The busk they carved

October 21, 2026

A pale wooden busk on a wooden table, a heart against the wood.

In 1675 someone in England carved a wooden busk and cut a question into the back. It asks why he should not love a woman named Fransys.

A busk was the stiff piece in the centre front of a pair of stays. A gallery label of 2016 at the Victoria and Albert Museum says that busks shaped and reinforced that front, and that they were made from whalebone, wood and bone. They were often inscribed with names, dates and symbols of love, the label says, because they were positioned close to the heart. The piece was slipped into the front of the stays, and it stayed there while they were worn. A name, a date and one sentence would fit.

The busk made for Fransys is in that museum, numbered W.56-1929. It is carved wood, and it curves in two directions. It is 38.7 centimetres long. The width runs from 2 to 2.6 centimetres, and the thickness from 6 to 9 millimetres. In profile the lower end curves out by 5 centimetres. Viewed from the front, it curves 2 centimetres to one side. Hearts and other motifs are cut into the rounded front. There is a narrow lip at each end, rounded at the smaller end and finished with a double bow at the other. The words are on the back: “WONC A QVSHON I WAS ASKED WHICH MAD ME RETVRN THESE ANSVRS THAT ISAAC LOVFED RABEKAH HIS WIFE AND WHY MAY NOT I LOVE FRANSYS.” The museum reads it as “Once a question I was asked, which made me return these answers: that Isaac loved Rebekah, his wife, and why may not I love Fransys?”

A pale wooden busk on a windowsill, a heart against the wood, a village street outside.

Under the question the carver cut “GENSIS XXIIII VERS 67” and the year 1675. The museum takes the verse as Genesis 24:67, and quotes the King James Bible: “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” The busk is on display in the British Galleries, Room 56. Nothing else is known about Fransys.

Some later busks keep only the initials and the day. One of wood, numbered T.674-1996, was made in England in 1755. It is 35 centimetres long and 4 centimetres wide, scratched with circles, stars and hearts, and stained red in places. At the bottom are the initials E.B. and the year. Three lines on the back are now indistinct. Mrs M. Hulse gave it to the museum. Another, numbered T.345-1921, is wood with a triangular section, pricked, with small paintings set under glass: flowers, hearts, the initials S and D, and the date “July ye 20th 1796”. The round pane over the date is cracked.

A name still fitted. A busk numbered 675-1902 is greenish-grey whalebone, cut with a cupid’s bow, a quiver and pierced hearts, and in the middle “Maria Cooke 1821”. The catalogue gives it as 15.125 inches long and 1.75 inches wide. Lieutenant Colonel G. B. Croft Lyons gave it to the museum. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, number ZBA1481 is bone from the lower jaw of a sperm whale. The museum gives the measurements as 1 by 36 by 350 millimetres. A hole is pierced at the top. A dove carries a letter over crossed olive branches and a British fort. In a diamond the line reads “THE CYRUS ARRIVED Octr 20th 1833”. Under that are a church and a bird on a branch, and the reverse is a right whale. The museum says the Cyrus of 1799, Captain Hingston, was a London whaler that returned to Gravesend on 20 October from the southern ocean, and that her owners then were Jarvis & Co. The museum says the design indicates a love token. The line does not give her name. It gives the day the ship came in.

A busk has room for a name, a date and one sentence. The sentence sat at the front of the stays, close to the heart. Fransys’s asks why he should not love her. The wood has kept it.