The story of priest holes in Tudor England

In the 16th century many parts of Europe experienced an uneasy post-Reformation convergence of politics, monarchy and religion.

In England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome brought decades of unrest, violence and secrecy.

Historical background

His successor and son Edward VI appointed Archbishop Cranmer to write the first version of the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Common’ meant that everyone would worship uniformly as Protestants.

After Edward VI’s death, his half-sister Queen Mary — ‘Bloody Mary’ — sought to restore Catholicism. Dissenting Protestants who came to her attention were burnt at the stake.

After Mary’s death, her sister Elizabeth I, came to the throne and once again restored England as a Protestant country. She passed the Act of Uniformity, designed to unify England as a strong, independent nation of one religion. Those who disagreed with her were given fines or prison sentences.

Catholics secretly practised their faith during this time. The more influential among them hatched plots to bring Elizabeth I’s cousin Mary Queen of Scots to the throne in order to re-establish Roman Catholicism throughout the land. They sought the help of Bloody Mary’s widower, King Philip of Spain. Hence the attack — and Elizabeth’s sinking of — the Spanish Armada in 1588.

During this time of heightened religious tension, Elizabeth declared High Treason on any Catholic priest entering England. Any aiders and abetters were dealt with severely: prison, torture, death.

That said, a number of Jesuits sailed from continental Europe to England to lodge with prominent Catholic families or in safe houses. They supported the dissenters and provided them with spiritual comfort, Mass and the sacraments. England also had its share of Catholic priests who were lying low and seeking refuge. There were also humbler people who did not wish to renounce Catholicism and died for their faith.

Priest holes

Catholics during this time often communicated in secret code and symbols. They practised their faith discreetly and covertly.

Catholics who lived in grander circumstances built hideaways in their homes for their clergy. These are called priests holes. Historic UK describes these structures for us:

Hiding places or ‘priest’s holes’ were built in these houses in case there was a raid. Priest holes were built in fireplaces, attics and staircases and were largely constructed between the 1550s and the Catholic-led Gunpowder Plot [led by Guy Fawkes] in 1605. Sometimes other building alterations would be made at the same time as the priest’s holes so as not to arouse suspicion.

Not surprisingly, although a few larger estates also had secret underground chapels, most priests holes were tiny. Some could only accommodate one man, others several. However, there was little space to stand or lie down. (Illustration courtesy of Historic UK.) Most occupants had to crouch for hours or days at a time. There was no sanitation and no fresh air. Food was at a minimum or non-existent.

Elizabeth’s government had priest hunters called ‘pursuivants’, the French word for ‘pursuer’. The priest hunters were very thorough in their check of suspect properties:

measuring the footprint of the house from the outside and the inside to see if they tallied; they would count the windows outside and again from the inside; they would tap on the walls to see if they were hollow and they would tear up floorboards to search underneath.

Another ploy would be for the pursuivants to pretend to leave and see if the priest would then emerge from his hiding place.

Once detected and captured, priests could expect to be imprisoned, tortured and put to death.

St Nicholas Owen

A lay brother of the Jesuits and a skilled carpenter, Nicholas Owen, built a number of priest holes. He also created a network of safe houses for priests in the 1590s. In 1597, he helped the Jesuit priest John Gerard escape from the Tower of London. After the Catholic Gunpowder Plot failed in November 1605, the authorites arrested Owen and tortured him to death in 1606. Owen was canonised in 1970, which makes him St Nicholas Owen. He is the patron saint of escapologists and illusionists.

His masterpiece of priests holes was built at Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire. The stately home housed the Jesuit Henry Garnet for 14 years:

One hiding place, just 3’ 9” high, is in the roof space above a closet off a bedroom. Another is in the corner of the kitchen where visitors to the house today can see through to the medieval drain where Father Garnet was hidden. Access to this hiding place was through the garderobe (medieval toilet) shaft in the floor of the Sacristy above. A hiding space beneath the library floor was accessed through the fireplace in the Great Parlour.

Tatler magazine had a feature on priest holes in their January 2015 issue (pp. 90-95). These hideaways still exist today in a few estates under ownership of the original Catholic families who hid priests away during this era. The photographs are fascinating.

Equally fascinating is the fact that some of the newer generations did not realise their homes had priest holes until they had structural work done in the 19th or 20th centuries.

