Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns.

Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, a keen fox-hunter who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the revolution of the working class. As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that, while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.

Amid these oddities lurks another—a puzzle whose solution offers fresh insights into the life and thinking of the midwife of Marxism. The mystery is this: Why did Engels, sent in 1842 to work in the English industrial city of Manchester, choose to lead a double life, maintaining gentleman’s lodgings in one part of the city while renting a series of rooms in workers’ districts? How did this well-groomed scion of privilege contrive to travel safely through Manchester’s noisome slums, collecting information about their inhabitants’ grim lives for his first great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England? Strangest of all, why—when asked many years later about his favorite meal—would a native German like Engels answer: “Irish stew”?

Manchester in 1870, the year Engels left the city he had lived in for 28 years. It was the largest industrial town in England and a noted center of the profitable cotton trade.

To answer these questions, we need to see Engels not as he was toward the end of his long life, the heavily bearded grand old man of international socialism, but as he was at its beginning. The Friedrich Engels of the 1840s was a  gregarious young man with a facility for languages, a liking for drink and a preference for lively female company. (“If I had an income of 5,000 francs,” he once confessed to Marx, “I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces.”) It was this Engels who arrived in England in December 1842–sent there to help manage a factory part-owned by his wealthy father, by a family desperate to shield their young radical from the Prussian police. And it was this Engels who, to the considerable alarm of his acquaintances, met, fell for and, for the better part of two decades, covertly lived with an Irish woman by the name of Mary Burns.

Burns’ influence on Engels—and hence on communism and on the history of the world in the past century—has long been badly underestimated. She makes at best fleeting appearances in books devoted to Engels, and almost none in any general works on socialism. And since she was illiterate, or nearly so, not to mention Irish, working class and female, she also left only the faintest of impressions in the contemporary record. The sterling efforts of a few Manchester historians aside, almost nothing is known for certain about who she was, how she lived or what she thought. Yet it is possible, reading between the lines of Engels’ writings, to sense that she had considerable influence on several of her lover’s major works.

Mary Burns’ younger sister, Lizzie, c.1865. Lizzie lived with Engels after her sister died, and married him a day before she herself died. No image of Mary is known to exist.

Let us begin this attempt at recovered memory by sketching the main setting for the tale. Manchester, it must be said, was a poor choice of exile for a young man whose left-wing convictions had so concerned his family. It was the greatest and most terrible of all the products of Britain’s industrial revolution: a large-scale experiment in unfettered capitalism in a decade that witnessed a spring tide of economic liberalism. Government and business alike swore by free trade and laissez faire, with all the attendant profiteering and poor treatment of workers that their doctrines implied. It was common for factory hands to labor for 14 hours a day, six days a week, and while many of them welcomed the idea of fixed employment, unskilled workers rarely enjoyed much job security. Living conditions in the city’s poorer districts were abominable. Chimneys choked the sky; the city’s population soared more than sevenfold. Thanks in part to staggering infant mortality, the life expectancy of those born in Manchester fell to a mere 28 years, half that of the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. And the city still bore the scars of the infamous Peterloo Massacre (in which cavalry units charged down unarmed protesters calling for the vote) and had barely begun to recover from the more recent disaster of an unsuccessful general strike.

Engels had been sent to Manchester to take up a middle-management position in a mill, Ermen & Engels, that manufactured patent cotton thread. The work was tedious and clerical, and Engels soon realized that he was less than welcome in the company. The senior partner, Peter Ermen, viewed the young man as little more than his father’s spy and made it clear that he would not tolerate interference in the running of the factory. That Engels nonetheless devoted the best years of his life to what he grimly called “the bitch business,” grinding through reams of stultifying correspondence for the better part of 20 years, suggests not so much obedience to his father’s wishes as a pressing need to earn a living. As part-owner of the mill, he eventually received a 7.5 percent share in Ermen & Engels’ rising profits, earning £263 in 1855 and as much as £1,080 in 1859—the latter a sum worth around $168,000 today.

Engels’s father – also Friedrich – sent his son to Manchester to work for his business partner Peter Ermen – a taskmaster who tolerated little independence in his managers.

What made Engels different from the mill owners with whom he mixed was how he spent his wealth (and the contents of Peter Ermen’s petty-cash box, which was regularly pilfered). Much of the money, and almost all of Engels’ spare time, was devoted to radical activities. The young German fought briefly in the revolutions of 1848-9, and for decades pursued an intensive program of reading, writing and research that resulted in a breakdown as early as 1857 but eventually yielded a dozen major works. He also offered financial support to a number of less-well-off revolutionaries—most important, Karl Marx, whom he had met while traveling to Manchester in 1842. Even before he became relatively wealthy, Engels frequently sent Marx as much as £50 a year—equivalent to around $7,500 now, and about a third of the annual allowance he received from his parents.

Few of Engels’ contemporaries knew of this hidden life; fewer still were aware of Mary Burns. As a result, almost all of what we know of Burns’ character comes from Engels’ surviving correspondence and a handful of clues exhumed from local archives. It is not even certain where they met. Given what we know of working-class life during this period, it seems likely that Mary first went to work around age 9, and that her first job would have been as a “scavenger,” one of the myriad of nimble children paid a few pennies a day to keep flying scraps of fluff and cotton out of whirring factory machinery. The noted critic Edmund Wilson took this speculation further, writing that by 1843 Mary had found a job in Ermen’s mill. But Wilson gave no source for this assertion, and other biographers argue that Engels’ less-than-gallant pen portrait of his female employees—”short, dumpy and badly formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure”—makes it unlikely that he met the “very good natured and witty” young woman whom Marx remembered on the factory floor.

The Manchester slums of the mid-19th century were the subject of Engels’ first book, and a district that—thanks to his lover Mary Burns—he came to know remarkably well.

If Mary was not a factory girl, there were not too many other ways in which she could have made a living. She lacked the education to teach, and the only other respectable employment available was probably domestic service; an 1841 census does suggest that she and her younger sister, Lizzie, worked as servants for a while. A “Mary Burn” of the right age and “born in this parish” is recorded in the household of a master painter named George Chadfield, and it may be, as Belinda Webb suggests, that Burns took this job because it offered accommodation. Her mother had died in 1835, and she and her sister had to come to terms with a stepmother when their father remarried a year later; perhaps there were pressing reasons for their leaving home. Certainly a career in domestic service would have taught Mary and Lizzie the skills they needed to keep house for Engels, which they did for many years beginning in 1843.

Not every historian of the period believes that Mary was in service, though. Webb, noting that Engels described taking frequent, lengthy walking tours of the city, argues that Mary would scarcely have had the time to act as his guide to Manchester had she labored as a factory hand or servant, and may instead have been a prostitute. Webb notes that Burns was said to have sold oranges at Manchester’s Hall of Science–and “orange selling” had long been a euphemism for involvement in the sex trade. Nell Gwyn, King Charles II’s “Protestant Whore,” famously hawked fruit at Drury Lane Theater, and the radical poet Georg Weerth–whom Mary knew, and who was one of Engels’ closest associates—penned some double entendre-laced lines in which he described a dark-eyed Irish strumpet named Mary who sold her “juicy fruits” to “bearded acquaintances” at the Liverpool docks.

That Engels’ relationship with Mary had a sexual element may be guessed from what what might be a lewd phrase of Marx’s; taking in the news that Engels had acquired an interest in physiology, the philosopher inquired: “Are you studying…on Mary?” Whatever the truth, while Engels did not believe in marriage—and his correspondence reveals a good number of affairs—he and Burns remained a couple for almost 20 years.

Nothing is known for certain about Mary’s involvement in Engels’ political life, but a good deal can be guessed. Edmund and Ruth Frow point out that Engels describes the Manchester slum district known as Little Ireland in such graphic detail that he must have known it; Mary, they argue, “as an Irish girl with an extended family…would have been able to take him around the slums…. If he had been on his own, a middle-class foreigner, it is doubtful he would have emerged alive, and certainly not clothed.”

The interior of an Irish hovel during the great famine of 1845-50. Engels toured Ireland with Mary Burns in 1856, when almost every village still suffered from the consequences of the disaster.

Engels’ acquaintance with Manchester’s worst slums is a matter of some significance. Though he had been born in a business district in the Ruhr, and though (as his biographer Gustav Meyer puts it) he “knew from childhood the real nature of the factory system”—Engels was still shocked at the filth and overcrowding he found in Manchester. “I had never seen so ill-built a city,” he observed. Disease, poverty, inequality of wealth, an absence of education and hope all combined to render life in the city all but insupportable for many. As for the factory owners, Engels wrote, “I have never seen a class so demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress.” Once, Engels wrote, he went into the city with such a man “and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters.” The man heard him out quietly “and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here: good morning, sir.'”

Making the acquaintance of the Burns sisters also exposed Engels to some of the more discreditable aspects of the British imperialism of the period. Although born in England, Mary’s parents had been immigrants from Tipperary, in the south of Ireland. Her father, Michael, labored on and off as a cloth dyer, but ended his days in miserable poverty, spending the last 10 years of his life in a workhouse of the sort made notorious in Oliver Twist. This, combined with the scandal of the Great Famine that gripped Ireland between 1845 and 1850, and saw a million or more Irish men, women and children starve to death in the heart of the world’s wealthiest empire, confirmed the Burns sisters as fervent nationalists. Mary joined Engels on a brief tour of Ireland in 1856, during which they saw as much as two-thirds of the devastated country. Lizzie was said to have been even more radical; according to Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, she offered shelter to two senior members of the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood who were freed from police custody in 1867 in a daring operation mounted by three young Fenians known as the Manchester Martyrs.

Three young Fenians free two senior Irish revolutionaries from a Manchester police van in November 1867. They were captured and hanged, but the freed men—Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy—escaped to the United States. Some sources say Lizzie Burns helped spirit the pair out of Manchester.

Thanks to Manchester’s census records and rates books from this period—and to the painstaking work of local labor historians—it is possible to trace the movements of Engels and the Burns sisters under a variety of pseudonyms. Engels passed himself off as Frederick Boardman, Frederick Mann Burns and Frederick George Mann, and gave his occupation as bookkeeper or “commercial traveler.” There are gaps in the record–and gaps in Engels’ commitment to both Manchester and Mary; he was absent from England from 1844 until the very end of 1849. But Burns evidently retained her place in Engels’ affections through the revolutionary years of 1848-9. Webb notes that, after his return to Manchester, “he and Mary seem to have proceeded more formally,” setting up home together in a modest suburb. Lizzie moved in and seems to have acted as housekeeper, though details of the group’s living arrangements are very hard to come by; Engels ordered that almost all of the personal letters he wrote during this period be destroyed after his death. Engels seems to have acknowledged Mary, at least to close acquaintances, as more than a friend or lover. “Love to Mrs Engels,” the Chartist Julian Harney wrote in 1846. Engels himself told Marx that only his need to maintain his position among his peers prevented him from being far more open: “I live nearly all the time with Mary so as to save money. Unfortunately I cannot manage without [private] lodgings; if I could I would live with her all the time.”

Engels and Mary moved frequently. There were lodgings in Burlington and Cecil Streets (where the Burns sisters appear to have earned extra money by renting out spare rooms), and in 1862 the couple and Lizzie moved into a newly built property in Hyde Road (the street on which the Manchester Martyrs would free Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy five years later). But the years–and perhaps Engels’ long absences on business, private and revolutionary—began to take their toll. In her 20s, Eleanor Marx recorded, Mary “had been pretty, witty and charming…but in later years [she] drank to excess.” This may be no more than family lore—Eleanor was only 8 when Burns died, and she admitted in another letter that “Mary I did not know”—but it seems to fit the known facts well enough. When Burns died, on January 6, 1863, she was only 40.

Jenny Marx—neé Jenny von Westphalen, a member of Prussia’s aristocracy—in 1844.

If it is Mary Burns’ death, not life, that scholars focus on, that is because it occasioned a momentous falling-out between Engels and Marx—the only one recorded in four decades of close friendship. The earliest signs of discord date back several years. During a sojourn in Belgium between 1845 and 1848, during which the two men wrote the Communist Manifesto, Mary went to live in Brussels, an unusual adventure in those days for someone of her sex and class. Jenny Marx had few acquaintances among working-class women, and was undoubtedly shocked when Engels held up his lover as a model for the woman of the future. Burns, Jenny thought, was “very arrogant,” and she observed, sarcastically, that “I myself, when confronted with this abstract model, appear truly repulsive in my own eyes.” When the two found themselves together at a workers’ meeting, Simon Buttermilch reported, Marx “indicated by a significant gesture and a smile that his wife would in no circumstances meet Engels’ companion.”

It was against this backdrop that Engels wrote to Marx to tell his friend of Mary’s death. “Last night she went to bed early,” he wrote, “and when at midnight Lizzie went upstairs, she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart disease or stroke. I received the news this morning, on Monday evening she was still quite well. I can’t tell you how I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.” Marx sympathized–briefly. “It is extraordinarily difficult for you,” he wrote, “who had a home with Mary, free and withdrawn from all human muck, as often as you pleased.” But the remainder of the missive was devoted to a long account of Marx’s woes, ending with a plea for money. “All my friends,” Engels fired back in anger, “including philistine acquaintances, have shown me, at this moment which hit me deeply, more sympathy and friendship than I expected. You found this moment appropriate to display the superiority of your cool intellect.”

Engels in later life. He died in 1895, at age 74.

Marx wrote again, apologizing, extending more elaborate condolences and blaming his first letter on his wife’s demands for money. “What drove me particularly mad,” he wrote, “was that [Jenny] thought I did not report to you adequately our true situation.” Mike Gane, among other writers, suspects that Marx objected to Engels’ love of a working-class woman not on the grounds of class, but because the relationship was bourgeois, and hence violated the principles of communism. Whatever the reason for the argument, Engels seems to have been glad when it ended.

