Burned at the Stake: The Life and Death of Mary Channing

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In 1999, on the 200th anniversary of Anning's birth, an international meeting of historians, palaeontologists, fossil collectors, and others interested in her life was held in Lyme Regis. [80] In 2005 the Natural History Museum added Anning, alongside scientists such as Carl Linnaeus, Dorothea Bate, and William Smith, as one of the "gallery characters" (actors dressed in period costumes) it uses to walk around its display cases. [81] [82] In 2007, American playwright/performer Claudia Stevens premiered Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore, a solo play with music by Allen Shearer depicting Anning in later life. Among the presenters of its thirty performances around the Charles Darwin bicentennial were the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, museums of natural history at the University of Michigan and the University of Kansas, and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. [83] The family continued collecting and selling fossils together and set up a table of curiosities near the coach stop at a local inn. Although the stories about Anning tend to focus on her successes, Dennis Dean writes that her mother and brother were astute collectors too, and Anning's parents had sold fossils before the father's death. [18] Drawing from an 1814 paper [19] by Everard Home showing the Ichthyosaurus platyodon skull found by Joseph Anning in 1811 Every year, more people are reading our articles to learn about the challenges facing the natural world. Our future depends on nature, but we are not doing enough to protect our life support system. Pollution has caused toxic air in our cities, and farming and logging have wreaked havoc on our forests. Climate change is creating deserts and dead zones, and hunting is driving many species to the brink of extinction. This is the first time in Earth's history that a single species - humanity - has brought such disaster upon the natural world. But if we don't look after nature, nature can't look after us. We must act on scientific evidence, we must act together, and we must act now.

Link to account of The Bloody Assizes - 292 People condemned to death in Dorchester in 1685 and 74 of those were executed the some heads were impaled on spikes outside St Peters church In Speed’s plan of Dorchester published in 1610, the gallows prominently illustrated as two uprights with a connecting crossbeam, was marked at the junction of what today is Icen Way and South Walks. In an earlier time, Icen Way was known as Gaol Lane and started at the Gaol then on the corner of High East Street; the final section leading to the gallows was known as Gallows Hill and for many men, women and children the journey along Gaol Lane was their last. This double execution drew thousands from far and wide. It was reported that two brothers erected a grandstand on the meadows and charged for seats. Their enterprise was so well supported that the stand collapsed under the weight of the spectators who all subsided into the mud below. Fradin, Dennis B. (1997), Mary Anning: The Fossil Hunter (Remarkable Children), Silver Burdett Press, ISBN 978-0-382-39487-4 Claudia Stevens, Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore, video documentation, script, performance history, Claudia Stevens papers, Special Collections, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary http://scdb.swem.wm.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=8096

MAUMBURY RING

The main character in John Cowper Powys' novel Maiden Castle (1937) writes a book about Mary Channing. As to the fate of her son, this seems to have been lost to history. Did he die in infancy? Was he perhaps brought up in a workhouse or even adopted by his grandparents or another family? Did he stay in Britain or emigrate to seek his fortune overseas? We may never know. Anning's first famous discovery was made shortly after her father's death when she was still a child of about 12. In 1811 (some sources say 1810 or 1809) her brother Joseph found a 4ft (1.2m) skull, but failed to locate the rest of the animal. [22] After Joseph told Anning to look between the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, she found the skeleton—17ft (5.2m) long in all—a few months later. The family hired workmen to dig it out in November that year, an event covered by the local press on 9 November, who identified the fossil as a crocodile. [21] She was later to disown these “friends” when she began a loose affair with a local man. The pair would frequent public houses, where the wayward teenager would entertain her date with wine and shower him with gifts such as ruffles and cravats. Mary would willingly cover the expenses for these excesses, but her generosity cut deeply into her solvency. To financially support her highly social lifestyle Mary cajoled, or even conspired to rob, her parents of substantial sums, aided by some of her closest friends. In the same 1821 paper he co-authored with Henry De la Beche on ichthyosaur anatomy, William Conybeare named and described the genus Plesiosaurus (near lizard), called so because he thought it more like modern reptiles than the ichthyosaur had been. The description was based on a number of fossils, the most complete of them specimen OUMNH J.50146, a paddle and vertebral column that had been obtained by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas James Birch. [62] Christopher McGowan has hypothesised that this specimen had originally been much more complete and had been collected by Anning, during the winter of 1820/1821. If so, it would have been Anning's next major discovery, providing essential information about the newly recognised type of marine reptile. No records by Anning of the find are known. [63] The paper thanked Birch for giving Conybeare access to it, but does not mention who discovered and prepared it. [58] [63] Cast of Plesiosaurus macrocephalus found by Mary Anning in 1830, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris

In 1642 the earthwork was again remodelled and saw yet another function, this time one of war. The Parliamentarians turned it into an artillery fort guarding the southern flank along Weymouth Road where the Royalists were thought to be advancing.Mary Anning [3] was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset, England, on 21 May 1799. [4] Her father, Richard Anning ( c.1766–1810), was a cabinetmaker and carpenter who supplemented his income by mining the coastal cliff-side fossil beds near the town, and selling his finds to tourists; her mother was Mary Moore ( c.1764–1842) known as Molly. [5] Anning's parents married on 8 August 1793 in Blandford Forum and moved to Lyme, living in a house built on the town's bridge. They attended the Dissenter chapel on Coombe Street, whose worshippers initially called themselves independents and later became known as Congregationalists. Shelley Emling writes that the family lived so near to the sea that the same storms that swept along the cliffs to reveal the fossils sometimes flooded the Annings' home, on one occasion forcing them to crawl out of an upstairs bedroom window to avoid drowning. [6] Blue plaque where Mary Anning was born and had her first fossil shop, now the Lyme Regis Museum 1842 sketch of Anning's house Mary Channing". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/67091. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Come and join the chairman and academic director of the Thomas Hardy Society in a talk about Mary Channing.

Anning served as inspiration for Sarah Perry's fossil-hunting protagonist, Cora, in the 2016 novel The Essex Serpent.Bourgault, Jerome (20 June 2012). "Tongue Twisters: She Sells Sea Shells…". Archived from the original on 20 September 2016 . Retrieved 29 August 2016. a b "Appeal launched for Mary Anning statue in Lyme Regis". BBC News. 23 November 2020 . Retrieved 25 February 2021. Royal Mint to commemorate fossil hunter Mary Anning". The Guardian. 25 February 2021 . Retrieved 25 February 2021. Like its more famous prototype, the Colosseum, this spot of sombre records has also been the scene of Christian worship, but only on one occasion, so far as the writer of these columns is aware, that being the Thanksgiving service for Peace a few years ago. The surplices of the clergy and choristers, as seen against the green grass, the shining brass musical instruments, the enormous chorus of singing voices, formed not the least impressive of the congregated masses that Maumbury Ring has drawn into its midst during its existence of a probable eighteen hundred years in its present shape, and of some possible thousands of years in an earlier form.