{"id":44305,"date":"2018-07-28T03:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-28T07:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44305"},"modified":"2018-07-27T23:29:19","modified_gmt":"2018-07-28T03:29:19","slug":"historical-vandalism-at-stonehenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/28\/historical-vandalism-at-stonehenge\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical vandalism at Stonehenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jocelyn Sears<\/a> on the barbaric “souvenir” habits of 18th century English “tourists”:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1860, a concerned tourist wrote to the London Times<\/em> decrying the \u201cfoolish, vulgar and ruthless practice of the majority of visitors\u201d to Stonehenge \u201cof breaking off portions of it as keepsakes.\u201d Today, taking a hammer and chisel to a Neolithic monument seems like obvious vandalism, but during the Victorian era, such behavior was not only common but expected.<\/p>\n

English antiquarian tourists, who were mostly upper class, had developed the habit of taking makeshift relics from the historical sites they visited during the 18th century. By 1830, the practice was so widespread that the English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon dubbed it \u201cthe English disease,\u201d writing, \u201cOn every English chimney piece, you will see a bit of the real Pyramids, a bit of Stonehenge! [\u2026] You can\u2019t admit the English into your gardens but they will strip your trees, cut their names on your statues, eat your fruit, & stuff their pockets with bits for their musaeums.\u201d<\/p>\n

For centuries, both locals and visitors had taken pieces of Stonehenge for use in folk remedies. As early as the 12th century, rumors of the stones\u2019 healing properties appear in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in 1707, Reverend James Brome wrote that their scrapings were still thought to \u201cheal any green Wound, or old Sore.\u201d In the 1660s, the English antiquarian John Aubrey reported a local superstition that \u201cpieces or powder of these stones, putt into their wells, doe drive away the Toades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, tourists were not just taking from Stonehenge, but also leaving their mark, too. By the middle of the 17th century, tourist graffiti was appearing on the stones. The name of Johannes Ludovicus de Ferre \u2014 abbreviated \u201cIOH : LVD : DEFERRE\u201d \u2014 is etched, and so is the engraving \u201cI WREN,\u201d which may refer to Christopher Wren, the famed architect who designed St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral.<\/p>\n

As early as 1740, the archaeologist William Stukeley was decrying \u201cthe unaccountable folly of mankind in breaking pieces off [the stones] with great hammers,\u201d and by the end of the 19th century, according an 1886 commenter, \u201cAlmost every day takes some fragment from the ruins, or adds something to the network of scrawling with which the surface of the stone is defaced.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jocelyn Sears on the barbaric “souvenir” habits of 18th century English “tourists”: In 1860, a concerned tourist wrote to the London Times decrying the \u201cfoolish, vulgar and ruthless practice of the majority of visitors\u201d to Stonehenge \u201cof breaking off portions of it as keepsakes.\u201d Today, taking a hammer and chisel to a Neolithic monument seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[288,570,274],"class_list":["post-44305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","tag-archaeology","tag-england","tag-tourism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bwB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44306,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44305\/revisions\/44306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}