He lived with Mary’s sister for 15 more years. Whether their relationship was as passionate as the one Engels had enjoyed with Mary may be doubted, but he was certainly very fond of Lizzie Burns; just before she was struck down by some sort of tumor in 1878, he acceded to her dying wish and married her. “She was of genuine Irish proletarian stock,” he wrote, “and her passionate and innate feelings for her class were of far greater value to me and stood me in better stead at moments of crisis than all the refinement and culture of your educated and ascetic young ladies.”

Historians remain divided over the importance of Engels’ relations with the Burns sisters. Several biographers have seen Mary and Lizzie as little more than sexual partners who also kept house, something that a Victorian gentleman could scarcely have been expected to do for himself.  Terrell Carver has suggested that “in love, Engels does not seem to have gone in search of his intellectual equal.” Others see Mary Burns as vastly more important. “I wanted to see you in your own homes,” Engels wrote in dedicating his first book to “the Working Classes of Great Britain.” “To observe you in everyday life, to chat with you on your conditions and grievances, to witness your struggles.” He never could have achieved this ambition without a guide, certainly not in the short span of his first sojourn in England. And achieving it marked him for life. “Twenty months in Manchester and London,” W.O. Henderson observes – for which read 10 or 15 months with Mary Burns — “had turned Engels from an inexperienced youth into a young man who had found a purpose in life.”

Sources Roland Boer. “Engels’ contradictions: a reply to Tristram Hunt.” International Socialism 133 (2012); William Delaney. Revolutionary Republicanism and Socialism in Irish History, 1848-1923. Lincoln [NE]: Writer’s Showcase, 2001; Edmund and Ruth Frow. Frederick Engels in Manchester and “The Condition of the Working Class in England”; Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1995; Mike Gane. Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationship. London: Routledge, 1993; Lindsay German. Frederick Engels: life of a revolutionary. International Socialism Journal 65 (1994); W.O. Henderson. The Life of Friedrich Engels. London: Frank Cass, 1976; W.O. Henderson. Marx and Engels and the English Workers, and Other Essays. London: Frank Cass, 1989; Tristram Hunt. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist. London: Penguin, 2010; Sarah Irving. “Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzie Burns.” Manchester Radical History, accessed April 3, 2013; Mick Jenkins. Frederick Engels in Manchester. Manchester: Lancashire & Cheshire Communist Party, 1964; Jenny Marx to Karl Marx, March 24, 1846, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 38. New York: International Publishers, 1975; Marx to Engels, January 8, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 13, 1863; Marx to Engels, January 24, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 26, 1863, all in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 41. New York: International Publishers, 1985; Belinda Webb. Mary Burns. Unpublished Kingston University PhD thesis, 2012; Roy Whitfield. Frederick Engels in Manchester: The Search for a Shadow. Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1988.

Who served out the longest prison sentence known to history? My extensive investigation – begun in 2010 but now comprehensively updated – answers that question [it’s Charles Fossard, of Australia, with an all-but-incomprehensible 70 years, 303 days]. It also takes a look at some of Fossard’s unwitting and unwilling rivals, and tries to go inside the cells, to hear from the prisoners themselves. Their stories are often brutal, occasionally pathetic, but always surprisingly compelling.

The full story – which includes numerous case studies, a state-by-state listing of the longest sentences served everywhere from Alabama to Wisconsin, a look at record stretches from elsewhere, some notes on extraordinary cases of protracted solitary confinement, and a listing of all 15 known cases of men who spent in excess of 60 years behind bars – can be read here.

“Widower Bluebeard and the Red Key” – a painting from Cassia Lupo’s wonderful series “Fables and myths.” Reproduced with permission and grateful thanks.

For very nearly all its course, the Blavet is a placid river. It winds its way through central Brittany: broad, unhurried, gentle and unthreatening, a favourite among fishermen, and – for the century or so since it was dammed at Guerlédan, creating a substantial lake – a magnet for holidaymakers, too. Yet even there, at the very heart of an ancient county that knows its history as well as anywhere in France, not one person in a thousand could tell the awful history of the river. Few realise that there were times when it was not so tame, or can point to where the outlines of an ancient fortress can yet be traced, up on the heights above the dam. And almost nobody recalls the lord of that forgotten castle, or could tell you why, until about 150 years ago, Breton peasants crossed themselves at the mere mention of his name.

His name was Conomor the Cursed, and he lived in the darkest of the Dark Ages – in the first half of the 6th century, 50 years or more after the fall of Rome, when much of Brittany was still dotted with dolmens and covered by primeval forest, when warlords squabbled with one another other over patrimonies that were generally less than 500 miles across, and the local peoples were as likely to be pagan as they were Christian. We know almost nothing about him, save that he was probably a Briton, very probably a tyrant, and that his deeds were remembered long enough to give rise to a folkloric tradition of great strength – one that endured for almost 1,500 years. But the folk-tales hint at someone quite extraordinary. In local lore, Conomor not only continued to roam the vast forest of Quénécan,  south of his castle, as a bisclaveret – a werewolf – and served as a spectral ferryman on another Breton river, making off with Christian souls; he was also the model for Bluebeard, the monstrous villain of Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tales.

A 19th century sketch of the Blavet at the spot where Conomor’s fortress, Castel Finans, once loomed over the river. Today, thanks to the construction of a dam, the water level is vastly higher, obscuring the great defensive qualities of the position.

Bluebeard himself, of course, has fallen through the cracks of our collective memory. His tale is seldom told these days; it is far too bloody to sit comfortably alongside the Disneyfied versions of Perrault’s more celebrated stories – his single volume, known familiarly to English-speaking readers as the Tales of Mother Goose, also introduced the world to Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood. That’s because, while he bowdlerised his other tales, all told originally by adults for adults (Perrault ignored – to give just one example – an older version of Little Red Riding Hood in which the child performs a striptease for the lecherous wolf), the account he span of Bluebeard reads like a treatment for a modern horror movie.

Bluebeard – so this version of the age-old story goes – is a man of immense wealth, and husband to any number of mysteriously vanished wives, but he is rendered hideous by the disfigurement of his strange beard. (It’s worth bearing in mind that, while blue was the colour of the aristocracy at the time that Perrault wrote, beards, with all their associations with unbridled sexuality, were firmly out of fashion at the court of Louis XIV.) He courts two beautiful sisters, and, by showering them with hospitality, persuades the younger of the pair to marry him. Soon after the wedding, though, Bluebeard is called away on business. Summoning his wife to him, he hands her a great bunch of keys, telling her that they give access to every room in their vast mansion, with all the collections of gold and silver plate that they contain. Only one room is forbidden to her – the one behind a locked door at the end of a long corridor, opened with the smallest key of the whole bunch. Entry to that room is taboo, and Bluebeard warns his bride, in graphic terms, of the terrible rage she will stoke in him if she ever dares to enter it: “Open anything you want, go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you so much as open it a crack, there will be no limit to my anger.”

Harry Clarke’s imagining of Bluebeard, drawn for an early 20th century edition of Perrault’s tales.

Bluebeard departs and, naturally enough, his bride is so consumed with curiosity that she rushes straight to the forbidden room, almost falling downstairs and breaking her neck in her haste. Pausing only for a second to recall the promise that she made to her husband, she thrusts the small key into the lock, turns it, opens the door – and finds herself confronted by a terrible scene. The floor is thick with clotted blood, and the decapitated bodies of Bluebeard’s former wives hang from the walls. Each has had her throat slit, and – in several versions of the tale – much of the blood that they have shed has been collected in an enormous basin that squats monstrously in the centre of the room.

The young wife is so horrified by this sight that she drops the key to the slaughter chamber into the pool of blood lapping at her feet. Hurriedly, she bends to pick it up – only to find that the bloodstains on it cannot be removed. No matter how hard she buffs and scrubs it, the blood that coats the key returns, first on one side, then the other. It is readily apparent to the reader that it must be charmed, and, indeed, as soon as Bluebeard returns from his business trip and calls for his wife, he recognises the significance of the reddened key. Knowing that his bride has ignored his orders (though, as Maria Tatar points out, he surely wanted her to disobey), he tells her that she has sealed her fate, and will be the next victim of the locked room.

The legend of Bluebeard is still sometimes retold – here, in a 1970s film, in a version in which Bluebeard is a disfigured World War I German fighter pilot (Richard Burton at his fruitiest), and one unlucky wife is played, somewhat implausibly, by Raquel Welch.

Bluebeard’s wife pleads earnestly for mercy, but her husband will not yield, and the one concession she can wring from him is permission to go and dress herself in preparation for her execution. In several versions of the story, she ascends to her bedchamber in order, so she says, to don the gown that she was married in. In fact, though, this is simply a ruse. Her brothers have promised to come and visit her, and she sends her sister to the highest tower to watch for signs of their arrival.

It is here that Perrault ratchets up the suspense. Twice the trembling bride calls up to ‘Sister Anne’ (the one person in the story who is actually named) to ask if her brothers are in sight; twice she receives the answer that “all I see are the flurries of the sun, and the grass turning green.” All this time, Bluebeard is standing at the foot of the stairs, shouting up for her in ever angrier and more urgent tones, while his wife calls down with ever-flimsier excuses. At last she can delay no longer, but at this crucial moment the clouds of dust thrown up by her brother’s galloping horses can be seen at last, and just as Bluebeard drags her to the execution-place, the door bursts open, the brothers appear, and the monster flees, only to be cut down by their swords. In the denouement, Bluebeard’s wife uses his riches to affiance her sister to a man she loves, find herself a second husband, and buy her brothers commissions as officers in the king’s army. There is no further mention of her slaughtered predecessors, nor of the anguish that her discoveries must have caused their families.

Many scholars have searched for Perrault’s sources. It seems to be a fact that the story of Bluebeard appeared nowhere in print before the Frenchman published it in 1697, but the accumulated research of generations of critics and folklorists has shown that, while myriad versions of the tale existed among the oral traditions of most parts of France – and there are equivalents in many other countries, in every one of which the Bluebird-figure is portrayed as the cruellest monster ever to walk the earth – the largest number come from Brittany, and the historic figures most closely associated with the Bluebeard myth are Bretons, too. They are Gilles de Rais, the notorious libertine and boy-murderer who befriended Joan of Arc, and Conomor the Cursed.

Scene from a late 19th century novelty tableau. The heads of Bluebeard’s murdered wives hang behind a curtain, ready to be revealed to a horrified audience.

The case for associating Gilles with Bluebeard seems weak to me, dependent more on the French nobleman’s general notoriety as a heretic, paedophile and serial murderer than on any real parallels between his history and legend; there are no wives in his story. The case for Conomor is stronger, insofar as elements of Perrault’s tale at least accord with the vigorous traditions of Brittany. Legends that saw print as early as 1514, when Alain Bouchart published his Grandes Chroniques du Bretagne, associate Conomor with wife-killing, and suggest that, because the Breton count had been warned by a soothsayer that he would meet his death at a child’s hand, he was in the habit of disposing of each spouse as soon as she revealed her pregnancy. The association between Conomor and Bluebeard grew from there; he is a “wicked and vicious lord” and “Comorre ar miliguet” (“Conomor the Cursed”) in Albert Le Grand’s work of 1636, and was first linked directly to Bluebeard by Pierre Daru, writing in 1826; Jules Michelet, the great French historian of the nineteenth century, called him an “exterminating beast.”

Charles Perrault, author of the Mother Goose tales, was a high official in the France of Louis XIV who turned to fairy tales only after his career was abruptly ended by association with political scandal.

The Conomor of legend was ruler of the northern Breton coast, with his main seat at Carhaix. It seems that he was also some or all of the Comorre, Conomorus, Kynwawr, Cunmar, Chonomor, Choonbro, Chonobor, Commorus, Chonomorem, Cvnomoriv and Choonober who feature in the chronicles and monuments of the time (the name has been Latinised, rendered from Franconian into French, hastily copied, confused with that of other rulers, or left in its native Old Brythonic, but it always means something along the lines of “Hound of the Sea”). He appears with considerable frequency in a cluster of Breton saints’s lives written some time during the ninth century, supplying the necessary villainy to stories of the holiness of St Paul Aurelian, St Samson and St Gildas. The most elaborate versions of his legend do dwell briefly on the manner in which he came to power – by overthrowing and killing his predecessor, Jonas, and driving Jonas’s son, Judwal, into the arms of the neighbouring Franks – and on his unpleasant character; according to the Breton author Emile Souvestre, “he was a giant, one of the wickedest of men, held in awe by everyone for his cruelty. As a boy, when he went out, his mother used to ring a bell to warn people of his approach. When unsuccessful in the chase he would set his dogs on the peasants to tear them to pieces.” For the most part, however, they revolve around consequences of his marriage to a Breton girl, Tryphine or Tréphine, the beautiful daughter of Waroch (or Guérok), Count of Vannes.

It is in these saints’ lives that we encounter the Conomor who most resembles Bluebeard. He was – Albert Le Grand avers – a tyrant who had already murdered four wives when his eye fell on the beautiful Tryphine. Being known throughout all Brittany for his cruelty and vices, Conomor could not persuade the girl and her father to assent to a marriage. Instead, he resorted to a cunning stratagem. At a time when Brittany had long been wracked by fighting between rival petty rulers, who between them had brought misery to the peninsula, he offered Waroch peace in exchange for Tryphine’s hand.

