5 Daedalus’s Rose: a fairly complicated procedure devised by Martin Pale for preserving emotions, vices and virtues in amber or honey or beeswax. When the preserving medium is warmed, the imprisoned qualities are released. The Rose has – or rather had – a huge number of applications. It could be used to dispense courage to oneself or inflict cowardice on one’s enemy; it could provoke love, lust, nobility of purpose, anger, jealousy, ambition, self-sacrifice, etc., etc.

6 Like many spells with unusual names, the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded. The ladies of the title were only a kind of woodland flower which was used in a spell to bind a fairy’s powers. The flower was required to be stripped of leaves and petals – hence the “unrobing”.

7 Stokesey’s Vitrification turns objects – and people – to glass.

63 The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache

1 It has often been observed that the Northern English, though never wavering in their loyalty to John Uskglass, do not always treat him with the respect he commands in the south. In fact Uskglass’s subjects take a particular delight in stories and ballads that shew him at a decided disadvantage, c.f. the tale of John Uskglass and the Charcoal Burner of Ullswater or the tale of the Hag and the Sorceress. There are many versions of the latter (some of them quite vulgar); it tells how Uskglass almost lost his heart, his kingdoms and his power to a common Cornish witch.

2 Like John Uskglass, the Magician of Athodel ruled his own island or kingdom. Athodel seems to have been one of the Western Isles of Scotland. But either it has sunk or else it is, as some people think, invisible. Some Scottish historians like to see Athodel as evidence of the superiority of Scottish magic over English; John Uskglass’s kingdom, they argue, has fallen and is in the hands of the Southern English, whereas Athodel remains independent. Since Athodel is both invisible and inaccessible this is a difficult proposition to prove or disprove.

3 In the tale of John Uskglass and the Charcoal Burner of Ullswater, Uskglass engages in a contest of magic with a poor charcoal-burner and loses. It bears similarities to other old stories in which a great ruler is outwitted by one of his humblest subjects and, because of this, many scholars have argued that it has no historical basis.

4 At the engravers’ house in Spitalfields in the early spring of 1816, Strange had told Childermass, “One can never help one’s training, you know …”

Childermass had had several careers before he became Mr Norrell’s servant and adviser. His first was as a highly talented child pick-pocket. His mother, Black Joan, had once managed a small pack of dirty, ragged child-thieves that had worked the towns of the East Riding in the late 1770s.

5 A Yorkshire word meaning “cloth”.

64 Two versions of Lady Pole