Someone from a medieval landowning family had a life expectancy of a little over thirty years from birth. This rose to forty-five if they successfully ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and reached the age of twenty-one.
Out of this extraordinary tax evolved a system, overseen by Roger of Salisbury, the name of which survives as the centre of British government finances today: the Exchequer, so-called because the moneys due to the crown in Henry’s time – rents, taxes and fines – were laid out on a large table. It was ten feet by five, with a three-inch rim around its edge to stop anything from falling off. This counting table was covered with a cloth, on which there was a pattern of horizontal and vertical squares, as would be found on a board for a game of chequers. The columns of squares had different values, starting with pennies, progressing through shillings to pounds, all the way up to tens of thousands of pounds. The royal accountant set out counters across the top row of squares, representing the sums that he had calculated as being due to the crown. Along the row immediately below this were laid out further counters, showing what had actually been paid in against the debt. In an age of complicating Roman numerals, the employment of what was, in essence, a giant chequerboard abacus reduced payments and debts to their simplest and most digestible form.
On behalf of his wife and sons, Geoffrey of Anjou led the fighting in Normandy with drive and energy, riding into battle with a ‘Planta Genista’ – the Latin name for a type of yellow-blooming flower – as his talisman. This was, it is said, the root of his nickname of ‘Plantagenet’.
In a cruel age, he became a byword for particular viciousness. At a time when the fear of God persuaded many to respect (or at least bear in mind) the concept of mercy, and divine retribution, de Bellême seems to have been devoid of religious belief or conscience. He chose not to ransom his prisoners – then normal practice, since it was lucrative – because he preferred to keep victims on hand for torture and mutilation.
Suddenly, in the vernacular of popular culture, the woman who wore white lace collars (and a jet-black collar for dissent days) with her black robes was “cool.”
Some dyslexics are object thinkers, and some are more mathematical visual-spatial. Once again, the studies don’t sufficiently distinguish between the two types. Some spatial visualizers and people with dyslexia are great at big-picture thinking; they can both visualize and rotate 3D objects in their mind’s eye. I have worked with creative metalworkers who had dyslexia. They designed and built huge, elaborate feed mills. Object visualization skills are used to design complex systems consisting of conveyors, pumps, and feed-mixing equipment. The spatial visualizers make them work.
I’m a total picture-thinker, and Betsy lives in a world of words. It was a huge challenge for her to help me arrange my thoughts in a linear fashion. Not only do I think in pictures, but my mind is associative. It creates chunks of visualized information and makes associations. To a verbal thinker, these associations may appear random, but in my mind I’m continuously sorting the images. Betsy, on the other hand, is a strictly linear verbal thinker. She needs a sentence to be grammatically correct before she can understand it and move on to the next. We learned that we think completely differently, but that difference became the cornerstone of our future collaborations. To the uninitiated verbal thinker, my initial draft would have looked like a disjointed series of chunks. Betsy takes my pictures and puts them in order.
Most of our traits are polygenic, which means they are affected by many genes. Another mechanism for understanding individual difference is single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Each one of these refers to possible substitutions at a single rung on the ladder of DNA. Sometimes a rung on the ladder changes and nobody knows why. This is called a de novo mutation and occurs in a small percentage of people diagnosed with autism.