A decapitated Tryphine: statue from the chapel of St Trémur, near Carhaix in Brittany – the small town at the centre of the legend of Conomor the Cursed. Trémur was Tryphine’s son by the bloody tyrant.

Arrangements for the marriage were brokered by St Gildas – Gildas the Wise, a noted holy man who had been born in Wales and who had come to Brittany in search of nothing more than a quiet spot in which he could settle down as a hermit. The turbulence of the peninsula soon put an end to that idea, and Gildas instead attached himself to Conomor’s court “in the hope of converting that ravenous wolf into a meek lamb.” Sent to negotiate with the Count of Vannes, the saint eventually persuaded Waroch to accept the marriage proposal – on condition, that is, that Gildas himself guaranteed that Conomor’s bride would be “well treated, and restored to him, healthy and whole, when he should demand her of him.”

For a short time – the same saints’ lives continue – all was well, and Conomor made a concerted effort to be charming to Tryphine. But then something happened to change matters for the worse. There are two traditions here; in one, Conomor is entrapped by another girl at court, who is able to make him fall for her by taking a tumble from her horse in such a way that she inflames his passions with a display of shapely ankle; the count seeks to free himself to pursue her by disposing of Tryphine. In the other, Conomor’s new bride finds herself pregnant, and hence incurs the wrath of a husband who believes their child will grow to kill him.

In Lewis Spence’s version of the legend, a silver ring that Gildas had given her to warn her of approaching evil turned “black as a crow’s wing.” She

descended into the chapel to pray, [but] when she rose to depart, the hour of midnight struck, and suddenly a sound of movement in the silent chapel chilled her to the heart. Shrinking into the recess, she saw four tombs of Conomor’s wives open slowly, and the women all issued forth in their winding sheets.

Faint with terror, Tryphine tried to escape, but the spectres cried, “Take care, poor lost one! Conomor seeks to kill you.”

“Me?” said Tryphine. “What evil have I done?”

“You have told him that you will soon become a mother; and, through the Spirit of Evil, he knows that his child will slay him. He murdered us when we told him what he has just learned of you.”

“What hope then of refuge remains for me?” cried Tryphine.

“Go back to your father,” answered the phantoms.

“But how will I escape Conomor’s guard dog in the court?”

“Give him this poison which killed me,” said the first wife.”

“But how can I descend yon high wall?”

“By means of this cord with which he strangled me,” answered the second wife.

“But who will guide me through the dark?”

“The fire that burnt me,” replied the third wife.

“And how can I make so long as journey?” returned Tryphine.

“Take this stick which broke my skull,” rejoined the fourth spectre.

Armed with the poison, the rope, and the stick,Tryphine set out, silenced the dog, scaled the wall, and miraculously guided on her way through the darkness by a glowing light, proceeded on her road to Vannes.

A statue of St Gildas at the spot where he is said to have established his hermitage, in the woods outside the Breton village now known as Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys.

Unfortunately for the girl, she was making her escape on the only horse available, a haquenée (“an ambling nag”). She did not get very far before an enraged Conomor overtook her, dragged her out of the thicket where she had vainly sought to hide herself, and, ignoring her tearful pleas for mercy, lopped her head from her body with one stroke of his sword.

Waroch was alerted to the outrage by a group of Tryphine’s servants. The grieving count had his daughter’s head and body brought to him at Vannes, and there he confronted Gildas and reminded the holy man of the promise he had made to restore the girl to him “healthy and whole.”

Much affected, Gildas prayed fervently, and then

approached the body, and, taking the head, placed it on the neck; and then, speaking to the defunct, he said to her aloud: “Tryphine, in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I command thee to rise upon thy feet, and tell me where thou hast been.” The lady rose, and before all the assembled people, she said that the angels had been preparing to place her in Paradise, among the saints, when the words of St Gildas had called her soul back to earth.

There is, of course, a postscript to the legend: having resurrected Tryphine, Gildas travelled along the banks of the Blavet to where his fortress, Castel Finans, loomed on a rocky promentory above the river. Conomor had the castle gates closed as he approached, but the saint merely knelt, picked up a handful of dust, and flung it against the walls – which promptly crumbled just like those of Jericho. In at least some versions of the legend, Conomor himself survived this disaster to retreat to a second stronghold, but there, in solemn conclave, Gildas led the 30 bishops of Brittany in anathematising him, whereupon the tyrant was immediately seized by a “terrible malady,” and his soul born off bobbing on “a stream of blood.” But a potent Breton legend asserted that Conomor’s evil was such that he was denied entry to both Heaven and to Purgatory, and instead remained on earth to haunt the dark, rock-strewn interiors of the ancient forest of Quénécan in the form of a werewolf – one that devoured travellers who passed that way, and could be killed only by the thrust of a knife right through the centre of his forehead.

The ancient landscape of Brittany is filled with prehistoric monuments known as dolmen. This one is close to the Atlantic port of St Nazaire.

Approaching all of this as an historian, rather than a story-teller, it is sensible to ask, first, what – if anything – such saints’ tales can tell us about what was really going on in Brittany in the sixth century. It should go without saying that the Lives from which these details have been lifted are notoriously suspect sources. Those that dwell on Conomor were not only composed three centuries after his death, in the ninth century; they were also written as hagiography, in conventional styles, and designed to convey morals and religious messages, not facts. We ought to be deeply suspicious of their contents; certainly it would be dangerous simply to discard their evidently legendary trappings, and hope thereby to recover a residue of solid history. The testimony of the saints’ lives, in short, requires corroboration – and to go back any further, and attempt to detect the relicts of an historical Count Conomor, means travelling well beyond the range of almost every chronicle. It means relying on just a handful of written sources, and some ambitious archaeology.

Brittany in the 6th century, from the New Cambridge Medieval History. Conomor’s domain ran along the northern coast, corresponding roughly to Dumnonia. Waroch’s was in the south-east, around Vannes. We have no idea of the borders of their territories. Click to view in higher resolution.

The chief problem confronting would-be historians of this period is that the Brittany that Conomor knew was a land at the periphery of almost everybody’s interests. Abandoned by the Romans after 380, the peninsula had been swept by successive waves of barbarians and colonisers for well over one hundred years; the Life of St Paul Aurelian mentions it as a “land of four languages,” suggesting that Latin (from Italy), Old Franconian (drawn from Germany’s North Sea coast), Brythonic (from Britain) and also Alan (originating in what is now Iran) were all spoken in these districts at this time. The Breton peninsula also lay beyond the borders of the burgeoning Frankish state, which in Conomor’s day already stretched from Aquitaine in south-eastern France all the way to Thuringia, abutting what is now the Czech Republic. As such, Breton history is mostly ignored in the one almost contemporary source we have, the Historia Francorum (History of the Franks) of Gregory of Tours, completed in 594. And, aside from Gregory, our sources for the period are limited to scraps – this despite the fact that one of the main protagonists of Conomor’s story, Gildas, was himself the author of another notable early work of history, focused this time on Britain, which fails to make any mention whatsoever of Conomor. For now, the thing to remember is that the doings of the petty warlords who established toeholds in sixth century Brittany were noticed only when they interfered with the smooth running of the larger states to the east.

All we really know, in consequence, is that – by around 550 – Brittany consisted of several rival polities, the largest of which was the one we now associate with Conomor: Dumnonia, along the northern coast. Warfare – at least in the form of raids and skirmishes – was more or less endemic in the district, not only between the various Breton counts but also between the Bretons and the Franks. By later standards, though, the causes of conflict were generally petty ones; the chronicles record attacks on Rennes and Nantes that were apparently mounted with the aim of seizing the grape harvest of the Loire valley and escaping back to Brittany with the wine. The Franks retaliated by seizing hostages and taking sureties from their fractious neighbours to the west.

St Gregory of Tours, the sixth century chronicler who tells us most of what we know about the historical Conomor.

All this is broad-brush stuff, and there’s no avoiding the fact that – as Wendy Davies glumly concludes her survey of the period – “for the most part, we simply do not know what was happening in Brittany” during these years. The fragments that do survive tell us this about the historical Conomor: that he ruled over as much as half of the peninsula; that his base was in the north; that he ruled from some time prior to 540 until around 560; and (at least according to the saints’ lives) that he was eventually defeated in battle somewhere in the Monts d’Arée, in remote Finistére, where he was personally slain by Judwal, the son of Jonas – Jonas being the count whom Conomor, in his turn, had supplanted. None of this is checkable, of course, though it is tempting to read into the last, too-good-to-be-true, account the origins of the tradition that Conomor feared being killed by a child. At any rate, the story of the tyrant’s fall resonated powerfully in Brittany; as late as the second half of the 19th century, a block of slate that lay exposed at a spot called Brank Halleg (Breton for “willow bough”), outside the hamlet of Mengleuz, was pointed to as Conomor’s tomb. “Beneath that block, said the peasants” – Ernest Vizetelly writes – “lay the bones of the tyrant, awaiting the sounds of the judgement trump.”

There is a bigger story here – Judwal seems to have spent his years of exile at the Frankish court, and Gregory of Tours presents his struggle with Conomor as part of a wider conflict that took place in the late 550s between the much more powerful Frankish king Chlothar I (reigned 511-558) and Chlothar’s ambitious son Chramn. Since this civil war is both patchily chronicled and frankly confusing, there is not much to be gained from an attempt to contextualise. It is more interesting, and hopefully more profitable, to turn instead to the ways in which the history of Conomor the Cursed can illuminate the most puzzling and contested aspect of Breton history in this period: the nature of Brittany’s relationship with Britain.

The Monts d’Arée, in the far western reaches of Brittany, are an elevated wilderness of bracken and heather running like a spine through central Finistère. It was here, in about 560, that the decisive battle that cost Conomor the Cursed his life is said to have been fought.

The dispute here is a fundamental one. Nobody doubts that the Britons of this period sailed south to establish themselves in Brittany. Close connections were undoubtedly maintained across what we now know as the English Channel; a glance at the map [above right] shows a couple of examples of the fascinating and widespread duplication of place-names (Dumnonia/Dumnonia; Cornwall/Cornouaille) that exists between south-west England and the Breton peninsula. What is far less certain is whether the leaders who travelled to Brittany from the fourth century onwards left their lands in Britain behind – or whether there were rulers active and powerful enough to reign on both sides of the water.

In attempting to tackle this problem, we need to point, first, to the reasons for British emigration in this period. Abandoned by the Rome, and then confronted by Anglo-Saxon invasion in the years 450-550, the Celtic inhabitants of Britain fell back to the the west, where the land was higher, rougher and more inaccessible, and where much of the soil was so poor that the invaders had little motive to press for further conquests. In consequence, British kingdoms continued to exist to the north (in Strathclyde, with its capital at Dumbarton – which means “the fortress of the Britons” –  c.450-c.1030); in Wales; and to the south, in Devon and Cornwall, where the state known as Dumnonia was certainly in existence well before 550 and survived as late as about 875.

Britain at the time of Conomor, showing British polities in black and Saxon ones in red. The British states include Dumnonia (Cornwall and Devon); Strathclyde is here shown as “Damnonia.” Image: Wikicommons. Click to show in higher resolution.

But if a key factor in the existence of these states was geography, the same features that allowed the Celts to retain their independence also caused them serious difficulties. There was little decent land available in the highlands, and Celtic law prescribed the division of each father’s possessions among all his sons. In such circumstances, the progressive dividing up of patrimonies inevitably produced poverty and encouraged the Britons of both Cornwall and South Wales to look hungrily over the Channel for land. It is generally supposed that this emigration began no later than 350, and we know there was enough of it for a “bishop of the Britons” to have travelled from Brittany to attend the Council of Tours, which was held in 461, and for the Brythonic and Breton languages to remain indistinguishable as late as the 10th century. Small states controlled by rulers with British names existed in the Breton peninsula after 500, and in the course of the sixth century enough Britons emigrated to France, with sufficient success, for a clearly independent collection of Breton polities, with their own language and distinct identity, to have emerged a century later.

All this certainly suggests something much more interesting than the emigration of some scattered families, but it is not enough to prove that the Britons who sailed south retained were politically significant or that they retained lands and power in their homeland. There are, indeed, reasons to suppose that this was not the case; educated guesswork suggests that British control in Brittany was far stronger in the countryside than in its towns, where Roman and Frankish influences still predominated in this period. That, and the fact that no identifiable British “high king” emerged south of the Channel in the sixth century, argue against the existence of a ruler powerful enough to control significant territory in both Cornwall and Brittany. Even Conomor the Cursed, remember, was only a count, and ruled no more than the northern shores of the peninsula.

This reasoning cleaves to the line of least resistance, and eminent authorities on the period, among them Wendy Davies, follow it. Yet there is other evidence. Dumnonia was easily the largest of the British kingdoms that survived the Saxon onslaught – at its height it was something like 125 miles (200km) from end to end, making it among the largest states, by area, in all of Britain at this time. That suggests rulers of some prominence, and a degree of organisation that might have been sufficient to permit projections of their power. Conomor’s name – “Hound of the Sea” – and the powerful traditions of the Breton saints’ lives, which present him as an “unjust and unprincipled stranger” – an outsider, in other words – both suggest a possible origin in Dunmonia as well.

King Mark of Cornwall – the hypothetical ruler of a trans-Channel Celtic state, and an important figure in the Arthurian tradition. Illustration by Howard Pyle, 1905.

The most interesting fragment of evidence, though, comes from the Life of St Paul Aurelian – a much later source, remember, completed in 884, and thus one that must be treated with great caution. This mentions a “King Marcus whom by another name they call Quonomorius” – and this extract has been taken as a reference to the semi-legendary King Mark of Cornwall who figures prominently in medieval Arthurian romance and plays an especially important part in the story of Tristan and Yseult (that is, Tristan and Isolde ). In this romance, Mark is a king of Cornwall – Dumnonia – and Tristan is his nephew, sent to Ireland to bring back Mark’s beautiful young bride, who instead, inevitably, falls in love with the girl himself.