Georgina Blackwell’s article, ‘England’s Finest Priest Holes’, profiles four of them from all over the country:

– Ingatestone Hall in Ingatestone, Essex (p. 91): The Petre family have owned this estate for centuries. It has two priests holes which date from 1570. (Later generations did not discover them until 1855 and 1905. The children have since used them as spaces in which to play.) The Petres of Elizabeth I’s time harboured a Jesuit, John Payne, for several years beginning in 1576. He posed as the family’s steward but was really their chaplain. A servant betrayed Payne to the authorities. Payne was hanged, drawn and quartered at the marketplace in nearby Chelmsford in 1582. Sir William Petre, who had built the house, escaped prosecution and persecution by actually helping to dissolve the monasteries and then serve as privy counsellor to four monarchs, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I. Talk about discretion being the better part of valour.

– Coughton Court in Alcester, Warwickshire (p. 92): Coughton (pron. ‘Coe-ton’) Court has been home to the Throckmorton family for 600 years. It was built in the early 15th century. The aforementioned Nicholas Owen built a ‘double hide’ here. A second compartment lies hidden underneath the first. Rediscovered in 1910, it still contains the original rope ladder and bedding. The Throckmortons were among those grand families who attempted to overthrow Elizabeth I in favour of Mary of Scots. The family member who engineered it — Sir Francis Throckmorton — was beheaded. Those men involved in the Gunpowder Plot hid and amassed their ammunition here, too.

– Naworth Castle in Brampton, Cumbria (p. 94): Like the Throckmortons, the Howard family also built their home in the 15th century. A family member, Lord William Howard, built a stunning priest hole which is not only roomy but also has a window. Howard was known for hanging Scots — as many as 63 in a two-year time span. The hangman’s tree is still on the estate. A notable occupant of his priest hole was a Catholic activist by the name of Nicholas Roscarrock. Roscarrock is said to have been the last man to die on the rack. Some of the Howards spent a lot of time in the Tower of London. One of them, Sir Philip Howard, spent 13 years there; he was later canonised a Catholic saint. Another ancestor, Sir Charles Howard, played the system. During the English Civil War, he renounced Catholicism and followed Cromwell. Just before the Restoration in 1660, he helped bring Charles II to the throne. For his efforts, he was made Earl of Carlisle. Although he amassed a great deal of wealth, he, unfortunately, earned it via the slave trade. For this reason, the Howards call him ‘a particularly dodgy ancestor’.

– Ripley Castle in Harrogate, North Yorkshire (p. 95) – The Ingilby family (originally Ingleby until the late 18th century) did not find Ripley Castle’s priest hole until 1963. They were having the house inspected for death watch beetle and, in the process, discovered a tiny hiding place. It was large enough for a man to stay hidden, crouched down, and had just enough room for a candle and a Bible. Lady Ingilby told Tatler that priest hunters were very good at pointing swords in between floor panels to get an ‘Ouch!’. One of their ancestors is on the route to sainthood: Blessed Francis Ingleby, who was ordained in France before his return to England. He was hanged, drawn and quartered in York in 1586. Francis’s brother David was known as ‘the Fox’ and is considered to be the Catholic version of the Scarlet Pimpernel. He died undetected athough he was known to the authorities. The present day owner, Sir Thomas Ingilby, says that Elizabeth’s I spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, lived in fear of ‘the Fox’. Even later, during Cromwell’s Interregnum, the priest hole had its use. After the Royalist Sir William Ingleby returned to the house following the defeat at Marston Moor in 1644, he sequestered himself in the hideaway. Cromwell appropriated the house shortly thereafter as a billet. Whilst William hid, his sister Jane held up Cromwell at pistol point. The Ingilby family have lived at Ripley Castle since the 14th century.

Thus ends the intriguing story of priest holes. There are no doubt a few more, discovered and undiscovered, in grand houses around England.

UPDATE — September 2017: One of my readers, CherryPie, visited Harvington Hall recently. She wrote about her visit and included many interesting pictures of priest holes. Recommended reading. Many thanks, CherryPie, for sending in the link to your post.

Butchery, the Shambles and burgesses

The other night we saw the first in a three-part series on BBC4, Britain’s Oldest Businesses.

