Final Update (Reflection Forthcoming!)

I'm up a bit early on this, my last day of undergraduate classes, to provide one last update on my progress before closing this blog with a reflection piece on what I've done so far, which will be out a bit later this weekend. To my annoyance and disappointment, I discovered some serious formatting problems with my lists that I've had to spend rather a lot of time going back to fix. The lists still are not in the complete and final form in which they would be published/released, but after dealing with some of the format problems (involving a bunch of wrongly entered numbers of Establishment Books and some confusion on proper abbreviations) I think they're at least in a format that will be more useful to Professor Bucholz (or even me) in the future in constructing the more polished versions of the lists.  I've unfortunately not been left with enough time to get into the Notitiae that I've been hoping to get into for weeks now. I'm particularly frustrated with myself since I feel like if I'd not made the mistakes with the layout of the lists in the first place, I likely could have finished all of the raw info gathering and begun to get down to reorganizing the lists for presentation. Still, the raw data gathering was a substantial task that took me the better part of the time I've devoted to this project, and seeing the pages upon pages of names, dates, and positions is some satisfaction, at least. At this point, since I don't like leaving a job like this undone, I may ask Professor Bucholz for the Notitiae so I can put together the final (or at least a more final) version of the lists over the summer, but for now I'm just putting the last few touches on the lists for Caroline and George before sending them in for his evaluation. On that note, I've got to get back to work polishing up what I've got, so I'll close with this Interesting Historical Tidbit(!!!!!!!!) I came across several weeks ago while going through the lists of Prince George's Household, but was reminded of yesterday going over a section of the list:
The Turnbrooch
I came across this position in Prince George's kitchen staff, along with cool sounding positions like Yeoman Cook and Soyl-Carrier for the Kitchen. The Establishment Book listed two Turnbrooches, Thomas Carpenter and Timothy Poole. Their job, possibly the least interesting in the kitchen, was to sit around and turn the meat that was roasting on a spit, which took a while. Fortunately for Thomas and Timothy, they were compensated for their spit-spinning efforts with an annual salary of 30 pounds, which wasn't a bad salary at all for a working person in the 1710s.

A merry young Turnbrooch happily plying his craft.

Source for Turnbrooch Info
Image Source
Interesting Wage Comparison Source