Now, it is true that the King Mark of Arthurian romance makes his first appearance in literature at least 500 years after the historical King Mark lived and ruled – if indeed he ever lived at all. And it’s also true that no source dating to before Paul Aurelian makes mention of a Mark of Cornwall. So we are sailing here in very dangerous waters. But a connection can still perhaps be made, for a late Welsh list of the Dunmonian kings – held at Jesus College, Oxford (MS.20), though probably copied no earlier than the late 14th century –  includes a “Kynwawr” who would have reigned shortly before 550. From an etymological perspective, Kynwawr can be identified with both Cynfawr (a name known to have existed in 6th century Wales), and the Latin Conomorus. Thus, if credence can be placed in the king list, a king called something very like Conomor ruled in Dumnonia at pretty much the same time as a Count Conomor ruled in Brittany; and if credence can be placed in the Life of St Paul Aurelian, this Conomor might also be the same person as the King Mark of Cornwall whose name remains indelibly associated with Arthurian romance. And if both these things are true, then the Conomor who features as the Bluebeard of Breton legend might indeed have been a British king of considerable power and resources, whose domains included lands on both sides of the Channel.

A French werewolf, from an engraving of the 18th century.

There is at best only an outside chance that this extensive chain of surmise stands much scrutiny, and the association of King Mark with Kynwawr of Dumnonia has proved to be, by itself, enough of a lure to have generated some highly dubious scholarship, which has come to muddy the waters of even quite respectable historical journals – as the afterword to this essay seeks to demonstrate. Things can only get more tangled and less rigorous if we attempt to add Breton werewolves and wife-killers to the mix. The idea remains, though, an enticing one. And a Conomor who had his roots in Wales or Cornwall remains the best candidate by far for the cursed count who haunted medieval Brittany, and caused even the peasants of the 19th century to mutter prayers whenever they heard his name.

Afterword: Conomor and the “Tristan Stone”

Anyone searching for the historical Conomor online will soon encounter references to an ancient monument in Cornwall which not only seems to refer to him, and provide additional evidence for the existence of a powerful British ruler who controlled territories on both sides of the Channel during the sixth century, but which has also been linked directly to the tale of Tristan and Yseult. It has been claimed that this “Tristan Stone” is proof that these two legendary characters were real historical personages, and that Tristan was the son of a King Mark, who was also known as Conomor, and who ruled from an important hill-fort, Castle Dore, which can still be seen a mile or two to the north of the spot where the monument now stands.

The “Tristan Stone”, with its badly worn inscription – a sixth century granite monument outside Fowey in Cornwall.

Today the “Tristan Stone” is to be found alongside the B3415, just outside the little port of Fowey, on Cornwall’s south-east coast – although the evidence suggests that it was originally erected some way to the north. The stone bears an inscription, now almost entirely worn away, which can be dated by its form and lettering to around the sixth century, and which (at least in the internet consensus) originally read Drvstanvs hic iacit filivs Cvnomoriv cvm domina Clvsilla. This can be – and has been – rendered, with the help of a considerable degree of favourable “interpretation,” as “Here lies Tristan, son of Conomor, with his lady Yseult.”

We’ll return to this interpretation in a moment. But let’s look first at what we know about the stone, its location and its history. What follows, I should note, is drawn from the major academic studies of such stones – those of Macalister and Okasha. I’ll deal with the rival, more ambitious claims of the archaeologist Raleigh Radford, the historian Charles Thomas, and the Arthurian scholar André de Mandach later.

The first thing to say is that, while the stone is estimated to be roughly 1,500 years old, records of its existence date back only as far as the sixteenth century writings of the Cambridge scholar John Leland, librarian and antiquarian to Henry VIII. Leland is of interest to us here  because he travelled throughout England and Wales during the years c.1538-43 in order to compile an Itinerary of places, monuments and artefacts; he was in Cornwall in 1542, where he set down the earliest known description of what appears to be the “Tristan Stone.” His work, which was never published in his lifetime, exists today as an original manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was first published, in nine volumes edited by Thomas Hearne, in 1744-45 [vol.III p.26]; between 1907 and 1910, Lucy Toulmin Smith produced a scholarly edition of the work, and the passage that concerns us features here in the first volume (part III p.207): “Casteldour is longgid to [belongs to] the Erle of Saresbyri [Earl of Salisbury]. A mile of [off] is a broken Crosse inscribed: Conomor & filius cum Domina Clusilla.”

Henry VIII’s antiquary, John Leland – the first man to note the existence of the ancient Cornish stone that mentions a “Conomorus”.

The second thing to point out is that the stone has moved – and, apparently, fragmented – in the time since Leland apparently saw it. If it was one mile from Castle Dore in 1540, then it was a full two and a half from Fowey, and Okasha summarises its subsequent movements as follows: it was relocated, probably before 1602, to a spot about a mile and a half away, on the roadside one mile from Fowey; by 1742 it had been dumped in a ditch along the Castledore road near Newton, where it was soon “half-buried” in accumulated muck; it was set upright once more about 1803, at the same spot; it was moved again, shortly before 1894, to “the centre of the highway outside Menabilly Lodge gates”; and in 1971 it was shifted yet again, slightly to the south, and re-erected at the place where it can now be found.

This is a history that combines periods of rough care with longer stretches of utter lack of care, and it is not very surprising that the inscription on the stone has become far less readable than it was when Leland apparently saw it. The wording itself is now in two lines, reading downwards and facing left. (Leland’s interpretation may imply there were once three.) It is in Latin, predominantly in capital script, and  – thanks to its murky, deteriorated condition – it has been read rather differently by the various people who have seen it – the versions that have been published along the way include those of William Camden, in his Britannia of 1586; of the Welsh antiquary Edward Lhwyd (a friend of Isaac Newton’s who was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of  Oxford and a noted student of the Cornish language), in a private letter of 1700; of the Cornishman William Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall, 1754; and of Daniel and Samuel Lysons, in the third volume of their Magna Britannia, 1814.

Listing these various interpretations in order of date, we have [with a slash, “/”, denoting a break between the lines, “-” an illegible character, ” and “{x}” a special character (in the case of the “Tristan Stone,” these are inverted letters – the letter ‘w’ being apparently represented, though it did not actually come into use until about 1100). The single exception here is the argument of Raleigh Radford, de Mandach and Charles Thomas that the first letters, “Cl” should actually be read as a “D” carved in unical script)]:

The “Tristan Stone” in its current position, by a roadside outside Fowey. It has stood there only since 1971.

CONOMOR & FILIUS CUM DOMINA CLUSILLA [Leland, 1542]

CIRVIVS HIC IACET / CVNOWORIS FILIVS [Camden, 1586]

CIRUSIUS HIC JACIT – CUNOWORI FILIUS [Lhwyd, 1700]

CIRVSIVS HIC IACIT / CVNOWORI FILIVS [Borlase, 1754]

CIRUSIUS HIC JACET / CUNOWORI FILIUS  [Lysons, 1814]

CIRVSINIVSHICIACIT / CVNO{M}ORIFILIVS [Macalister, 1945]

[CIRV–V–NCIACIT] / CV[N]O[{M}]ORFILVS [Okasha, 1985]

{D}RVSTA/NVSHICIACIT / CVNO{M}ORIFILIVS [Thomas, 1994]

I make no claim to any expertise in the interpretation of ancient stone inscriptions, but a couple of things seem readily apparent here. The first is that increasing wear on the inscription (and very likely also increasing scrupulousness on the part of its interpreters) caused some individual letters on the monument to be become – or be acknowledged as – illegible in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second is that there is a very dramatic difference between the inscription as given by Leland in 1542, and the inscription reported by every other witness, beginning with Camden four decades or so later.

These distinctions become important when we turn to the work of André de Mandach, a Swiss scholar of Arthurian legend who is the most important reinterpreter of the inscription. Although it was the archaeologist Raleigh Radford, writing in the 1930s, who first proposed that the stone commemorates the Tristan of medieval romance, it is de Mandach who places the greatest stress on the primacy of Leland’s version of the inscription, using it to tie it to the Tristan legend by arguing that Clvsilla = Clu-silla = “blonde flower” [ancient Irish] = Isolde. De Mandach goes on to propose that Leland encountered the stone when it was not only significantly more legible, but also significantly more complete, than it was found by any later visitor. He points out, by comparing sketches, that it seems to have been then almost 10 feet (3m) tall and about 25 inches (63cm) wide, whereas the monument we see today is about 7 feet (2.1m) tall and only 13 inches (33cm) across. There is certainly something in this argument; we have a sketch [below right], published by Borlase midway through the eighteenth century, which shows the monument – known in those days merely as the Long-Stone – in something more nearly approaching its original shape. The reason for its deterioration, by the way, is probably that the stone originally stood surmounted by some sort of cross; this became detached at some point before Leland’s visit to it, exposing a posthole in the top of the remnant. This hole allowed water to collect and begin a slow process of degradation via successive freezings and thawings.

Borlase’s engraving of the Long Stone as it was c.1750. Note its width – much greater than that of the surviving monument today.

Cutting what is threatening to become a lengthy story as short as possible, de Mandach’s argument is that a third line, originally part of the inscription, was lost as a result of this shrinkage; he proposes that Leland reported the second and third lines of an original three-line inscription, while every person who came after him transcribed only the first and second lines. This dichotomy, he argues, can be resolved by supposing that the third line was lost to the process of “shrinkage” after Leland saw it.

Yet there are good reasons for supposing that this cannot be so, and in fact de Mandach’s own evidence does not support his argument. He prints Borlase’s engraving, which depicts the monument at its full width, and clearly shows only a blank space where Leland’s third line ought to be; if we assume the old antiquary’s reading was correct, then his CVM DOMINA CLVSILLA must therefore have been lost to erosion, not to the gradual degradation of the stone itself. But – given that Borlase wrote well before the stone spent decades lying in a ditch – there seems no obvious reason why one line should disappear completely, while two others apparently remained entirely legible.

In much the same way, it is also notable that Camden’s version of the inscription reads entirely differently to Leland’s, even though it dates to less than half a century after it. Even today’s much more scarred and worn-down monument is not deteriorating at the sort of rate that would be required for an entire line of text to go missing between 1542 and 1586, and the only reasonable alternative is that one of the two sixteenth century transcriptions that have come down to us has to be in error. Which one? Camden’s closely resembles those of later travellers and antiquaries; Leland’s does not. It seems possible to conclude that (for reasons that are now entirely lost to us) Leland comprehensively mistook, misnoted or misreported the inscription – or, more probably, given his abilities as a scholar, merely took it down from some local who had mistaken or misreported it.

The hill fort at Castle Dore, near Fowey. It dates to the Iron Age but remained in use at least as late as the Roman occupation.

We’re left with a monument that seems to date to about our period, which must have been produced by a family possessed of considerable resources, which was set up near an important castle, and which commemorates the son of a “Conomor” – albeit one who was almost certainly not named “Tristan”. It’s not implausible that the Conomor in question was the same man as the Breton Bluebeard, nor utterly impossible that he was the King Marcus/Quonomorius of the Life of St Paul Aurelian. But, equally, there is no proof at all that he was either of these things. For all we know, “Conomor” was a common name at this time, given to many members of many noble families. The Long-Stone thus adds little to our quest for an historical Conomor the Cursed, raising more questions than it answers.

Gustave Doré’s engraving “Barbe-bleu” (1862) for a French edition of Perrault.

What all this shows, I would contend, is the great danger of wanting something to be so. Both Raleigh Radford and André de Mandach seem to have been guilty of this sin. Radford wanted to find evidence that a significant British civilisation had survived the departure of the Romans; excavating at Castle Dore, a few miles north of where the “Tristan Stone” stands, he uncovered some post-holes and a couple of fragments of old pottery, and dated them to the years after Rome’s withdrawl – “proving” (and not just in his own mind, for his findings were not challenged for nearly 40 years) that Castle Dore had been the palace of King Mark of Cornwall, and the likely capital of a substantial Dumnonian government. Both Raleigh and de Mandach also badly wanted to demonstrate that the Arthurian legends had historical roots in the same time and place. This need led them into convoluted arguments, and most dangerously it prompted them to reinterpret evidence in ways that suited their own carefully prepared cases. It was for this reason that both men were willing to interpret the hazily-carved, badly worn first letters, CI, on the  Fowey monument as a single letter “D,” improbably inscribed in quite a different script to that which followed. It was this bit of palaeographical contortionism that allowed them to read the inscription not as a reference to “Cirusius” but as “Drustanus” – Tristan – and turn the Long-Stone into the “Tristan Stone” that pops up on the internet today.

It is romantic. But it is scarcely history.

