Two Little Ladies, One Body: Meet the Biddenden Maids of the 12th Century

by Stephen J. Gertz

A Short But Concise Account of Elizabeth and Mary Chulkhurst
…Commonly Called the Biddenden Maids.
Tenterden, Kent: James Weston, 1811.

Born to parents of means in the year 1100, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst - the Biddenden Maids - were joined at the hips and shoulders. They are considered to be one of the earliest genuine cases of conjoined twins on record.

"They were naturally very close friends, although they sometimes disagreed in minor matters, and had 'frequent quarrels, which sometimes terminated in blows'" (Anon. Antiquarian Repertory, vol. I. London: F Blyth,1775:17, as cited in Bondeson, J., The Biddenden Twins: A Curious Chapter in the History of Conjoined Twins, in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Volume 85 April 1992, p. 217).

Detail from above broadside.

In 1134, Mary died after a sudden illness. When it was proposed that Eliza be surgically separated from her dead sister, Eliza refused. "As we came together we will also go together." She died six hours later.

Upon their death, they left parcels of land in Biddenden to the church wardens of that parish, the annual rent for which was annually doled to the local poor. For many years, every Easter Sunday the Maid's charity distributed bread, cheese, and beer to the less fortunate. Ongoing for centuries,  by the early nineteenth century the Biddenden Twin's charity was distributing near 1000 Biddenden cakes and 300 quartern loaves of bread and cheese in proportion.

Plaster cast of an early biscuit stamp.

As reported in 1895, "the income now amounts to about £40, and, as may be supposed, such a sum is sufficient to put Biddenden into a state of festivity for one day in the year. Visitors from neighboring places flocked to the village, which was turned into a kind of fair after the services in the church had been celebrated…There are two distributions under the will of the united sisters. In the first place, 1,000 hard-baked rolls, each stamped with a representation of the foundresses of the feast, were distributed among the visitors who might be in want of refreshment. They are very durable, as they are hard as wood, and may be kept as curiosities for twenty years. It would take the same time to digest them if eaten….The ceremony finished, many of the visitors attempted to soften their cakes in Kentish ale, and passed the rest of the day in Old World conviviality. Biddenden then resumed the quietude which it will retain until the memory of its twin sisters is celebrated next Easter Day" (New York Times, June 6, 1895).

From the Antiquarian Repertory, Volume One.
London: F. Blyth, 1775:17.

There has been some question about whether the traditional story of the twins is apocryphal or authentic. The incidence of twins conjoined in two places, at hips and shoulders, is extremely rare and most teratologists dismiss the possibility. Later historians were of the opinion that if the Biddenden Maids lived at all it was during the 16th or 17th century.

Yet what was reported as conjoinment at the  hips and shoulders was, in all likelihood, simply  due to the custom of twins conjoined at the hips to walk with their  arms around each others' shoulders; they only appeared to be joined at that place, too.

The Biddenden Maids, Gentleman's Magazine, 1869.

As far as Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst living much later than the 12th century, "the Maids [are] not mentioned in any of the major teratological works of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as those by Aldrovandi, Liceti, Pare,Schenckius and others. Nor [are] they noticed in the Philosophical Transactions or any other British collection of teratological descriptions. This is an argument against the opinion that they lived in the 16th or 17th century, since most other remarkable monsters that reached maturity occasioned much publicity in the popular and scientific works of this period"  (Op cit Bondeson, p. 220).

Date unknown.

Further, "a medieval historical chronicle, the Chronicon Scotorum, tells us that in AD 1099, a woman gave birth to 'two children together, in this year, and they had but one body from the breast to the navel, and they were two girls'. In the Irish chronicle Annals of the Four Masters is an almost identical description, although the conjoined twin girls are stated to have been born in 1103; in the Annals of Clonmacnoise their year of birth is given as AD 1100. These ancient descriptions are unreliable in details and probably dependent on each other, but in spite of this, they add some credibility to the old tradition that the Biddenden Maids were really born in 1100" (Op cit Bondeson, p. 221).

Biddenden Maids' Biscuit, c. 1902.

We refer and defer to newspaperman, Dutton Peabody, who, when he learned the truth, responded to Ransom Stoddard, the putative Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

And when the legendary biscuit becomes a real jawbreaker, eat the legend.

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Broadside image courtesy of James Eaton of  Alastor Rare Books, currently offering this extreme rarity, with our thanks.

Image of 1902 biscuit courtesy of England: The Other Within. Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, with our thanks.
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The Monsters Among Us (1665)

 by Stephen J. Gertz

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.
Guillermo del Toro

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich 

I strongly suspect Guillermo del Toro will love this book. Ms. Rich might want to rethink her sleeping arrangements.

In the ancient world, both the sophisticated and the credulous, and the knowing and the ignorant, believed in monsters. Monsters were considered a part of the natural world, representing punishment for sin or the diversity and fecundity of life. In a world whose religions and mythology accepted belief in demons, spirits, the afterlife of ancestors into the present, and legendary beasts, monsters fit right into the scheme of things.