The first in the programme profiled R J Balson and Son from Bridport, Dorset. Richard Balson is the current proprietor. He works together with his brother-in-law Rudi Boulay. The programme revealed that Richard Balson understood the business to date from 1535. However, a subsequent discovery, shown in the programme, dates back to 1515.

A year away from half a millenium of meat sales

The Balson website includes old family photographs of the shop and their first ‘modern’ 20th century delivery vehicle. It’s a short but fascinating read and, if the show is rerun (let’s hope it airs on PBS), it’s worthwhile recording for later viewing at home.

We learned that the first two documents dating the business referred to those Balson men being granted a stall at Bridport’s shambles, where butchery was done live in the main thoroughfare. More about shambles later in the post.

We also learned that market days — the only time butchery was allowed — were Wednesday and Saturday. Therefore, if you wished to make a living by selling meat, you often had to have another job.

One of Balson’s more recent ancestors from the 19th century ran a pub. He was able to sell  more meat through the pub. (These days, outsiders go in to pubs to sell meat of unknown provenance, possibly stolen, at very low prices. Caveat emptor — buyer beware.) However, this proves that selling meat in the pub is an old tradition. It would be interesting to find out how many butchers ran pubs before they were allowed to open a shop throughout the week.

Another detail viewers learned was that the abundance of carcasses on display was generally photographed in the run-up to Christmas as a retail incentive.

Currently, a Balson relative living in the US sells meat from the family firm online. He still has the old date of 1535 in the banner heading.

The Telegraph has a good article — albeit with a misspelling of Thomas More’s name — about the Balson family business:

Although he’s interested in his business’s claim to fame, Richard Balson has never had the time to think about starting a history project. A butcher’s life is busy from cradle to grave. He grew up above the shop and remembers his father warning him from an early age that the Balson butchers never earned enough for a retirement …

Next year he will own a business that has been in the same family for half a millennium. Still, it’s not all good news: “Nothing exciting happened that year [1515], except the birth of Anne of Cleves,” he says despondently.

More disturbing information is in store for Balson, whom we follow in the first part of the series. He becomes increasingly hooked as the story unravels: the shop has, quite miraculously it seems, survived a rather bloody history. One of the Balson butchers lived with a married woman and “had his head blown off” by her 10-year-old son [an accident]; another was sent to a Victorian asylum for electric shock treatment before cutting his own throat [in a wash house, the precursor to a launderette]. What makes these stories close to the bone, as it were, is that they all lived and worked in the same space – as indeed did Balson with his own father.

The Shambles — first butchery sites

‘The Shambles’ was the name for mediaeval and subsequent butchers’ stalls until the 18th or 19th century, depending on the town or city.

A few places by that name still exist today in England — York has The Shambles and Little Shambles thoroughfares. Manchester has Shambles Square.

As the documentary on the Balsons showed us, shambles were set up in the main shopping — high — street in a central location. They were often roofed structures but might have been held up only by columns in some cases to allow freer passage of livestock to slaughter.

Farmers brought in their beasts to be slaughtered and butchered on market days. In principle, the documentary told us, the animals could be cut to order. Any meat not sold on that day could be salted — similar to corned beef — or sent to the local lepers, which was undoubtedly seen as an act of Christian charity; otherwise they might have starved.

However, the shambles represented a hygiene problem over the centuries. Whilst the blood and faecal waste from the animals could flow off into the recesses of the street, in time, cholera and other diseases were rife in these districts. Yet, it would not be until the 18th century when the ‘Godless’ Enlightenment (as many 21st century American fundamentalists perceive it as a whole) would enable town planning and some degree of cleanliness. At that point, Bath being one example, the shambles were removed from the public square and placed indoors with separate slaughter or butchery facilities at the rear of the shops. Some animals were killed offsite and brought into town. In the late 19th century, butchers were among the first to be able to purchase and benefit from refrigerated cold stores to keep meat fresh throughout the week. From that point on, many meat shops were open five or six days a week.