Sources

Albert le Grand. Les Vies des Saints de la Bretagne-Amorique. Brest: P. Anner et Fils, 1837; Bernard S. Bachrach. A History of the Alans in the West.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973; Brigitte Cazelles and Brett Wells. “Arthur as Barbe-Bleu: the Martyrdom of Saint Tryphine.” In Sahar Amer and Noah D. Gunn (eds), Rereading Allegory: Essays in Memory of Daniel Poirion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; Celtic Inscribed Stones Project database, compiled by the Department of History and Institute of Archaeology, University College London, accessed 28 December 2015; TM Charles-Edwards. Wales and the Britons, 350-1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; Wendy Davies. “The Celtic Kingdoms.” In Paul Fouracre (ed). The New Cambridge Medieval History I, c.500-c.700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Sidney Hartland. “The forbidden chamber.” The Folklore Journal 3 (1885);  Casie Hermansson. Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson [MS]: University of Mississippi Press, 2009; “Mr Canon Kendall to Mr Moyle,” 1717/18, in The Gentleman’s Magazine  May 1838; Gy Kroó. “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.” In Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 1 (1961); Marianne Micros. “Robber bridegrooms and devoured brides.” In Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (eds), Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008; R.A.S. Macalister. Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum vol.1. Blackrock, Eire: Four Courts Press, nd (c.1996); André de Mandach. “The shrinking tombstone of Tristan and Isolt.” Journal of Medieval History 4 (1978); Elsie Masson. Folk Tales of Brittany. Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1929; Elisabeth Okasha. Corpus of Early Christian Inscribed Stones of South-West Britain. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993; Susan M. Pearce. “The traditions of the royal king-list of Dumnonia.” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 1971 Part 1 (1972). Susan M. Pearce. The Kingdom of Dunmonia: Studies in History and Tradition in South Western Britain, AD 350-1150. Padstow: Lodenek Press, 1978; Charles Perrault. “Blue Beard.” From Tales of Mother Goose. Accessed 27 June 2015; Philip Rahtz. “Castle Dore – a reappraisal of the post-Roman structures.” Cornish Archaeology 10 (1971); Christopher A. Snyder. The Britons. Malden [MA]: John Wiley, 2003; Lewis Spence. Legends and Romances of Brittany.  London: George Harrap, 1917; Clare Stancliffe. “Christianity among the Britons, Dalriadan Irish and Picts.” In Paul Fouracre (ed). The New Cambridge Medieval History I, c.500-c.700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Maria Tatar. Secrets Beyond the Door: the Story of Bluebeard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006; Charles Thomas. And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? Post-Roman Inscriptions in Western Britain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994; Lucy Toulmin Smith [ed.] The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535-1543, parts I to III. London: George Bell and Sons, 1907; Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. Bluebeard: An Account of Comorre the Cursed and Gilles de Rais, with Summaries of Various Tales and Traditions. London: Chatto & Windus, 1902; Marina Warner. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Vintage, 1995; Micheline Walker. “Bluebeard: motifs & suspense.” Micheline’s blog, accessed 9 June 2015.

Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns.

Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, a keen fox-hunter who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the revolution of the working class. As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that, while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.

Amid these oddities lurks another—a puzzle whose solution offers fresh insights into the life and thinking of the midwife of Marxism. The mystery is this: Why did Engels, sent in 1842 to work in the English industrial city of Manchester, choose to lead a double life, maintaining gentleman’s lodgings in one part of the city while renting a series of rooms in workers’ districts? How did this well-groomed scion of privilege contrive to travel safely through Manchester’s noisome slums, collecting information about their inhabitants’ grim lives for his first great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England? Strangest of all, why—when asked many years later about his favorite meal—would a native German like Engels answer: “Irish stew”?

Manchester in 1870, the year Engels left the city he had lived in for 28 years. It was the largest industrial town in England and a noted center of the profitable cotton trade.

To answer these questions, we need to see Engels not as he was toward the end of his long life, the heavily bearded grand old man of international socialism, but as he was at its beginning. The Friedrich Engels of the 1840s was a  gregarious young man with a facility for languages, a liking for drink and a preference for lively female company. (“If I had an income of 5,000 francs,” he once confessed to Marx, “I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces.”) It was this Engels who arrived in England in December 1842–sent there to help manage a factory part-owned by his wealthy father, by a family desperate to shield their young radical from the Prussian police. And it was this Engels who, to the considerable alarm of his acquaintances, met, fell for and, for the better part of two decades, covertly lived with an Irish woman by the name of Mary Burns.

Burns’ influence on Engels—and hence on communism and on the history of the world in the past century—has long been badly underestimated. She makes at best fleeting appearances in books devoted to Engels, and almost none in any general works on socialism. And since she was illiterate, or nearly so, not to mention Irish, working class and female, she also left only the faintest of impressions in the contemporary record. The sterling efforts of a few Manchester historians aside, almost nothing is known for certain about who she was, how she lived or what she thought. Yet it is possible, reading between the lines of Engels’ writings, to sense that she had considerable influence on several of her lover’s major works.

Mary Burns’ younger sister, Lizzie, c.1865. Lizzie lived with Engels after her sister died, and married him a day before she herself died. No image of Mary is known to exist.

Let us begin this attempt at recovered memory by sketching the main setting for the tale. Manchester, it must be said, was a poor choice of exile for a young man whose left-wing convictions had so concerned his family. It was the greatest and most terrible of all the products of Britain’s industrial revolution: a large-scale experiment in unfettered capitalism in a decade that witnessed a spring tide of economic liberalism. Government and business alike swore by free trade and laissez faire, with all the attendant profiteering and poor treatment of workers that their doctrines implied. It was common for factory hands to labor for 14 hours a day, six days a week, and while many of them welcomed the idea of fixed employment, unskilled workers rarely enjoyed much job security. Living conditions in the city’s poorer districts were abominable. Chimneys choked the sky; the city’s population soared more than sevenfold. Thanks in part to staggering infant mortality, the life expectancy of those born in Manchester fell to a mere 28 years, half that of the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. And the city still bore the scars of the infamous Peterloo Massacre (in which cavalry units charged down unarmed protesters calling for the vote) and had barely begun to recover from the more recent disaster of an unsuccessful general strike.

Engels had been sent to Manchester to take up a middle-management position in a mill, Ermen & Engels, that manufactured patent cotton thread. The work was tedious and clerical, and Engels soon realized that he was less than welcome in the company. The senior partner, Peter Ermen, viewed the young man as little more than his father’s spy and made it clear that he would not tolerate interference in the running of the factory. That Engels nonetheless devoted the best years of his life to what he grimly called “the bitch business,” grinding through reams of stultifying correspondence for the better part of 20 years, suggests not so much obedience to his father’s wishes as a pressing need to earn a living. As part-owner of the mill, he eventually received a 7.5 percent share in Ermen & Engels’ rising profits, earning £263 in 1855 and as much as £1,080 in 1859—the latter a sum worth around $168,000 today.

Engels’s father – also Friedrich – sent his son to Manchester to work for his business partner Peter Ermen – a taskmaster who tolerated little independence in his managers.

What made Engels different from the mill owners with whom he mixed was how he spent his wealth (and the contents of Peter Ermen’s petty-cash box, which was regularly pilfered). Much of the money, and almost all of Engels’ spare time, was devoted to radical activities. The young German fought briefly in the revolutions of 1848-9, and for decades pursued an intensive program of reading, writing and research that resulted in a breakdown as early as 1857 but eventually yielded a dozen major works. He also offered financial support to a number of less-well-off revolutionaries—most important, Karl Marx, whom he had met while traveling to Manchester in 1842. Even before he became relatively wealthy, Engels frequently sent Marx as much as £50 a year—equivalent to around $7,500 now, and about a third of the annual allowance he received from his parents.

Few of Engels’ contemporaries knew of this hidden life; fewer still were aware of Mary Burns. As a result, almost all of what we know of Burns’ character comes from Engels’ surviving correspondence and a handful of clues exhumed from local archives. It is not even certain where they met. Given what we know of working-class life during this period, it seems likely that Mary first went to work around age 9, and that her first job would have been as a “scavenger,” one of the myriad of nimble children paid a few pennies a day to keep flying scraps of fluff and cotton out of whirring factory machinery. The noted critic Edmund Wilson took this speculation further, writing that by 1843 Mary had found a job in Ermen’s mill. But Wilson gave no source for this assertion, and other biographers argue that Engels’ less-than-gallant pen portrait of his female employees—”short, dumpy and badly formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure”—makes it unlikely that he met the “very good natured and witty” young woman whom Marx remembered on the factory floor.

The Manchester slums of the mid-19th century were the subject of Engels’ first book, and a district that—thanks to his lover Mary Burns—he came to know remarkably well.

If Mary was not a factory girl, there were not too many other ways in which she could have made a living. She lacked the education to teach, and the only other respectable employment available was probably domestic service; an 1841 census does suggest that she and her younger sister, Lizzie, worked as servants for a while. A “Mary Burn” of the right age and “born in this parish” is recorded in the household of a master painter named George Chadfield, and it may be, as Belinda Webb suggests, that Burns took this job because it offered accommodation. Her mother had died in 1835, and she and her sister had to come to terms with a stepmother when their father remarried a year later; perhaps there were pressing reasons for their leaving home. Certainly a career in domestic service would have taught Mary and Lizzie the skills they needed to keep house for Engels, which they did for many years beginning in 1843.

Not every historian of the period believes that Mary was in service, though. Webb, noting that Engels described taking frequent, lengthy walking tours of the city, argues that Mary would scarcely have had the time to act as his guide to Manchester had she labored as a factory hand or servant, and may instead have been a prostitute. Webb notes that Burns was said to have sold oranges at Manchester’s Hall of Science–and “orange selling” had long been a euphemism for involvement in the sex trade. Nell Gwyn, King Charles II’s “Protestant Whore,” famously hawked fruit at Drury Lane Theater, and the radical poet Georg Weerth–whom Mary knew, and who was one of Engels’ closest associates—penned some double entendre-laced lines in which he described a dark-eyed Irish strumpet named Mary who sold her “juicy fruits” to “bearded acquaintances” at the Liverpool docks.

That Engels’ relationship with Mary had a sexual element may be guessed from what what might be a lewd phrase of Marx’s; taking in the news that Engels had acquired an interest in physiology, the philosopher inquired: “Are you studying…on Mary?” Whatever the truth, while Engels did not believe in marriage—and his correspondence reveals a good number of affairs—he and Burns remained a couple for almost 20 years.

Nothing is known for certain about Mary’s involvement in Engels’ political life, but a good deal can be guessed. Edmund and Ruth Frow point out that Engels describes the Manchester slum district known as Little Ireland in such graphic detail that he must have known it; Mary, they argue, “as an Irish girl with an extended family…would have been able to take him around the slums…. If he had been on his own, a middle-class foreigner, it is doubtful he would have emerged alive, and certainly not clothed.”

The interior of an Irish hovel during the great famine of 1845-50. Engels toured Ireland with Mary Burns in 1856, when almost every village still suffered from the consequences of the disaster.

Engels’ acquaintance with Manchester’s worst slums is a matter of some significance. Though he had been born in a business district in the Ruhr, and though (as his biographer Gustav Meyer puts it) he “knew from childhood the real nature of the factory system”—Engels was still shocked at the filth and overcrowding he found in Manchester. “I had never seen so ill-built a city,” he observed. Disease, poverty, inequality of wealth, an absence of education and hope all combined to render life in the city all but insupportable for many. As for the factory owners, Engels wrote, “I have never seen a class so demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress.” Once, Engels wrote, he went into the city with such a man “and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters.” The man heard him out quietly “and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here: good morning, sir.'”

Making the acquaintance of the Burns sisters also exposed Engels to some of the more discreditable aspects of the British imperialism of the period. Although born in England, Mary’s parents had been immigrants from Tipperary, in the south of Ireland. Her father, Michael, labored on and off as a cloth dyer, but ended his days in miserable poverty, spending the last 10 years of his life in a workhouse of the sort made notorious in Oliver Twist. This, combined with the scandal of the Great Famine that gripped Ireland between 1845 and 1850, and saw a million or more Irish men, women and children starve to death in the heart of the world’s wealthiest empire, confirmed the Burns sisters as fervent nationalists. Mary joined Engels on a brief tour of Ireland in 1856, during which they saw as much as two-thirds of the devastated country. Lizzie was said to have been even more radical; according to Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, she offered shelter to two senior members of the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood who were freed from police custody in 1867 in a daring operation mounted by three young Fenians known as the Manchester Martyrs.

Three young Fenians free two senior Irish revolutionaries from a Manchester police van in November 1867. They were captured and hanged, but the freed men—Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy—escaped to the United States. Some sources say Lizzie Burns helped spirit the pair out of Manchester.

Thanks to Manchester’s census records and rates books from this period—and to the painstaking work of local labor historians—it is possible to trace the movements of Engels and the Burns sisters under a variety of pseudonyms. Engels passed himself off as Frederick Boardman, Frederick Mann Burns and Frederick George Mann, and gave his occupation as bookkeeper or “commercial traveler.” There are gaps in the record–and gaps in Engels’ commitment to both Manchester and Mary; he was absent from England from 1844 until the very end of 1849. But Burns evidently retained her place in Engels’ affections through the revolutionary years of 1848-9. Webb notes that, after his return to Manchester, “he and Mary seem to have proceeded more formally,” setting up home together in a modest suburb. Lizzie moved in and seems to have acted as housekeeper, though details of the group’s living arrangements are very hard to come by; Engels ordered that almost all of the personal letters he wrote during this period be destroyed after his death. Engels seems to have acknowledged Mary, at least to close acquaintances, as more than a friend or lover. “Love to Mrs Engels,” the Chartist Julian Harney wrote in 1846. Engels himself told Marx that only his need to maintain his position among his peers prevented him from being far more open: “I live nearly all the time with Mary so as to save money. Unfortunately I cannot manage without [private] lodgings; if I could I would live with her all the time.”

Engels and Mary moved frequently. There were lodgings in Burlington and Cecil Streets (where the Burns sisters appear to have earned extra money by renting out spare rooms), and in 1862 the couple and Lizzie moved into a newly built property in Hyde Road (the street on which the Manchester Martyrs would free Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy five years later). But the years–and perhaps Engels’ long absences on business, private and revolutionary—began to take their toll. In her 20s, Eleanor Marx recorded, Mary “had been pretty, witty and charming…but in later years [she] drank to excess.” This may be no more than family lore—Eleanor was only 8 when Burns died, and she admitted in another letter that “Mary I did not know”—but it seems to fit the known facts well enough. When Burns died, on January 6, 1863, she was only 40.

