to be strongest during the Summer Solstice, and it’s also the time when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, eep! According to Pagan folklore, evil spirits in particular may walk the earth more freely at this time, and in order to ward them off, people wear protective garlands of herbs and flowers. One of the most powerful of these is the ‘chase devil’, also known as St. John’s Wort, because of its association with St. John’s Day.

Other Summer Solstice traditions surround the ashes from a midsummer bonfire, which can be used as a protection against misfortune by being formed into an amulet, or spread across a garden to ensure a good harvest. ‘Sunwheels’ were also used to celebrate midsummer in some Pagan communities. A wheel or ball of straw was lit on fire and rolled down a hill into a river. It was believed that if the fire went out before hitting the water then a good harvest was guaranteed.

Maypole in Eaton Socon c.1914 – picture credit: Cambridgeshire Community Archive Network

Local traditions

Over the centuries, the June solstice has inspired many midsummer celebrations involving bonfires, singing, and Maypole dancing. Many towns and villages across Britain still mark the day with fairs and festivals, like the one that takes place on Midsummer Common in Cambridge.

Local historian C.F. Tebbutt records in his writings a few other local traditions that took place in Huntingdonshire. In Bluntisham in the late 19th century, a midsummer feast was once held, with stalls selling sweets and gingerbread, and a garlanded hoop hung over the street. Records from Waresely in 1679 record the firing of blanks from guns at a midsummer festival, intended to scare away fairies and evil spirits. Finally, court records from Stilton in 1830 tell of one Thomas Wade, who was brought before a court for “walking up and down disguised by having a pair of painted ram’s horns on his head and a green veil over his face… at the same time also making strange and frightful noises…” Though whether this was actually to do with midsummer celebrations is anyone’s guess!

And there we have it! It can’t be denied that the Summer Solstice is a significant occasion astronomically, spiritually and historically. However you choose to mark the day (though we’d recommend not taking inspiration from Mr Wade), be sure to enjoy the longest day to its fullest!

National Lottery funding for St Neots Museum

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We’re thrilled to announce that St Neots Museum has been awarded £14,845 of National Lottery funding by Arts Council England!

This comes from ACE’s Emergency Response Fund to support the arts and museums during the COVID-19 crisis. The funding will mean the museum can develop new digital ways to keep connected with the local community, whilst its doors remain closed due to the imposed lockdown.

The museum staff have already been busy making films for all ages, which can be found here on our website and YouTube channel. Already, there are thirteen new films sharing the fascinating history of local people like James Toller, the Eynesbury Giant, and Victorian criminals. There’s also new articles to read on local (and not so local) history, and online exhibitions, the latest of which is by St Neots artist Richard Walker.

In addition, the funding will support the museum’s social media and marketing channels to let people know how the museum is taking its collection and knowledge out into the local community. Details of our social channels can be found at the bottom of this article.

Learning Officer Lesley Sainsbury says:

“Having the museum closed has been a challenge, so we are really pleased to have been given funding, and are working hard to get great local history content on our website (www.stneotsmuseum.org.uk) and social media. This has only be made possible thanks to public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England”.

Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. They have pledge that between 2018 and 2022, they will invest £1.45 billion of public money from government, and an estimated £860 million from the National Lottery, to help the arts and museums sectors. Following the Covid-19 crisis, the ACE has developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support.  You can find out more about ACE by visiting their website: www.artscouncil.org.uk

Find us on social media at: Twitter @StNeotsMuseum, Facebook @stneotsmuseum, Instagram @stneotsmuseum, and on YouTube 

Historical folk remedies

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St Neots Museum Curator Liz Davies delves into the medical folk remedies recorded in Huntingdonshire

In 2020, the current COVID-19 pandemic is a major crisis gripping the world, but since biblical times, epidemics of highly contagious diseases have swept the world killing many millions of people. The most deadly recent world pandemic was the 1918 / 19 influenza outbreak, which is said to have killed between 20 to 50 million people, more than the total number who died fighting in the First World War!

Historical pandemics

In the medieval period the Bubonic plague (also known as the Black Death) swept across Europe and arrived in England in 1348, where it’s estimated to have wiped out almost half the population. The plague then reoccurred across Europe at regular intervals over the following centuries, particularly in Britain in the years 1665 and 1666 when it was known as the Great Plague. This outbreak ravaged London in particular, killing up to 200,000 people when the population of the capital was then around  500,000.