Shambles — etymology and current meaning

The American Heritage Dictionary traces the word ‘shambles’ as follows (emphases in bold mine below):

A place or situation referred to as a shambles is usually a mess, but it is no longer always the bloody mess it once was. The history of the word begins innocently enough with the Latin word scamnum, “a stool or bench serving as a seat, step, or support for the feet, for example.” The diminutive scamillum, “low stool,” was borrowed by speakers of Old English as sceamol, “stool, bench, table.” Old English sceamol became Middle English shamel, which developed the specific sense in the singular and plural of “a place where meat is butchered and sold.” The Middle English compound shamelhouse meant “slaughterhouse,” a sense that the plural shambles developed (first recorded in 1548) along with the figurative sense “a place or scene of bloodshed” (first recorded in 1593). Our current, more generalized meaning, “a scene or condition of disorder,” is first recorded in 1926.

A webpage on the history of York adds that ‘shamel’ also referred to:

Flesshammel, which means to do with flesh – it was the street of the butchers. In 1872 the number of butchers was recorded as 26. This figure dwindled over the years until the last butcher standing was Dewhurst at number 27 the Shambles.

Unfortunately, the nationwide Dewhurst chain disappeared in 1995. I remember seeing them in many towns and London boroughs when I first moved to England. However, the Vestey Group which, although British, branched out into large-scale South American food ventures instead of investing in the UK. They:

developed the country-wide Dewhurst the Butchers chain of butchers shops, which was eventually disbanded in 1995 in the face of increasing competition from the supermarket chains. Dewhurst were the first to introduce the innovation of glass windows on butcher’s shops – previously meat had been exposed to the elements and pollution.

Since 2011, a few Dewhurst shops have made their way back onto the high street thanks to another company stepping into the breach.

I was in York’s Shambles on a visit 20 years ago. I remember we all laughed at the street sign which read:

The Shambles

We didn’t know what it meant, even though we were all steeped to an extent in English history.

However, as the York website explains:

It is said that in certain points you can reach out of the top window and shake hands with a person doing the same daft thing in the house opposite! But if you had walked the length of this street, say, 300 years ago, it would have been a very different experience! Livestock would have been kept behind the shops and slaughtered on site.

Later, when York had the cattle market it meant that cattle no longer lived behind the shops, but the slaughterhouses remained and the cattle were driven in on foot from the market. The middle of street would have been an open gutter and the waste from the butchers was washed out of the shops and into the street. Number 31 has a sloping floor for this reason.

Gardy-loo!

There was also another hazard — human waste from the bedpans and chamberpots. Younger readers should realise there were no toilets at the time. Sorry, but this has to be said. We don’t know how fortunate we are to be living in our times.

In Edinburgh at the same time, there was a common saying among the locals living in similarly crowded conditions, where disease was also rife. Housekeepers and housewifes would empty the chamberpots and bedpans, quickly calling out, ‘Gardy-loo!’ I have heard several historical explanations of this, but the most likely seems to be a corruption of the French, ‘Gardez l’eau!’ or ‘Mind — pay attention to — the water’, not unlike the ancient fencing expression, ‘En garde!’

York’s website says much the same thing:

domestic waste would have been thrown down from the windows above to either drain into open ditches, or stagnate in the road. Manure was collected at night, but no great effort was made to take it very far away. The terribly unhygienic conditions led to several outbreaks of cholera, and yet it was not until the 20th century that changes were made.

It was not until the 20th century that ‘changes were made’ because Bazalgette’s modern sewage and sanitation system of its many u-bends was perfected in the 19th century in London. It made a near-immediate change for the better in the hygiene of London’s residents and was no doubt sent across the country as the way forward.

Never laugh when people talk about the benefits of modern toilet, drainage and water sanitation systems. You would not be reading this if they were not in place.

York: St Margaret Clitherow, butcher’s wife — and priest holes

Whilst in York, strolling along The Shambles, I don’t know if I knew there was a slaugherhouse (abbatoir) behind Nos. 37 and 38.

However, I did see the overhang of upper storeys of the centuries-old buildings:

There remain examples of late medieval buildings in the Shambles, which represents a good example of how houses – topped by overhanging “solars” through which it was hoped that sunlight might be brought through the windows into burgesses’ living quarters – were sometimes within arms’ reach of each other.

To the dismay of my Anglican companions, I — a fellow Anglican — did visit St Margaret Clitherow’s shrine at Nos. 35 and 36:

Margaret Middleton married John Clitherow, a widowed butcher who had his business at number 35. After her marriage Margaret converted to Catholicism. These were turbulent times for religion, with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the continued religious warring throughout the reigns of his children. Margaret gave shelter to travelling Priests, and conducted Mass for local Catholics in her home. Warned and imprisoned for her continual refusal to conform to the protestant way of life, she continued with her activities.