Jenny Marx—neé Jenny von Westphalen, a member of Prussia’s aristocracy—in 1844.

If it is Mary Burns’ death, not life, that scholars focus on, that is because it occasioned a momentous falling-out between Engels and Marx—the only one recorded in four decades of close friendship. The earliest signs of discord date back several years. During a sojourn in Belgium between 1845 and 1848, during which the two men wrote the Communist Manifesto, Mary went to live in Brussels, an unusual adventure in those days for someone of her sex and class. Jenny Marx had few acquaintances among working-class women, and was undoubtedly shocked when Engels held up his lover as a model for the woman of the future. Burns, Jenny thought, was “very arrogant,” and she observed, sarcastically, that “I myself, when confronted with this abstract model, appear truly repulsive in my own eyes.” When the two found themselves together at a workers’ meeting, Simon Buttermilch reported, Marx “indicated by a significant gesture and a smile that his wife would in no circumstances meet Engels’ companion.”

It was against this backdrop that Engels wrote to Marx to tell his friend of Mary’s death. “Last night she went to bed early,” he wrote, “and when at midnight Lizzie went upstairs, she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart disease or stroke. I received the news this morning, on Monday evening she was still quite well. I can’t tell you how I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.” Marx sympathized–briefly. “It is extraordinarily difficult for you,” he wrote, “who had a home with Mary, free and withdrawn from all human muck, as often as you pleased.” But the remainder of the missive was devoted to a long account of Marx’s woes, ending with a plea for money. “All my friends,” Engels fired back in anger, “including philistine acquaintances, have shown me, at this moment which hit me deeply, more sympathy and friendship than I expected. You found this moment appropriate to display the superiority of your cool intellect.”

Engels in later life. He died in 1895, at age 74.

Marx wrote again, apologizing, extending more elaborate condolences and blaming his first letter on his wife’s demands for money. “What drove me particularly mad,” he wrote, “was that [Jenny] thought I did not report to you adequately our true situation.” Mike Gane, among other writers, suspects that Marx objected to Engels’ love of a working-class woman not on the grounds of class, but because the relationship was bourgeois, and hence violated the principles of communism. Whatever the reason for the argument, Engels seems to have been glad when it ended.

He lived with Mary’s sister for 15 more years. Whether their relationship was as passionate as the one Engels had enjoyed with Mary may be doubted, but he was certainly very fond of Lizzie Burns; just before she was struck down by some sort of tumor in 1878, he acceded to her dying wish and married her. “She was of genuine Irish proletarian stock,” he wrote, “and her passionate and innate feelings for her class were of far greater value to me and stood me in better stead at moments of crisis than all the refinement and culture of your educated and ascetic young ladies.”

Historians remain divided over the importance of Engels’ relations with the Burns sisters. Several biographers have seen Mary and Lizzie as little more than sexual partners who also kept house, something that a Victorian gentleman could scarcely have been expected to do for himself.  Terrell Carver has suggested that “in love, Engels does not seem to have gone in search of his intellectual equal.” Others see Mary Burns as vastly more important. “I wanted to see you in your own homes,” Engels wrote in dedicating his first book to “the Working Classes of Great Britain.” “To observe you in everyday life, to chat with you on your conditions and grievances, to witness your struggles.” He never could have achieved this ambition without a guide, certainly not in the short span of his first sojourn in England. And achieving it marked him for life. “Twenty months in Manchester and London,” W.O. Henderson observes – for which read 10 or 15 months with Mary Burns — “had turned Engels from an inexperienced youth into a young man who had found a purpose in life.”

Sources Roland Boer. “Engels’ contradictions: a reply to Tristram Hunt.” International Socialism 133 (2012); William Delaney. Revolutionary Republicanism and Socialism in Irish History, 1848-1923. Lincoln [NE]: Writer’s Showcase, 2001; Edmund and Ruth Frow. Frederick Engels in Manchester and “The Condition of the Working Class in England”; Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1995; Mike Gane. Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationship. London: Routledge, 1993; Lindsay German. Frederick Engels: life of a revolutionary. International Socialism Journal 65 (1994); W.O. Henderson. The Life of Friedrich Engels. London: Frank Cass, 1976; W.O. Henderson. Marx and Engels and the English Workers, and Other Essays. London: Frank Cass, 1989; Tristram Hunt. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist. London: Penguin, 2010; Sarah Irving. “Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzie Burns.” Manchester Radical History, accessed April 3, 2013; Mick Jenkins. Frederick Engels in Manchester. Manchester: Lancashire & Cheshire Communist Party, 1964; Jenny Marx to Karl Marx, March 24, 1846, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 38. New York: International Publishers, 1975; Marx to Engels, January 8, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 13, 1863; Marx to Engels, January 24, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 26, 1863, all in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 41. New York: International Publishers, 1985; Belinda Webb. Mary Burns. Unpublished Kingston University PhD thesis, 2012; Roy Whitfield. Frederick Engels in Manchester: The Search for a Shadow. Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1988.

Bog pool beneath Errigal Mountain, County Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Gareth McCormack, reproduced with permission – clicking the image takes you to Gareth’s site and more evocative landscape photography.

In an ancient bog at the foot of a fairy-haunted hill, peat-cutting work lays bare the body of a giant. Carbon dating suggests that the man died at the height of the Iron Age, around 275 B.C.; forensic examination shows that he died hard, stabbed through a lung and then decapitated with an axe. After killing him, his executioners chopped his body in half at the diaphragm, and at some point, perhaps while he was still alive, they also inflicted two pairs of unusual wounds on him. Deep cuts almost severed both his nipples, and his arms were vigorously pierced so that twisted lengths of hazel withy could be threaded through from side to side, presumably to pinion him. After that, his mutilated torso was sunk in a pool where, over the years, bog moss grew up to cradle and cover him, until he became part of the mire itself.

As the dead man’s assailants were most likely perfectly aware, the unusual properties of the bog and the moss combined to preserve his remains. The sour waters of high bogs are as acidic as vinegar, and they support practically no life, yet they contain bog oak – which deeply tans organic matter – and sphagnum moss, which uniquely binds both nitrogen and oxygen, inhibiting bacteria. Trapped in this nutrient poor, anaerobic environment, human remains are preserved almost intact; bones may be leeched and gradually demineralise, but flesh and wood, horn, fur, hair and textiles can and do survive for millennia. So when ditching work uncovered the torn remains that archaeologists now call “Old Croghan Man” outside the little village of Croghan, in County Offaly in the heart of Ireland, investigators could still make out the pores on his skin and inspect the well-manicured fingernails that showed that he had done no manual work and hinted at high status. They could calculate that he had once stood 6 feet 5 inches [1.95m] tall: a great height now, freakish for his day.  And they could feel reasonably certain that that height had been made possible by an unexpectedly rich diet, predominantly comprised of meat.

Beyond that, though, almost everything is mystery. We can only speculate as to why the giant’s life was cut so short, and why he died while in his twenties, at the height of his physical powers. We cannot know why the people who killed him felt it necessary to inflict such violence on his body. Nor do we properly understand what the peculiar mutilations that they added to his torso meant: what magic they were intended to perform, or what catastrophe they were intended to commemorate – or, perhaps, prevent.

What we can say is that Old Croghan Man must have been special in some way. His size and strength would certainly have made him physically quite different – he must have been, Valerie Hall suggests, “the golden boy of his tribe. Those big, capable hands… even in death, he oozes confidence, status, presence.” He did not die a normal death, nor was his body handled in a manner typical of his time and place. Early Iron Age burials usually involved cremation, while late ones substituted interral, almost always with grave goods of some sort. Bog burials seem to have been rare, though of course we cannot be sure how many there were. Estimates run into thousands, yet, while archaeologists are careful to point out that there are several different sorts of bog body – and that some of the people whose remains survive apparently died natural deaths – a residue of several dozen hacked and mutilated corpses suggest that other, highly specific, motives were occasionally at work. The members of this last group combine thought-provoking characteristics (babies are under-represented; the young and people with obvious deformities or disabilities are heavily over-represented) with the preserved marks of such extreme violence that it amounts sometimes to overkill. It has been suggested that the evidence shows that their deaths came in the form of stage-managed ceremonies: a theatre of death that culminated in human sacrifice.

Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, whose accounts of the pagan north around 0 A.D. include some of the few scraps of written evidence that may help to explain the nature of bog body finds.

Reconstructing what went on so long ago is more than usually difficult. The civilisations that produced the bog bodies left no written accounts of themselves; we know little about their customs and religions, and much of the evidence we do have comes from outsiders who had their evidence at third hand, and saw the rites they wrote about as evidence of barbarism. Caesar described the ancient British druids, and noted the Gaulish custom of herding victims into giant wooden structures and then burning them alive – killings that involved the infamous “wicker man.” The historian Tacitus heard that the Roman dead from the decisive battle that took place deep in the Teutoberg Forest in 9 A.D.  had their heads nailed to trees, while “in adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they immolated tribunes and centurions of the first rank.” He also took the opportunity, in his Germania, to praise the tribes who lived beyond Rome’s north-eastern borders for the straightforward nature of their justice. According to Tacitus (whose source was possibly the accounts of traders who had visited the north), members of the Germanic tribes could “launch an accusation before the Council or bring a capital charge. The punishment varies to suit the crime. The traitor and deserter are hanged on trees, the coward, the shirker and the unnaturally vicious are drowned in mirey swamps under a cover of wattled hurdles.” The geographer Strabo, meanwhile, noted that the Gauls “used to stab a human being, whom they had devoted to death, in the back with a dagger, and foretell the future from his convulsions.” And the anthropologist J.G. Frazer based his pioneering study The Golden Bough on Roman accounts of rituals in another sacred grove, this one at Lake Nemi in central Italy. Amongst other customs peculiar to Nemi – Frazer thought – was the ritual drowning of slaves who had taken part in fertility rituals.

Such passages are difficult to interpret. Frazer took literally records that were not contemporary, and drew debatable links to other customs from around the world. Tacitus was more interested in condemning what he saw as the decadence of Roman society and justice than he was in compiling accurate lives of the northern tribes. Yet there is also archaeological evidence that helps us grasp the fundamentals of Iron Age religion. We have items showing that water really was associated with votive offerings; at the dramatically-situated Llyn Fawr, at the head of a South Wales valley, the draining of the lake revealed that a large collection of important Bronze Age artefacts had been deposited there around 700 B.C., while in a Danish bog at Gundestrup, a silver cauldron, covered in images of gods and sacrifices, had been dismantled into more than half a dozen pieces, then “reverently deposited on a tiny island” about a hundred years before the time of Christ.

Dramatic Llyn Fawr – seen here in 1830 – huddles beneath a 2,000 foot escarpment at the head of a South Wales valley. Draining the lake revealed a treasure trove of votive offerings deposited there during the Bronze Age.

The difficulty comes when we venture to interpret this evidence. What are we to make, for instance, of the charred remains exhumed at Aalestrup in Denmark – a burned body found covered in the severed wings of six jackdaws and two crows? It is easy for us to imagine that the birds’ wings were intended to bear a human soul to some celestial heaven – but when we do so, we impose a modern vision of religion on an ancient civilisation quite unlike our own. Much the same can be said of the – to us bizarre – skeletons exhumed at Cladh Hallan, on the Hebridean island of South Uist. Archaeologists excavating a stone roundhouse there dating to 1600 B.C. uncovered a pair of skeletons that had been placed in the foundations. Close examination of these remains revealed inexplicable anomalies. Both bodies had been mummified, then kept above ground for at least 300 years before their burial. When they were finally interred, they were also rearranged. One body turned out to be made up of pieces of three people; the second, a woman’s, had been given a man’s head – and two incisors extracted from the man’s skull were found clutched in the woman’s hands. Meanwhile, at Verulamium, in what was once the heart of Roman Britain, the head of an adolescent boy was found at the bottom of a deep shaft. The child had been killed by a heavy blow to the head, after which his skull had been defleshed and then apparently displayed on the end of a pole. When it was finally buried, it was placed next to a whetstone and a puppy.

One of the skeletons excavated at Cladh Hallan in the Hebrides. The body had been kept above ground for centuries before being buried; the details of the finds are baffling.

Archaeologists joke grimly about their tendency to label things they cannot understand as the products of ritual, and it is almost certainly true that – had we better evidence – anomalies of the sort uncovered at Cladh Hallan and Verulamium might seem considerably less strange to us. It’s far from certain, however, that the same is true of bog bodies. For one thing, we have more of them; for another, a number display certain key similarities. These combine to force most students of the phenomenon to agree that a significant proportion of the dead really were victims of orchestrated killing, and perhaps the subjects of ritual and sacrifice as well.

The best place to begin this investigation is with the bogs themselves. Marshes, fens and mires of various descriptions are not at all like other places. They exist at the margins of human settlement, and for the most part they were, and are, rarely visited; Lindow Moss, the most famous such site in Britain, is fully 18 miles from the nearest known Iron Age settlement. We should be careful not to exaggerate this isolation; ancient wooden trackways thread their way through several otherwise impassable morasses, laid, perhaps, to permit the exploitation of bog iron – low-grade metal that was the only readily accessible source of iron in ancient times. Mires could also be sources of woods such as alder and hazel that were thought to have magical powers, as well as of birds and other foods; one bog body, a teenager dug out of a northern German marsh and known today as Uchter Moor girl, is thought to have slipped and died by accident while jumping from hummock to hummock in search of eggs or bilberries.