During the Renaissance in the West, with its revival of ancient learning and lore, and curiosity and quest to discover all that could be known about the world, the emerging flood of  information about new lands and animals created a sense that anything was possible. Within that context, human and animal monstrosities were considered probable, the consequence of human vice, curses, human and animal sexual congress, or magic.

Curious natural objects such as strangely shaped horns, fossils, skins, and minerals, human artifacts such as gravel stones from the bladder, and Siamese twins (not then known as Siamese twins) were all subjects for allegory and commentary. Folklore, cultural history, medicine, morality stories, and scientific curiosity mingled together, as reflected in the thinking of the seventeenth century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and the works of his assistant, Gaspar Schott.

The fervor over fantastic creatures began with Fortunato Liceti’s 1616 volume, De Monstris, not the first but certainly the most influential and respected survey of such, reissued in 1634 in a second edition edited by Flemish anatomist Gerard Blasius (1626-1692). This edition, the first to include illustrations, was certainly seen by Kircher. Schott's classic, Physica Curiosa (1st ed. 1662), based upon Kircher's notes and observations, deals with the marvels and curiosities of natural history and myth, including monsters.

Indeed, Physica Curiosa contains engravings (by a different hand) of some of the same "monsters" found here, i.e., the elephant man at p. 582 of Physica Curiosa (1662) is seen here at page 185;  others, such as those seen in the plate at page 593 in Schott, are here in the engravings on pages fifty-eight and sixty; and more.

Figure Explanation
A  A shamed woman's genitals.
B A membrane of the flesh, feeling shame, a church
attached to a woman  firmly on all sides, after childbirth
becoming too much like a purse, flaccid...

Treatises by other learned writers appeared in the wake of Liceti’s De Monstris, and soon museums and collections of curiosities in which monstrosities took a central, edifying role became popular throughout Europe, often enjoying courtly patronage; Kircher's museum at the Collegio Romano in Rome drew visitors from around Europe. Pygmies, mermaids, crocodiles, mandrakes, deformed fetuses, and other natural marvels were displayed and discussed in many similar places throughout the seventeenth century. They were the menageries, side-shows, the circus freak-shows of their era, evoking fear, wonder, fascination, and repulsion, proto-Barnum museums without the crassness and ballyhoo that Phineas  T. brought to the subject in the nineteenth century.

Liceti (1577-1657), however, took a different, more nuanced, positive view of the origins of monstrosities.

"The Paduan physician Liceti contested the 'vulgar' opinion that identified monsters with errors or failures in the course of nature. Liceti likened nature to an artist who, faced with some imperfection in the materials to be shaped, ingeniously creates another form still more admirable.

"On this view, monsters revealed nature not as frustrated in her aims but as rising to the challenge of recalcitrant matter, a constricted womb, or even a mixture of animal and human seed. 'It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art,' wrote Liceti, 'because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can,'" (Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature).

Lazarus Colloredo and his parasitic twin, Johannes.

"One of the earliest classifications of deformities Liceti's work was still under review in works on malformation in the 19th century. Includes both real and imaginary cases [as Physica Curiosa] and accurate descriptions of cases observed in the years following the first edition" (Garrison & Morton).

The Satyr Indica, aka an Orangutan.

This, the second illustrated edition (1665), is the most desirable, the first edition to  contain Gerard Blasius' fifty-three page Appendix of new and rare monstrosities including an additional fifteen engravings absent in the first illustrated edition of 1634, not the least of which are the famous plates of Lazarus and his parasitic twin, and the Satyr Indica, an orangutan mistaken for a deformed human, and the earliest, it appears, depiction of that now endangered primate.

Alas, this copy, as with most of this book and so many other antiquarian volumes with famous, wondrous and stunning illustrations ripe for excision, lacks a key plate. We have, however, with the covert assistance of a secret agent librarian at a major institution, gained possession of  a reproduction of the missing plate, an ominous portent of monsters too frightening to contemplate living amongst us as jus’ folks, the family of man corrupted by a family of monsters in our midst:

Televisionicum Familia Munstris, w/strange blond humanoid at right.

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LICETI, Fortunio. De Monstris. Ex recensione Gerardi Blasii, M.D. & P.P. Qui Monstra quaedam nova & rariora ex recentiorum scriptis addidit. Editio Novissima. Iconibus illustrata. Amsterdam: Sumptibus Andrae Frisii, 1665. Second illustrated edition (third, overall; first edition 1616; second and first illustrated, 1634), complete. Quarto. [16], 316, [28] pp [*4(f 1 as frontispiece), **4, ***1, A-z4, Aa-Pp4, Qq8, Rr-Tt4]. Seventy-three woodcut engravings.

Garrison & Morton 534.52. Osler 3235. Wellcome III, 514. Thorndike VII, pp. 52-53. Waller 5779. Rosenthal, Bibl. Magica 4375.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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