Anyone who tuned in to the first episode of Gunpowder will, I’m sure, have been appalled by one of the early scenes, in which a young Jesuit priest was hanged, drawn and so-called quartered. Having been hoisted by a rope around the neck, he was then let down and disembowelled while still alive before having his limbs chopped off with an axe. It was really quite shocking. After all, any child with an ounce of mathematical knowledge could tell you that when you quarter something, you don’t divide it into five parts.
I don’t know about you but I’m beginning to find the plethora of programmes on this bloody period of English history increasingly unsettling. Not only do they tend to make heroes of psychos and revel in the kind of barbarism that sickens us when perpetrated today, but they keep offering new perspectives on the truth to boot.
When I was a kid it was all very straightforward. Guy Fawkes was a bad man with a funny hat who tried to do something dastardly, got caught red-handed and was gruesomely butchered as a lesson to us all. Fair enough, we thought, as we watched another effigy of the bloke go up in flames and counted our shillings. But wait, what’s this? It could all have been a set-up by the Protestants to besmirch the Catholics for political reasons, you say? The Gunpowder Plot quite literally thickens.
Now I’m not so sure I want to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night in case I’m inadvertently supporting some clandestine and equally dastardly counter-plot. I do like a firework, though, so I’m torn. As, you might say, was Guy.
This confusion comes on top of the bombshell that Richard III may not have been the fiendish, child-killing hunchback he was made out to be for centuries but actually a rather sweet, upright chap, who had nothing to do with murdering any princes in any tower but just happened to be surrounded by such a treacherous troop of power crazy connivers you couldn’t make it up and it was only because of Shakespeare and his penchant for propaganda that we ever thought otherwise. And if you think that was a long sentence, try propping up a Leicester car park for 500 years.
It makes you wonder how more recent historical events will be portrayed in 500 years time. Perhaps we’ll have a cryogenically defrosted Lucy Worsley dressing up as Stalin or Hitler or Donald Trump even, and re-enacting the 1938 Nuremburg Rally or the ‘locker room talk’ incident with a wry smile of conspiratorial red lipstick.
Or perhaps not.
The ironic thing about being quartered, in the Jesuit priest sense, is that absolutely no quarter was given. So what does that mean exactly? It’s like this. Quarter comes from the Latin quartarius, meaning fourth part. Over time, this use mutated to mean any part, so you might hear a crone in the medieval marketplace talking about a ‘sixth quarter’. It didn’t mean she was mad as a fish, though she probably was; she may just have been referring to a sixth part of something. A cat, say, or some hemlock.
Moving on, the word quarter came to refer to part of a town or city. ‘The Latin quarter’. It’s not a quarter of the total area of the town, it’s just a part of it. This interpretation was then applied to parts of a building – e.g. the officers’ quarters – and so soldiers would be ‘quartered’ in digs or billets.
Now, if you were a fighting man who still retained a modicum of civility in the heat of battle, when you captured any of the enemy you would feel obliged to give them a roof over their head, or ‘quarter’, until such time as you could ransom them back to the oppo in exchange for a bar of chocolate or some shag or perhaps an end to the war. If you weren’t so civilised, possibly as a result of being shot at too many times, you might issue an order to give ‘no quarter’. That was bad news for the prisoners. It didn’t just mean they weren’t being given a bed for the night, put it that way.
Today quarter gives us great value as a word of many uses, from a point on the compass or the clock to a portion of the year, a 25c piece, a weight, part of an animal, an enclave, accommodation, mercy and, of course, the verb to chop something (or someone) into four (or five).
It’s also handy for rhyming with daughter, water, slaughter and aorta, though surprisingly none of the great poets or songwriters ever have. Bowie rhymed daughter with oughtta, Iron Maiden rhymed daughter with slaughter and Robbie Burns rhymed water with fautor (whatever that means) but none of them ever rhymed anything with quarter ever.
Of course, I might revise that assertion next week.
