What is so creepy about the discovery of the Mary Rose

The news that a new museum dedicated to the discovery of Henry VIII's ship, the Mary Rose, should be exciting to everyone, but especially to me as an historian. But a part of me is a bit creeped out.



I first saw the hulk of the ship when I visited Portsmouth about ten years ago. In 1982 I watched intently when she was hauled from the Solent, having been submerged for four hundred years. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Mary Rose was discovered in 1836 and some of the guns were removed. But then the location was lost for another hundred years until 1971.



The Mary Rose was a warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. After serving for over thirty years in wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany, she saw her last action on 19 July 1545. While leading the attack on the galleys of a French invasion fleet, she sank in the Solent, the straits north of the Isle of Wight.



The new museum serves as a time capsule of Tudor times. There are reconstructed crew members made from a process we have recently seen with Richard III. There is an eerie life-like archer, his spine twisted from years of using his archery equipment. There are grooves in the bones of his fingers where he has pulled the string of his longbow. He is five feet ten inches tall, strong and well-built and was wearing a leather jerkin when the ship went down. 



There is a skeleton of a dog that would have looked like a whippet, earning his place on the royal ship as chief rat catcher. He was a young dog; DNA studies on his bones claim that he was about two years old. And now he sits proud on the ship that is destined to become as famous as Pompeii.



Although the cargo of former life is mysterious and supernatural enough to send a shiver down my spine, it is the discovery of lots of combs that makes my hair stand on end.



The Tudors had nits.



As a parent and teacher, the fear of head lice is always present. Nasty, blood sucking parasites. Seeing the ancient nit combs that look so much like our modern ones, is very disturbing. However, I shouldn't be surprised. Head lice have been known to have lived on people for as long as homo sapiens has existed, the first evidence is from ten thousand years ago in Brazil. It has been suggested that Neolithic peoples actually enjoyed having them as it meant that there was always a food supply available. I'm really not sure about that hypothesis.



Egyptian mummies have been found with nits attached to their hair. Some have had the fine tooth combs necessary to remove nits, which are lice eggs, packed in their tombs to take with them to the afterlife. Head lice for eternity - what a disgusting thought!



All cultures have left evidence of suffering from this pest, whether it was from their remains or the presence of nit-combs, often with nits still trapped in the teeth, as was the case when one found by Hadrian's Wall from 72 AD. The first written evidence came from Aristotle when he wrote a theory on how lice occur. The Anglo-Saxons had many combs, suggesting that they took care of their hair. But even here the combs look very much like our nit detection combs. See an image of the combs here - look at the clothing section on the right​.



In my book Teon, the queen gives Teon a comb as a gift when he is taken in by the royal house as a musician, or scop as they were known. He is absolutely riddled with lice.  My head bleeds from scratching when I'm writing these scenes. It has to be done for the sake of my art.



So the moral of the story is that the little blighters will get you no matter who you are. At least in this modern age we know how to avoid them: keep away from children. Oh, and sailors and archers and Egyptian mummies and cave-men...

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