18th-century doodle from the MERL

@theMERL/YouTube

Twitter is obsessed with this 230-year-old doodle of a chicken in pants

This is so relatable.

Photo of Nahila Bonfiglio 

Nahila Bonfiglio

Internet Culture

Posted on Oct 11, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 4:22 am CDT

We’ve all been there. Bored in class, we tune out the teacher’s lecture and doodle mindless scribbles off the edge of our paper. It comes with being a teenager, and pages unearthed and shared on Twitter by the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) show that this trend did not start recently. Pictures of 230-year-old doodles from an 18th-century teenager’s math homework show us that teens never really change.

Richard Beale was the 13-year-old artist behind several idle doodles shared over the weekend by Adam Koszary, MERL’s program manager. The discovery began with a box of what looked like 18th-century diaries from Kent. Only one of them wasn’t a diary, it was Richard Beale’s mathematics book.

“Every generation of the Beale family had a Richard, and we think the one who owned this book was 13-years-old in 1784,” MERL’s Twitter page wrote.

“If Richard was indeed the 13-year-old,” the posts continue, “he had a beautiful hand. His mathematics are laid out like a dream. But, like every teenager, mathematics couldn’t fill the void of Richard’s heart.

“Richard doodled.”

The museum’s official Twitter page shared several of Richard’s doodles, most of his dog. It all culminated in one truly beautiful doodle of a chicken in trousers.

It turns out that Richard may even have had inspiration for his dapper fowl, and no, it wasn’t a live chicken wearing pants. Probably.

It was the crest of a town in the Netherlands called “Hensbroek,” which literally means “Hen pants.” The coat of arms sports, you guessed it, a hen in lovely yellow slacks.

 

The online response was prompt and overwhelming. People love a good chicken in pants, apparently.

The thread even reached J.K. Rowling, who was so tickled she joked about writing her next series about a chicken who wears trousers.

“This thread is truly wonderful,” the bestselling author wrote. When asked by @TheMERL to make her next series “track the adventures of a chicken who wears trousers,” she responded with, “Way ahead of you. He’s best friends with a duck in a balaclava.”

Koszary, who runs the Twitter page, told the Guardian that the archives are full of items like this and that he hoped the tweets would “get people to come and use them.”

“When you see a 13-year-old from the 18th century doing the kind of doodles that kids are doing today, it is so relatable—there’s an instant connection,” he said. “Also, there’s the fact it’s just so stupid.”

Its hard to say where Richard found the inspiration for his timeless doodles, but one thing we know for sure? This museum’s Twitter game is on point.

H/T Jezebel

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*First Published: Oct 11, 2018, 11:26 am CDT

Nahila Bonfiglio

Nahila Bonfiglio reports on geek culture and gaming. Her work has also appeared on KUT's Texas Standard (Austin), KPAC-FM (San Antonio), and the Daily Texan.

Nahila Bonfiglio