Since the 1600s, and without major advances in medical treatment, the world has continued to cope with a series of highly infectious diseases, including smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, malaria, influenza and many others.  After the last serious outbreak of the plague in England in 1666, smallpox became the most feared infectious disease, killing and disfiguring millions with pox scars.

Doctors and medicine

In the medieval period, the only qualified doctors were physicians who had trained at a university. Most had little practical medical knowledge, although in their defence, there were very few useful remedies available! Surgeons, on the other hand, were not university trained, but would learn under an experienced surgeon and then gain further experience ‘on the job’.

Edward Jenner

From the medieval period, until well into the Victorian period, most treatments involved herbal remedies, bleeding, vomiting or purging patients, magical charms, or offering to say a prayer. It was only during the later 1700s that medical knowledge started to increase and surgeons began to make important discoveries about the body and how it worked. For instance, it was in 1796 that Edward Jenner, following up countryside folklore that milkmaids who caught cowpox never contracted smallpox, proved that a vaccination with cowpox could prevent smallpox.

Folk remedies still prevailed

Despite Jenner’s discovery, it was not until 1853 that smallpox vaccination for children was made compulsory in Britain and the disease started to decline. Until then, people would still rely heavily on local folk remedies. Drawing on local memories, St Neots historian Mr Tebbutt discovered that, in St Neots, it was believed that keeping a guinea pig could offer protection from smallpox because the animal would attract the illness and prevent the owner becoming infected. He also recorded that in 1943, a local Dr Cross had told him that in the early days of his practice, when a child was vaccinated against smallpox, it was not unusual to find that the parents had applied a cow dung poultice due to a folk memory of the link to cowpox.

Local remedies

From the Tudor period onwards, better off people would pay to see a doctor and poor people could use the workhouse surgeon or doctor. A chance survival in a local scrapbook reveals that the Overseers of the St Neots Poor paid Surgeon, Joseph Rix 1s 6d (about 7p) in July 1829 for treating a patient with ‘Pills and Powder’.

Dr Rix receipt for “pills and powder”

However, with very few effective treatments for any serious illnesses, patent medicines, folk remedies, religious prayers and magical charms were all widely popular. In rural areas, such as Huntingdonshire, belief in folk medicines and cures survived until the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948.

Tebbutt’s documentation of cures

It was the strong belief in natural remedies that inspired Mr Tebbutt to collect information about folk remedies and beliefs. In particular he knew Alfred ‘Doc’ Rowlett of Eaton Ford, who supplemented his income as a road sweeper and antique dealer by selling his own herbal remedies from a stall on St Neots Market. Life-long Eaton Ford resident, Betty Cambers, remembered seeing Mr Rowlett collecting plants in the meadows which are today the riverside park in St Neots. Betty recalled that the meadows were ‘a much more beautiful place than people nowadays would ever imagine.’ The grassy meadows were full of lovely wild flowers, depending on the season.

Mr Rowlett

‘Doc’ Rowlett claimed he could cure warts, and Eynesbury resident, Bert Goodwin, once recalled that Mr Rowlett had cured a large wart on his knee. Bert recalled how Rowlett had cut a small twig from a bush he described as ‘Joseph’s Thorn’ which he shaped into a spatula, and then made the mark of the cross over the wart and said it would be gone by the next full moon. The next time Bert looked – the wart had gone!

In his booklet on Huntingdonshire Folklore, Mr Tebbutt recorded many of the folk remedies common in this area well into the last century. There were many different remedies for a common illness such as rheumatism including; carrying a moles foot or a hare’s foot with you, or using a lotion of adders fat.  Alternatively, people who lived in Bluntisham believed that you could cure rheumatism by tying a red ribbon around the bad leg.

Alternatively…

If you preferred to act before you became ill, you might carry a charm with you, or hang one in your house. ‘Doc’ Rowlett had a collection of charms which he had collected from local people: a white stone with a natural hole in the centre had been hung in a gypsy caravan to protect the horse, a leg shaped stone had been carried to protect the owner from gout, and a broken whelk shell had given protection against earache. In many cases, the charms seemed a much more pleasant alternative to some of the less appealing cures!

If you or your family have any memories connected to this, then we’d love to hear them! Liz is also able to offer talks on Myth and Magic in Huntingdonshire, so to find out more, please do get in touch!