Strangely enough, there were two calendars in use across the globe during the decade of the Regency. Though most of the world had adopted the Gregorian calendar, there were still some countries, Russia included, which had refused to give up the Julian calendar. Therefore, 1 January 1815 in London was 20 December 1814 in Moscow, as there was a difference of twelve days between the two calendars during the years of the Regency. The lack of a single calendar was to have disastrous results for the allies in at least one battle of the Napoleonic wars.

The Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, how they differed, when they were adopted, and how Napoleon turned this discrepancy to his advantage ...

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Last week I wrote about the making of quills into pens, but quill pens are not much use without ink. Therefore, this week I will explain how ink was made, the materials that were used to make it as well as how it was sold. Ink had been in use since ancient times, but the formulas by which it was made had been constantly improved over the centuries so that the ink of the Regency was a much more complex fluid than the simple solutions of water and lamp-black or charcoal of ancient times.

There were several types of inks available during the Regency. Here I will focus on writing ink, the kind of ink which would have been used during the Regency along with a quill pen to write letters, diary entries, deeds, wills, military dispatches, or any other document created using a pen. I will only briefly touch on specialty inks as well as the inks used for drawing and printing during the Regency.

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Despite the use of steel pens in some Regency novels I have read, the only type pen available to writers during that decade was the quill. A Mr. Wise did invent a steel pen in 1803, but they were extremely expensive, temperamental, and he sold very few of them over a very short period. Steel pens were not on the market during the Regency. It was not until 1830 that steel pens became readily available, when a Mr. Perry took out a patent for an affordable pen. In the years that followed, several other inventors took out patents for their own version of the steel pen. Over the course of the following decades, the quill pen was slowly supplanted by that of steel. But all that happened long after the Regency.

Though it is not certain when the feathers of birds first began to be used to make writing implements, they were the only source of pen-making materials during the middle ages and right through the Regency. In fact, it is from the feather that we have acquired our word "pen." It comes from the Latin penna, which means "feather." Now, how a feather becomes a pen ...

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In the West Riding of Yorkshire, about four and a half miles east of the city of Leeds, stands a Jacobean-era country house which has an important link to the Regency. The house, called Temple Newsam, stands on a large estate which has a history stretching back to Roman times. A Roman road connecting Castelford with Adel ran across the property, and the mound which remains of this ancient "street" can still be seen on the north side of the estate. In the early middle ages it was on this property that the Knights Templar built a preceptory, or complex of buildings, which housed a provincial community of their order. It was this preceptory which gave Temple Newsam its name. Here the members of the community worked the land to sustain themselves and to contribute to the support of the Templars. The preceptory is now gone, as is the original manor house, built by Thomas, Baron Darcy, a nobleman beheaded by Henry VIII in 1538, when he rebelled against the dissolution of the monasteries. The property was seized by the Crown after Darcy's death, and Henry gave it to his niece, Margaret, Countess of Lennox. Thus it became the property of the Earls of Lennox. In that same manor house was born Lord Darnley, who became the ill-fated husband of Mary Queen of Scots, and father of James I of England.

After the death of Lord Darnley, who was the eldest son of the Earl of Lennox, the property passed to his only son, King James I. In the first year of his reign in England, James granted the property to Ludovic Stewart, the second Duke of Lennox. In 1622, the Duke sold the property to Sir Arthur Ingram. In about 1630, with the exception of the part of the house which contained the room in which Lord Darnley had been born, the old manor house was mostly pulled down and rebuilt in red brick. That is the core of the Temple Newsam House which stands today. In 1661, Sir Arthur's grandson, Henry Ingram, was created Viscount Irwin, (sometimes listed as Irvine), in the Scottish peerage, for his loyalty to King Charles I. There were nine Viscounts Irwin, the last, Charles, died in 1778, leaving five daughters, but no sons.

So, what is the Regency connection to this historic property?

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