Haunted landscape: morning mist rises over a northern mire.

For the most part, however, traditions stress the liminality and otherness of places such as these. The monster Grendel, in Beowulf, had his lair in a marsh, as did the Will o’ the Wisp – a supernatural light that tempted travellers off the paths and lured them to their deaths in quagmires. In more recent times, the fens and moors of northern Europe were thought to be good places to deposit “troublesome bodies,” not least those of suicides and witches – the sort of people who might turn into wiedergängers, the malicious revenants of German legend. Perhaps the way in which bodies were preserved by bogs was thought to hobble spirits and deny them resolution; perhaps, when the marsh waters were still, they acted as mirrors that seemed to offer access to another world. “It is easy,” the archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green argues, “to see how bogs encouraged awe, terror and wonder. Not only are they dangerous to the unwary, but they emit vapours, curling from the surface like wraiths from the Otherworld, and little flames from bog gasses can flicker into life as if they are dancing spirits.”

The Ballachulish figure – a bog or crossing guardian, dug from a peat grave in the highlands of Scotland in November 1880. This image shows her as she is today, more than a century after the crude methods of preservation then available permitted her to dry out. See the gallery below for an image of the goddess as she originally appeared when found.

One surviving piece of evidence for the way in which Iron Age people thought about wetlands and marshes (which were, millennia before the development of the technology required to drain them, considerably more commonplace then than they are now) is the discovery of “bog guardians” – wooden figures exhumed from layers of ancient peat. At least six such finds have been made in Britain, and others in Denmark; among the latter are a pair of slender wooden figures – one male and one female – dating to the second century B.C. and found in a bog at Braak. Set upright in the marsh, these would have been visible for miles across the desolate local landscape; traces of fires once lit nearby suggest the spot was used for ritual or feasting. Bog guardians are also frequently sexualised. Thought they tend to be crudely carved, special attention has been given to the genitals; male figures have holes gouged in their groins to allow for the insertion of erect penises that, in at least one case, were probably carved from quartz.

Perhaps the most interesting example of a bog guardian is the five-foot-tall wooden figure found at Ballachulish, near Fort William in the Scottish Highlands, almost 140 years ago. She had once stood upright, gazing over a flat peat plain towards a crossing point where an arm of the sea thrust its way inland. Found lying face down under 10 feet of peat when the foundations were dug for a new church wall, the carving dates to around 600 B.C. – making her the oldest human figure known from Scotland. The carving is almost life size, and, as originally found, boasted not only a prominent vulva, but also hands that appear to grasp a pair of severed penises. One further minor detail from the reports of her unearthing is worth mentioning here; its significance will become apparent later on. The Ballachulish figure was found covered with a lattice of branches and twigs, “a sort of wicker work” that puzzled the handful of local antiquarians who took an interest in her.

The peat that had covered the Ballachulish figure – and which cradled the remains of Old Croghan Man – is the characteristic product of mosses and mires. It is also the reason why bog guardians and bog bodies continue to be found. Peat is made up of dense layers of decayed vegetation, mostly bog moss and low shrubs, which settles at the bottom of pools and is compressed over the centuries by the weight of more plant matter descending onto it until it consumes the pools themselves. Dried and cut into turfs, it can be used as fuel, and practically all of remains that have been found in the belt of bogs that stretch across northern Europe from Ireland to Poland are the products of the peat-cutting industry that got its start during the 17th century. Early finds, uncovered by hand-turfing, tend to be more complete but are inevitably more poorly preserved. Advances in conservation techniques mean that more recent ones can be better conserved, but, on the other hand, the mechanisation of the peat extraction industry means that an unknown number are destroyed by heavy machinery, and those that survive this fate are often badly damaged. A recent discovery in Germany had to be reassembled from 100 chopped-up parts; the first bog body found at Lindow Moss was a severed head, spotted on a conveyer belt as it was about to be fed into a shredding machine, and mistaken at first glance for a burst football.

How many of these bodies exist, or existed, is unknown. The best-known catalogue, compiled by the German expert Alfred Dieck and listing 1,800 finds, has recently been exposed as largely fraudulent, and current estimates are that around 130 sets of remains have been exhumed in Ireland, 140 in Britain, and 30 or more in the peat bogs of the Netherlands; a further 60 were dug up in Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, and several dozen more in Denmark. Only 50 or so of this total are bog mummies, however; the rest are skeletons – sometimes merely single bones. This discrepancy is a product of chemistry; low bogs are alkaline, nutrient-rich, and their high lime content dissolves flesh while preserving bones. High bogs are acidic and nutrient-poor, eroding metal, leaching bone and leaving one German bog body, Damendorf Man, as little more than a flattened envelope of slithery skin.

Surviving records suggest that most early finds were assumed to the remains of unlucky travellers who had wandered into mires, got lost, and been sucked down into them and drowned. The earliest bog body to attract significant attention was that of Gallagh Man, disinterred by farmers in the west of Ireland in 1821 and treated as something of a freak show exhibit at first; his remains were repeatedly reburied and then dug up again for passing travellers before finally being purchased by the Royal Irish Academy eight years later; it took another century-and-a-half for carbon dating to reveal that the remains had first been interred in about 300 B.C. By far the most significant nineteenth century discovery, however, was made in Denmark in 1835. Peat-cutting in a bog at Haraldskaer, in Jutland, unearthed the  well-preserved body of a woman, complete with leather cape and scraps of clothing. She had been aged about 40 when she died, and the deep grooves found around her neck implied she had been garrotted or hanged.

This sketch by Vincent Van Gogh, dating to October 1883, shows Dutch women working at peat-cutting in the traditional labour-intensive way. Bodies unearthed by hand were much more likely to survive intact than those exhumed by the modern, heavily-mechanised peat extraction industry.

The bog at Haraldskaer was only a few miles from what had once been Denmark’s main royal residence, at Jelling, and this coincidence led to the identification of the remains as those of Queen Gunhild, the infamous wife of the 10th century Norwegian monarch Eric Bloodaxe. Gunhild figures prominently in several Icelandic sagas as a cruel and cunning witch, but what excited Danish scholars most were two pieces of evidence that seemed to make the identification of the body with the queen quite reasonable. One was the discovery that the bog from which she had been disinterred had once been known as the Gutsmose – interpreted as “Gunhild’s Bog.” The other was a description in the sagas of the way in which the wicked queen had met her death: lured to Denmark by King Harald Bluetooth and then “drowned and sunk in miserable fashion in a terrifyingly deep bog.” So the identification of the bog body with the queen was widely accepted at the time – so much so that the remains were well looked-after and reverently re-interred in a local church, meaning that they are still remarkably intact. It was not until the 1970s that the theory had to be discarded when carbon dating work showed that “Queen Gunhild” had lived and died around the 5th century B.C.

A smashed keg of bog butter, found in an Irish bog and dating to around 310 A.D. Hundreds of bog butter finds have been made; archaeologists differ as to whether Iron Age peoples used bogs as primitive refrigerators or whether the deposits of butter were intended as offerings.

Little, then, is really known about the men, women and children who are found in bogs. We can only guess at the reasons why their bodies were placed there. Even the Iron Age religious rituals that we reconstruct are guesswork; Christian Fischer has proposed that some Danish bog bodies were sacrifices to a “God of the Hanged” whom he sees as a forerunner of Odin, but we have no firm evidence that any such deity existed, nor any real idea why the votive offerings that we find in bogs – from containers of “bog butter” to twisted swords – are very often smashed or broken. And while archaeologists agree that a significant proportion of the people found interred in mires did not die natural deaths (Turner and Briggs, examining a sample of almost 40 English bog bodies, concluded that as many as one in three had been murdered or executed), there are at least five competing theories to explain why they were killed. For some specialists, the evidence suggests little more than muggings and assaults gone wrong. For others, it points to the execution of criminals and deviants, to scapegoating, to augury, or sacrifice.

We do possess a few clues to help us distinguish between these very different sorts of death. One is the nature of the wounds found on the bog people; another is the treatment of the remains themselves. Most had been denied conventional burial – in coffins, with grave goods – and many were apparently naked when they were interred. A handful – among them one of the two men exhumed at Weerdinge in the Netherlands in 1904 – had been disembowelled, and were found with their intestines protruding from their bellies, perhaps evidence of the sort of auguries described by Strabo. Others again appear to have been pinioned or pegged down to the bottom of their bogs. Several had enjoyed high status, like Old Croghan Man, but more were either crippled or deformed, and four or five seemed to have had their heads shaved shortly before their deaths. A significant minority had been decapitated, and a handful, finally, were the victims of terrifying violence, sustaining sufficient mortal injuries to have died several times over.

The pelvic bones of four dismembered warriors, threaded on a stick: one of the spectacular finds made at Alken Enge.

It is fair to say that most archaeologists accept that some members of this last group, at least, were ritually murdered. But others still harbour doubts, and it is certainly true that, while human sacrifice has long been a staple of both literature and film, confirmed cases are comparatively rare in the historical record. The Romans, as Gary Forsythe points out, did bury Greek and Gaulish couples alive in the Forum Boarium at times of crisis, apparently in conformity with instructions found in their mysterious Sybelline books; we know that at least three sacrifices of this sort were made between 228 and 113 B.C. But Livy speaks of these events as most un-Roman, and there are obvious dangers in assuming that we can understand what was going on in the far less well-documented societies that existed beyond Rome’s borders. Too much of what has been written about bog bodies takes as its starting point the assumption that the Iron Age peoples of the north were both uncivilised and unfathomably cruel.

With these warnings borne firmly in mind, let’s look more closely at the evidence for ritual and sacrifice. A good first step might be to consider the ways in which the peoples of this period thought about the dead. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that many northern tribes made distinctions between the worthy and unworthy, between enemies and friends. Mike Parker Pearson points out that the desecration of opponents who had been killed in battle seems to have been commonplace in many Iron Age societies – not least in Britain, where dismembered human remains have been found mixed with refuse. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of this phenomenon, however, comes from Denmark, where in 2012 the remains of what appears to have been an entire defeated army were unearthed at Alken Enge, an important votive site in eastern Jutland known to archaeologists as “Holy Valley.” Thus far, the remains of 250 men, aged from 13 up to 45, have been recovered from one small area of a site that is known to extend across as much as 40 hectares [100 acres]. The dead men had apparently been dumped there at about the time of Christ – a period when, we know, Rome’s continued expansion to the north had displaced several Germanic peoples. Their search for new lands inevitably brought them into conflict with rival groups.

The remarkably-preserved face of Tollund Man, who was hanged in a Danish bog around 350 B.C. and found naked but for a leather belt and cap. He was apparently a human sacrifice whose remains were treated with care and respect after his death.

What makes the Alken Enge finds especially important is the parallels that can be drawn between the treatment of what were almost certainly the losers of a major battle and a number of the bog bodies dug up elsewhere. Forensic examination suggests that the Alken Enge dead had been left on the battlefield for around six months before their rotting remains were defleshed – the bones bear numerous cutting and scraping marks – and then conveyed some distance to a special place: a site on what was then the lobe of a lake in the Jutland boglands. Their dismembered remains were flung into the waters, along with their weapons and one of the boats that had, perhaps, brought them to the battlefield where they had met their deaths. By that point, they had already been subjected to what appears to have been ritual humiliation. Some of their bones had been hacked in half or crushed. Others showed signs of being prepared for what may have been some form of ceremony; the pelvic bones of four fighting men had been strung together on a stick.

Martin Welch believes that the treatment of the Alken Enge dead suggests gifting to the gods in the hope of creating reciprocal obligations. Other archaeologists broadly agree that the placement of many different warriors’ remains in a bog was a religious act. This interpretation suggests possible parallels with the several bogs that are known to have been used as depositories over periods of centuries. Three (perhaps four) different sets of human remains have been found at Lindow Moss, in Cheshire, placed there in the first or second centuries A.D. The two bog bodies exhumed at Windeby in Schleswig-Holstein – one a boy, the other a man – were found only 15 yards apart, but carbon dating suggests that one had been placed in the mire around 280 B.C. and the other three centuries later, in about 20 A.D. Similarly, the bog bodies known as Tollund Man and Elling Woman were found a short distance apart in the same bog near Silkeborg in Denmark. Both had died around the 4^th century B.C. Both had been hanged.

There are intriguing similarities, then, between bog bodies and the finds at Alken Enge. What distinguishes between the two is the evidence of “specialness” that is so common in the most spectacular bog finds, and which in Parker Pearson’s view means that we can make out “many patterns which help to define the corpses as a group which is socially distinct from the rest of the population.” These distinctions seem to have had nothing to do with sex; the bodies that we have are almost equally divided between male and female. But age seems to have been a factor – there are almost no children, and only a few bog bodies who were aged under 20 when they died. Social status seems to have mattered, too. A handful of the bog people probably came from the lowest stratum of Iron Age society, among whom the best documented is probably Yde Girl, a Dutch find dating back the 1897; she had been garrotted, and her body was found wrapped in a poorly-made, threadbare cloak. A much larger number, though, had held high status. Lindow Man – who was in his 20s when he died, and who had met an extraordinarily violent end – wore a neatly-trimmed beard and, like Old Croghan Man, boasted well-manicured fingernails that betrayed no sign of manual work. Huldremose Woman had been interred in a Danish bog along with a bone comb and amber beads, both indicators of rank. A German body with a slit throat, known as Der Roter Franz (Red Franz) for his bog-water-dyed red hair, was found to have “rider’s facets” – protrusions on the femur caused by the increased use of thigh muscles that are typically found only in those who spend long hours on horseback. And another German find, the decapitated skull known as Osterby Man, wore his hair elaborately twisted and tied on one side of his head – a style known as a “Suebian knot” that is mentioned by Tacitus as an important status-symbol among the men of the north.

