• Does discovery of a red velvet bag reinforce the legend that Sir Walter Raleigh's widow Elizabeth kept his severed head with her after his execution?
• R is for raisins, the unexpected super-food found in many early modern medicines.
• Norah Smyth, suffragette photographer.
• Image: Cat passages in the doors at Thomas Jefferson's 18thc Monticello.
• The 19thc angel guides of death.
• Stylish (and prize-winning) 1959 dress, made from a feedsack.
• President George Washington's letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, RI, 1790.
• Image: Dubious tips on how to get a husband from an 1950s women's magazine.
• "Knackers pork": the grim reality of London slaughterhouses during the Regency.
• Elizabeth Thorn, the angel of the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Wheat the old way: 1940s video of Pennsylvania Dutch family harvesting wheat by hand, without modern machinery.
• From an 1930s trousseau: beautifully embroidered silk slip and tap pants.
• Image: 1850s child's leather boot decorated with a black cat.
• A Mandarin duck mysteriously appears on a pond in New York's Central Park.
• John Rogers and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
• The Kit-Kat Club, an 18thc literary, political, and social club that became a stronghold of the Whig party.
• Workers in a Goodwill store in New Jersey discover an important, original 1774 Philadelphia "rebel" newspaper.
• Fifteen important women in history that you may not have heard of.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.
Please note: I'll be traveling this week, so alas, no Breakfast Links next Sunday....
One of us -- 
4 comments:
In Regency times, was it possible for there to be a stipulation on an inheritance that the man has to wed by his 30th birthday and he did not know of that stipulation until right before his 30th birthday?
If that is not possible, is there another way to suddenly surprise someone with a 'you have to get married within x weeks or lose everything' in the Regency era?
Thank you!
In many parts of the country, Amish farmers still harvest grain by hand, and the whole family, including women, can be seen in the fields binding sheaves and stacking them into shocks until the harvest can be brought in and threshed. Other crops are also brought in by hand, and it's not unusual to pass an Amish farm and see an old-time haystack, or someone tossing ears of corn into a corncrib.
Grest topic! All literary and social clubs in the 18th century were fascinating, and even some political ones. I am concentrating on Scottish clubs at the moment, but the issues were the same - somewhere private for intellectual young men to socialise, learn and make connections.
@ Christine
I'm not up on all the peculiarities of early 19th century inheritance law, but it's probably worth look at Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for an idea of the options. For example, in this novel, published in 1811, "Edward Ferrars was the eldest son of a man who had died very rich," but who had failed to create the kind of trust or "entail" that would have placed his son in direct possession on coming of age. Instead, nearly all the fortune had been left to the control of Edward's mother to dispose as she pleased. Thus, her temperamental behavior in disinheriting Edward when he contemplated a marriage she did not like. Again, in the case of Marianne's suitor, Willoughby, his fortune depended, not upon an entail, but on the preferences of a woman who had power to make him an heir or not.
Thus, you might do best not to make this a condition of a will, but rather a condition laid down by an unreasonable female relative who, lacking an entail, was left control of money by her husband. I believe there were certain laws relating to sons--for instance in Kent, such a situation for Edward Ferrars was unlikely, as Kentish law in default of an entail would divide the estate between the widow and all sons, with the widow's portion divided after her death.
However, an irascible grandmother, aunt, etc., in control of a private fortune--while your hero is bound for poverty and misery, thanks to a spendthrift father--is probably the simplest way to accomplish what you have in mind. She can summon him to her bedside, since she has not much longer to live, order him to get married on the promise that he will be her heir, and leave him to comply or not.
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