![]() Their name came from the barbaric practice at each meeting of decapitating and eat a calf, which members treated as a stand in for Charles. ![]() Members were said to gather on 30 January every year, the same day the former king was beheaded in 1649. The Calves' Head Club were one of London's most controversial secret societies, emerging in London in the second half of the 17th century, and dedicated to mocking the execution of Charles I. The Calves' Head Club A Description of the Calve's Head Club © Trustees of the British Museum ![]() They continue to be a subject of discussion alongside the conspiracy theories that emerged in the aftermath of Marlowe's murder, many of which continue to be debated to this day. As so much secrecy continues to surround the School of Night, what happened to the society afterwards remains unknown. Before he could be tried on any charges, Marlowe was killed later that same month in Deptford, in circumstances which still remain mysterious. On, a warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest after the playwright Thomas Kyd claimed he had been responsible for writing a text viewed as 'heretical', found in Kyd's own home. At the time, the expression of atheist beliefs was not only illegal people were burned at the stake for it. Many notable figures, including Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh, were rumoured to be members of The School of Night, an underground society whose work allegedly included explorations of alchemy, as well as the discussion of atheism. But some of these authors were said to have an additional form of connection than just their profession. Late 16th century London was one of the literary peaks in the capital's history an era which saw Shakespeare and many of the greatest English Renaissance writers at the height of their fame and accomplishment. We also claim that the rock was made and controlled by members of “secret societies” and that the abundance of rock art sites in more cooperative timber-rich regions should be seen as an outcome of political/ritual interactions with elites from more coercive areas (Figure 4.1).1. Moreover, we theorize that aggrandizing households sponsoring boat building and timber extraction also reaped many benefits stemming from the capturing of slaves. In doing so, they could control labour, raw materials, skills, and surplus production over large areas. They established transregional networks that linked and controlled interaction and exchange between regions with varied forms of environments and social organizations, spanning from more coercive to cooperative social settings (Feinman 2017). Thus, in order secure boats for long-distance exchange of metals and other exotica, the said political sodalities established trade confederacies, alliances, and colonies between rich agro-pastoral regions (more coercive) and regions rich in timber (more cooperative) – the latter ones famous for its rock art. We hypothesize that this sodality functioned as types of “secret society” as described by Hayden (2018). These elite households were organized into supra regional political sodalities that controlled political power, surplus production, debt, exchange, feasts, and warfare as well as ritual and religious means. We put forth the Supra Regional Interaction Hypothesis to explain how elite households were able to consolidate political power through their involvement in boat building, timber extraction, long-distance exchange, and raiding for slaves with the goal of financing trading expeditions to secure coveted metals. This chapter posits the processes that favored the rise of ranked polities in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age.
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