The head of Osterby Man, showing the Suebian Knot tied into his hair – a sign of his high status.

We ought to note in passing that the archaeologist Eamonn Kelly, who worked on Old Croghan Man and  other Irish bog bodies, sees in these clues to high status a key for unravelling the whole mystery of why the remains were treated in the way they were. For Kelly, the Croghan torso and as many as 40 other Irish finds are proof of the existence of a form of sacred kingship in which rulers entered into ritual marriages with the earth goddess in order to guarantee future supplies of milk and cereal, and were then killed if they were deemed to have failed to protect their people. This theory comes perilously close to the discredited ideas of Margaret Murray, the early 20th century folklorist who proposed that, well into the Christian period, Irish and English kings were sacrificed by the members of an ancient fertility cult as part of a seven-year cycle of renewal. But Kelly’s ideas do include one plausible proposal: that high status bog bodies such as Old Croghan Man were dismembered and their parts buried at important points on tribal borders as a sort of protective mechanism to prevent evil from crossing those boundaries. It is not necessary to accept Kelly’s ambitious proposal that Iron Age borders map closely to the ones we know existed between medieval Irish lordships 2,000 years later to see in this last suggestion a neat solution to the perplexing discovery of severed heads, hacked up torsos, and solitary legs in several European bogs.

Stranger and more interesting than mere signs of status is the clear evidence that a significant proportion of bog bodies bore physical deformities that would have marked them out as “different” in life. Yde girl suffered from pronounced curvature of the spine, and stood no more than 4 ft 6 [1.37m], small even for those times. Kayhausen Boy had a malformed hip that would have made it impossible for him to walk without assistance; he was discovered in a Saxon bog in 1922 with his throat cut, his hands and feet still elaborately tied with a length of rope that had also been wound around his neck and then passed between his legs – so that, according to Miranda Aldhouse-Green, “any attempt to free his hands would have pulled on the bonds so that the band between his legs would tighten agonisingly on his genitals and simultaneously throttle him.” The body known as Lindow III, found in northern England, possessed vestigial extra thumbs. Zweeloo Woman, a Roman-era mummy found in Drenthe, an inland province of the Netherlands, had been a dwarf.

The distribution of bog body finds. From Menotti.

There is other evidence of specialness as well, although a good deal is contested. A significant proportion of bog bodies wore no clothes, and, while we know that some mires can destroy flax and linen, enough human remains have been found with clothes laid alongside them, or wearing only a single, perhaps symbolic, item, to give us pause for thought. Here again Old Croghan Man is an example; he wore nothing but a leather armlet decorated with celtic symbols. Borremose Man, a Danish find, had been placed in a bog naked but for the rope used to strangle him, which was still wrapped tight around his neck; a pair of sheepskin coats and a cap had been placed alongside him. The man found in Rendswühren Fen, in northern Germany, had been interred during the Roman period, in about 100 A.D. He had been battered to death and his penis had been severed; he was found wearing only a leather anklet. Several archaeologists, among them Aldhouse-Green, interpret actions such as these as attempts on the part of killers to strip their victims of status and render them vulnerable.

If so, they might possibly be linked to examples of bog bodies with shorn heads – Yde Girl and Huldremose Woman among them. The evidence for head-shaving is dubious; several studies suggest it is more likely to be the product of differing levels of oxygen within the waters of a bog, and in the case of Huldremose Woman, who was found not only with her hair shorn but with her right arm severed at the shoulder, there is some suspicion that these injuries were actually inflicted by the spades of the labourers who exhumed her. But we may stand on firmer ground when we turn to the contents of bog body stomachs. Their preservation offers unique insights into the victims’ last meals, information that tells us something about the time of year at which they met their deaths (most often winter, it appears) and the rituals that may have taken place as a result. A high proportion of the bodies most closely associated with ritual murder had eaten poor last meals, food that was not only low in nutritional value, but also disgusting in taste. Does this mean it was prison fare? Evidence of times of famine? Or was something altogether more elaborate involved? Lindow Man had been fed a griddle cake laced with mistletoe, the sacred plant of the druids. And while the stomach of Graubelle Man – a Danish bog body whose throat was cut from ear to ear sometime in the 3^rd century B.C. – bore traces of several dozen different plants and grasses, some of them gathered from distances of up to 60 miles away, it also contained ergot. Ergot is a fungus that causes an unbearable sensation of burning – “St Anthony’s Fire” – accompanied by convulsions and hallucinations. Unfortunately, the archaeologists and scientists who examined Graubelle Man remain hopelessly divided as to whether he had sufficient ergot in him to produce clear symptoms, and – if so – whether those symptoms had caused his death (perhaps by making him appear possessed) or had actually been a part of his punishment.

A reconstruction of the death of Tollund Man, from Museum Silkeborg in Denmark.

Two more categories of evidence remain, and, of these, the first is the excessive violence – amounting, Aldouse-Green insists, to overkill – visited upon some bog bodies. In the case of Graubelle Man, that meant his throat had been cut so viciously that the knife had penetrated almost to the spinal column, severing the windpipe as well as both carotid arteries and both jugular veins. Several other victims had been decapitated, and some of these had been strangled first. The garrotte used to kill Worsley Man near what is now Manchester in about 120 A.D. was found still wrapped around the neck, just below the point at which his head had been removed. The skull of Dätgen Man was found in the peat, placed about 10 feet [3m] from his body. Not all these victims had been killed with cords; some had been dispatched with twists of wood that may have been thought to possess magical properties. Gallagh Man had been strangled with a willow rod, and Windeby Man with a noose made from hazel.

Perhaps the most notorious example of an “overkill” murder was the death of Lindow Man, who seems to have been killed in about 40 A.D. – around the date of the Roman invasion of Britain, and not far from the track that threaded its way across North Wales to the druidical strongholds on the island of Anglesey, a point several archaeologists have found pregnant with possibility. He died what Aldhouse-Green describes as a “triple death,” bludgeoned twice over the head with an axe (blows struck so violently that fragments of bone had penetrated his brain), then garrotted with a length of animal sinew before his throat was cut. This latter violence, combined with the pressure caused by the garrotte, would have caused “the effect of a fountain of blood” bursting from the throat to spatter victim and killers alike. Finally, Lindow Man had been kneed in the back and toppled into a bog pool, apparently while still alive, since there were traces of sphagnum moss in his lungs.

Reconstruction of the death of Lindow Man by archaeological illustrator Aoife Patterson.

This, Aldhouse-Green concludes, was a deliberately theatrical killing (she speculates that it may even have taken place by night, with “the event lit only by torches and the light of the moon glinting coldly on the surface of the marsh.”) Not every archaeologist, it’s fair to say, shares her sense of the macabre, but she is not the only specialist to wonder about the reasons for the heightened violence of such killings. Mike Williams has theorised that ritual execution was employed to ensure that an important spectacle was burned into collective memory. For Aldhouse-Green, such events were most likely an example of “participatory violence,” in which a group took joint responsibility for the death of a chosen individual, and hoped thereby to escape a communal crisis – perhaps it was famine, perhaps disease, perhaps invasion.

The final factor that seems to make some bog bodies special is the discovery of the wooden “stakes,” “pegs” and “hurdles” that are associated with roughly one in seven finds – not to mention with the Ballachulish figure, found within a wicker lattice that appeared to cover it. These discoveries are generally held to be restraints, designed to pin bodies down in bogs as Tacitus famously noted when he observed that Iron Age tribes drowned traitors “in mirey swamps under a cover of wattled hurdles.” The reason for their use – in Mads Ravn’s view – may have been to protect against the revenge of ghosts or the undead by preventing their spirits from escaping the bogs.

The oldest known photograph of a bog body in situ – this one excavated at Fattiggårdens Mose, in Denmark, in 1898.

Yet there remain many questions to be asked about the discovery of branches and stakes in bogs. Such finds are, to begin with, practically always associated with older bog bodies; in all, I have counted around 20 cases, dating from as early as 1770s, but only to as recently as 1960. This means that only a small handful of examples were professionally excavated by archaeologists. For the remainder, we are dependent on the accounts of antiquaries and clergymen who lacked formal training and who, in many cases, were not even present when the bodies were disinterred.

Let’s summarise the evidence from a few of these accounts. In the earliest case known to me – a discovery made at Ravnholt in Denmark in 1773 – a bog body was exhumed with its throat cut and its arms crossed behind its back as though it had once been pinioned. Contemporary sources stated that it had been covered in numerous branches, which had apparently lain crosswise on the torso. Gallagh Man, similarly, is said to have been interred with thick posts or stakes on either side of his body; Landegge Man (1861), Borromose Man (1946) and the Clongownagh Body (another male) were all criss-crossed with sticks, and a skeleton unearthed at Kühsen in Schleswig-Holstein, in 1960, had been covered by a number of alder poles, ranging from finger- to forearm-thick.

The body of “Queen Gunhild” – more properly known today as Haraldskær Woman – was found in 1835 and, thanks to careful treatment and storage, is exceptionally well preserved today.

Opinion remains divided as to what these discoveries actually mean. The judge brought in to report on the body unearthed at Ravnholt assumed that the sticks found on his torso were intended to prevent the remains from floating away into the mire, and there is some evidence that he was right; a cremation urn excavated at Ruchmoor in Saxony in 1951 had also been covered with wooden poles and branches, as had the skeleton found at Kühsen nine years later, which had been respectfully buried (the remains were arranged so they lay east-west, with the head facing west, towards twilight and the setting sun). But others have seen evidence of ritual in sets of “hooks” and “pegs” that were apparently specifically designed to pinion a body. Parker Pearson suggests that Auning Mose Woman, another Danish bog body unearthed in 1886 and dating to around 0 A.D, was pegged down in order that she could be buried alive.

A top-down view of the tangle of branches found on top of the Windeby II bog body. From Schlabow et al, Zwei Moorleichenfunde aus dem Domlandsmoor (1958).

The problem with such theories is the ambiguity of the evidence. In the case of Windeby Man – one of only a small handful of bog bodies excavated to modern standards, and a good example of an apparently ritual death – close study of the excavation report shows that the “hurdles” that many popular accounts state were used to pin the corpse down actually consisted of one arm-thick branch found in the peat 12 inches [28cm] above the body itself, and a tangle of eight branches of varying thicknesses, apparently cut with axes and placed across the body at a wide variety of angles. The diagram drawn at the time seems to provide some evidence for the idea that the sticks were intended to “weigh down” the body in some way; the head and all four limbs were covered. But it’s hard to see in this higgledy-piggledy heap of boughs evidence for the sort of “soft cage of birchwood poles” discerned by P.V. Glob when he reviewed the case of Bunsoh Man, unearthed in Schleswig-Holstein in 1890, or the “grid of stakes” supposed to have covered Jührdenfeld Man when  he was exhumed in 1934. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the two “wooden pegs” once supposed to have pinned Gallagh Man down in a bog have been reinterpreted as grave markers, that a Norwegian churchyard excavated by Michael Gebühr contained 64 medieval Christian corpses that had also been interred with staves across their bodies, that the wickerwork associated with the Ballachulish figure might as easily be the remains of a wattled hut in which the figure had once been sheltered as evidence for the ritual pinioning of a toppled goddess – and that, as C.S. Briggs points out, the physical difficulty of actually pinning a body down in the depths of a treacherous mire should not be underestimated.

When it comes to assessing the evidence for pegs and pinioning, in fact, we are forced back on records of the excavation of a single bog body dating to a much earlier period than is ideal – the remains of Queen Gunhild, the 5^th century B.C. body excavated in Jutland in 1835. Contemporary reports of the discovery made by a local doctor, J.F. Christens, are quite explicit; the body was found alongside a heavy wooden stake some 20 inches [51cm] in length, which was still covered with hammer marks, and alongside several willow crooks. According to Christens, these had been “driven down tight over each kneed and elbow joint. In addition, strong branches had been fixed like clamps across the chest and lower abdomen, their ends similarly held down by wooden crooks… All of the stakes had to be removed before the body could be excavated.”

Examples of the wooden “pegs” associated with the body known as Queen Gunhild, and thought to have been used to stake her body to the bottom of a bog.

Christens’s account was not written until a year after Gunhild’s body was uncovered; he was not himself present at her disinterral, having his accounts at second hand; and he was prone to flights of fancy – in the same account he speculates that the dead woman was “probably nailed into the mud while still alive… [since] her facial expression immediately after the exhumation could almost clearly be seen as despair.” All this gives us some reason to doubt whether Queen Gunhild really was pinioned to the bottom of a bog in the manner he described. Yet in this case, some of the “pegs” associated with her burial survive [right] – and these do seem to show evidence of the sort of crooks and sharpening that might be expected if they really had been chosen to stake a body in a mire.

The uncomfortable fact remains, however, that agreeing there is evidence for ritual does not put us that much closer to understanding why bog killings took place, nor what they meant. So many questions remain. Why were so many men and women killed in so many different places in such similar ways? Extensive trading networks did exist during the Iron Age – one Irish bog mummy had lacquered his hair with ingredients imported from the Pyrenees – and so ideas may have spread. But the people who interred the bog bodies belonged to many different ethnic groups, and worshipped many different gods. Why was it so important that they sent their victims to their deaths in such dramatic ways? And why in fens and mires?

Somewhere out there, one suspects, a solution to these problems lies, still buried under yards of peat. Human remains that have been tanned brown by bog oak, leached, demineralised and squashed flat by the weight of history.  But nonetheless a body that – for once – asks fewer questions than it answers.

Sources

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