The inspectors would count the windows outside the houses and compare them to the count inside, to see if an area had been concealed to hide a priest. On the evidence of a frightened child they arrested Margaret and charged her with providing cover for the Priests and with practicing Catholicism. She was offered a trial, but she insisted she had no crime to answer to, and so was sentenced to death. To be crushed to death in the prison under Ouse bridge.

Rather than be naked, she made herself a shift of white linen. She lay with a large stone placed in the small of her back and a door was laid upon her body. Stones were piled upon the door until she was dead. She was canonized on October 25th 1970, and her right hand can still be seen in the Bar Convent museum.

I didn’t know about the Bar Convent museum, but visiting her former home was moving. I could feel a chill, which normally hasn’t happened to me in other such places, e.g. the Roman Catacombs. Perhaps this was because the martyrdom was more recent. I cannot say.

My Anglican friends must have felt something, too, because two stepped away quickly and the other suggested a quick exit. I stayed on to read what was written about her and was increasingly moved by her life.

By the way, there were such things as ‘priest holes’. Some were hidden by a heavy stone concealing door with a false appearance on one side. The priest, with some physical effort, could move the stone door, carefully find the staircase to a lower storey — i.e. cellar — and remain there indefinitely as long as someone brought him food, drink and candles. The stone door made the cellar soundproof and rendered the clergyman invisible for all intents and purposes.

Elizabeth I, the reigning Queen, was outraged that Margaret Clitherow had been sentenced to death. St Margaret Clitherow’s Wikipedia entry says:

She was born as Margaret Middleton,^[3] the daughter of a wax-chandler, after Henry VIII of England had split the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. She married John Clitherow, a butcher, in 1571 (at the age of 15) and bore him three children. She converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 18, in 1574. Her husband John was supportive (he having a brother who was Roman Catholic clergy), though he remained Protestant.^[4] She then became a friend of the persecuted Roman Catholic population in the north of England. Her son, Henry, went to Reims to train as a Roman Catholic priest … A house in the Shambles once thought to have been her home, now called the Shrine of the Saint Margaret Clitherow, is open to the public (it is served by the nearby Church of St Wilfrid’s and is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Middlesbrough); her actual house (10 and 11, the Shambles) is further down the street.

… she was executed by being crushed to death – the standard punishment for refusal to plead – on Good Friday 1586. The two sergeants who should have killed her hired four desperate beggars to kill her. She was stripped and had a handkerchief tied across her face then laid out upon a sharp rock the size of a man’s fist, the door from her own house was put on top of her and slowly loaded with an immense weight of rocks and stones (the small sharp rock would break her back when the heavy rocks were laid on top of her). Her death occurred within fifteen minutes but her body was left for six hours before the weight was removed. After her death her hand was removed, and this relic is now housed in the chapel of the Bar Convent, York. Following her execution, Elizabeth I wrote to the citizens of York expressing her horror at the treatment of a fellow woman. Because of her sex, she argued, Clitherow should not have been executed.

From this, I gathered that St Margaret Clitherow would have been a patron saint of butchers. However, she is the patron saint of businesswomen, converts, martyrs and the Catholic Women’s League.

Patron saints of butchers include: St Adrian of Nicomedia, St George, St Peter (the Apostle) and  St Anthony the Abbot as well as St Luke, the Gospel writer.

Burgesses

There are some mysteriously and absolutely foul revisions of the word ‘burgess’ in the Urban Dictionary. Some are simply unkind and others are scatalogical. None of them has a link to history and the original meaning of the word. Therefore, I have not supplied a link to them.

Wikipedia has an international definition, encompassing Europe and the Middle East:

Burgess is a word in English that originally meant a freeman of a borough (England) or burgh (Scotland). It later came to mean an elected or unelected official of a municipality, or the representative of a borough in the English House of Commons.

It was derived in Middle English and Middle Scots from the Old French word burgeis, simply meaning “an inhabitant of a town” (cf. burgeis or burges respectively). The Old French word burgeis is derived from bourg, meaning a market town or medieval village, itself derived from Late Latin burgus, meaning “fortress“^[1] or “wall”. In effect, the reference was to the north-west European medieval and renaissance merchant class which tended to set up their storefronts along the outside of the city wall, where traffic through the gates was an advantage and safety in event of an attack was easily accessible. The right to seek shelter within a burg was known as the right of burgess.^[2]

The term was close in meaning to the Germanic term burgher, a formally defined class in medieval German cities, (Middle Dutch burgher, Dutch burger and German Bürger). It is also linguistically close to the French term Bourgeois, which evolved from burgeis. An analogous term in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu is برج ‘burj’ or ‘borj’, which in itself variously means a high wall, a building, or a tower.

The term is also related to burglar, though this developed in the opposite direction in terms of social respectability.

From my reading of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin, the Russians also had a similar word, burgis.

The burgess’s status was underneath that of the alderman’s — alder, elder — who was his superior. However, the burgess was the precursor to the merchant class. As Wikipedia cites, the verses of the ancient song Greensleeves point out:

Thy purse and eke thy gay guilt knives, thy pincase gallant to the eye: No better wore the Burgesse wives, and yet thou wouldst not love me.

About.com gives a simpler definition:

A burgess was a landowner or householder in a town or borough. Burgesses paid their share of any communal dues and expenses and therefore shared in town privileges.

The term derives from the word borough (and its alternate pronunciations), as does burgher. Burghers and burgesses were different, however, in that burgesses had special privileges that derived from their support of the community.

Today, we still have boroughs (e.g. London and New York City) as well as aldermen (e.g. Chicago).

The Medieval English Urban History glossary defines burgesses as:

town residents contributory towards the customary payments due the king from boroughs, later in the Middle Ages its varied application does not suggest a precise, universally agreed, technical definition. Broadly, however, it referred to residents of a borough, usually those residents who were members of the borough community in terms of sharing in communal responsibilities and rights; hence we often find the term “comburgess” used, to emphasise that an individual was a fellow member of the enfranchised community (although the term also came to be used, on occasion, to refer to burgesses of higher status). At Lynn the poorest townsmen were clearly described as non-burgesses, “burgesses” evidently being equated with those residents who had become freemen; this appears also the case in Ipswich. Yet in Colchester the same class of poorer residents was described as being burgesses. Outsiders (“strangers” or “foreigners”) were sometimes allowed to acquire some of the same – notably commercial – privileges by entering the franchise under the special status of “foreign burgess”. Towards the end of the Middle Ages “burgess” was more likely to be used to distinguish one group of privileged townsmen from a less privileged group.

There was a fine line between ‘advantages of burgesses’ — a burgess was a freeman — and a ‘monopoly’ on trading. Burgesses became wealthy because they could share in the proceeds of market trade, as this example from old Norwich (Norfolk) municipal laws says, in modern English:

It was a fundamental right of freemen to be able to claim a share in any mercantile bargain made by one of their fellows, if they were present when the bargain was made. Only in special cases could they claim a share if not present. The use of multiple representatives undermined this equal shares principle, and favoured the urban upper class, which supplied most bailiffs – perhaps explaining the final clause of this chapter, suggesting that the bailiffs might be reluctant to investigate such abuses in absence of a specific complaint, and producing a statement of the source of political authority in towns.

Perhaps this is the source of European class conflict, which might well have started centuries ago. Let it further be emphasised that local lords or kings actually owned the land granted to the care of burgesses to rent — tenements (somewhat different to the early 20th century meaning) — on their behalf.

On a lighter note …

The city of Manchester’s website has a photographic history of their Shambles Square. If you scroll down one-quarter or one-third down the page, you will see Ye Olde Fyshing Tackle Shoppe.

The next photo shows that a Will Chambers owns it (look for the postcard reproduced with Jason Kennedy’s permission).

The following postcard or photo shows the same building at a slightly different angle. Could the writing on the card be from Will Chambers? It is certainly signed Will. It says — in as much as I can make out:

Dear Froggy cum [‘with’ — Latin] sausage cum roast beef, how the dickens are you, have your muscles grown any, are you quite well, anything fresh, if so let me know, you owe me a letter, you [are] usually so punctual, what do you think of your new nephew, both [mother and son] are doing well.