Wallington’s ‘Anatomy’

From previous posts it’s clear I’m a great fan of Nehemiah Wallington, the puritan wood-turner in London who recorded his inner thoughts and everyday experience in extensive notebooks, made accessible through David Booy’s edited selection. I’m also fascinated by early modern memento mori culture (which is hardly surprising given my PhD was supervised by Nigel Llewellyn, author of The Art of Death).

Memento mori texts, art and objects reminded people of the transience of life and the inevitability of death, as a form of spiritual exercise. As Llewellyn established, this culture was ubiquitous across media and so it occupies a central place in our recent book, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, particularly in chapter 6 focusing on the experience of the chamber at night.

There we discuss Wallington’s investment in memento mori materials. In the year of his marriage, 1621, he notes:

‘I purposed to begin a new life, and I renewed my promises with my God but failed in keepeing of them exceedingly for which I was so perplexed in mind that now I was desirous to die and yet some tims in feare of death[.] So then I was given to bye Books consarning death[:] on[e] booke Learne to Die and death advantage and funarall sarmons, and many such lik book[.]’[1]

As well as being engaged with the body of writing on the nature and practice of the good Christian death, Wallington also invested in memento mori objects. He continues:

‘And I tooke a grat delight to by pickters of Death, but above all I was at grate charge in bying Anotime of Death and a little black coffin to put it in, and upon it written Meemento Mory[.] And this I had to stand upon a ginstoul by my bedsid every night and some meals to stand upon or by my Table. All this was to put me in mind and feet me for death. After this an honest man knowing of it did tell me it was superstition, shewing me it was a sine[.] And then I was not in quiet till I had made it away[.]‘^[2]

In our book, we suggest that this ‘anatomy’ of death (a skeleton) with its little black coffin bought by Wallington and placed on his bedside table (jointstool) every night might have resembled the celebrated Torre Abbey jewel in the V&A – while noting that this pendant is far too fine and elite to reflect Wallington’s purchase. As always, discoveries post-publication emerge and a chance hit on the Wellcome collection website suggested a much closer match for Wallington’s ‘superstitious’ object:

Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

It is a carved figure of a corpse in a wooden coffin, identified as Italian and 16^th century in date. Such sculptures were likely circulating throughout Europe and underline how memento mori culture was shared across regions and the religious divide. The Italian connection and Latin inscription might, however, indicate why Wallington’s friend (the ‘honest man’) saw this object as superstitious, encouraging him to get rid of it.

Wallington mentioned he placed his ‘meals’ (food, snacks) next to this anatomy, presumably for the interval between his first and second sleep.[3] The graphic detail of worms eating the belly of the corpse must have made this association between foodstuffs all the more profound.

Midnight snack anyone?

 

[1] David Booy (ed), Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection (Ashgate, 2007), p.270.

[2] Booy (ed), Notebooks, p.271.

[3] On ‘segmented sleep’ see Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, Yale University Press, 2016.

#MiddlingCulture

We’re delighted to announce our next big project…

The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort: writing and material culture, 1560-1660

What was Shakespeare looking at when he wrote? What kind of room was he in? How was it decorated and furnished? What was he sitting on, resting on? Where did these materials come from, who bought them and how much did they cost? What could he hear inside and outside the house? What food could he smell cooking elsewhere in the building? What could he look forward to doing once he finished his work? What other types of text might he have written that don’t survive? How similar was he to his neighbours in these practices?

David Mitchell as Shakespeare in the BBC series, Upstart Crow.  The room looks a little dull but they may be right about the chicken…!

We tend to treat writing as an intellectual rather than a located practice. But our environments condition our behaviour and thinking and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writing took place in domestic and civic spaces that also reflected other forms of cultural engagement, taste and habits. Few of these spaces retain their original form or appearance, so we need to reconstruct them in order to explore their impact.

First-floor room in an extension of c.1620 to urban house from Reigate, now re-erected at the Weald & Downloand Living Museum. We’re going to fill it with things – digitally!

The project is not especially concerned with Shakespeare – he is one of several examples of ‘middling writers’ we are interested in. We will examine the wider cultural lives and material investment of a range of people, including preachers, jobbing authors, urban administrators, poets and biographers, who were relatively well off and had status in their local communities, but were not members of the court or county elite. Surprisingly little research has engaged with the full cultural experience of this middling level of society – how their writing related to their wider aesthetic choices, purchases and patterns of living, relations that would have created a particular form of social identity.

Detail of sixteenth-century wall painting from Church Street, Ledbury

Understanding the nature of this cultural identity – how their literary, artistic and material production and consumption related to one another – lets us examine fully the creative environment in which the writers grew up and participated. But our project also allows us to reach beyond these well-known figures, to explore the impact of those environments on their wives, mothers, sisters, apprentices and servants – individuals for whom a classical grammar school education was not a possibility, but who nevertheless experienced its impact in the domestic and urban environments in which they lived and worked – for example as books in the household, sayings or images painted on the walls.

Portrait of Joene Goldstone, a prominent citizen’s wife of Gloucester, 1570s, oil on panel, Gloucestershire Museums.

This is a three-year project, funded by the AHRC, working together with Graeme Earl at King’s College London and with our partner organisations, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and The Weald & Downland Living Museum. There’s more information on the project website here.

The project launches in April 2019…. We are currently advertising for two Postdoctoral Research Associates: details of the first, based at Kent is available here. The second position, based at Birmingham, will be advertised shortly.

A Day at Home in Early Modern England: exclusive taster!

We’re delighted to announce that our co-authored book, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: material culture and domestic life 1500-1700 will be published by Yale University Press on 3 October.

On the front cover is a drawing from the Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This domestic scene is used by Trevelyon to illustrate ‘the malice of a woman’. A scolding wife stands over her subservient husband who is winding yarn while, in the background, a shocked neighbour walks in to discover such disorderly housekeeping. The image represents our book’s concern with gendered work within the household, and the social significance and scrutiny of domestic matters at the middling level.

The remarkable openness of the domestic to the community is made plain in the many court depositions we examine in the book. An ecclesiastical court case of c.1619 from Bishampton, a village near Worcester, did not end up in the book but it offers a fascinating window onto early modern domestic life (quite literally) and serves as a little taster of A Day at Home.

The case, Smith v Fareley, concerns two women and is prompted by a pew dispute – fascinating on its own terms – but as background to this dispute we learn about a slander.¹ Where this insult takes place provides a good deal of information about the visibility (and aural porosity) of domestic life.

The depositions first describe an incident whereby on a Sunday around Whitsun 1619 during evening prayer one Ann Fareley took it upon herself to sit in a seat ‘in which Jane Smith… had sat for many years’. Smith’s seat ‘was her right by her house’ and, as one deponent placed it ‘the uppermost seat except one, in the row in which the women sit’. This position close to the front of the church suggests that Jane Smith was a housewife of some status in the community of Bishopton, occupying the seat by right of her house, which before her was attached ‘to the occupier of the house in which she lives’. Ann’s lower status reflects that of her husband, who is not a settled householder, but lives with his father.² At the time of the tussle over the seat, Jane was pregnant. According to Dorothy Hay, a 40 year old farmer’s wife who occupied a pew near to Jane Smith’s, when Jane tried to enter her seat Ann wouldn’t let her, ‘putting her foot up on the opposite bench’. After the service Jane showed some neighbours the inward side of her thigh ‘which appeared to be of a black or blwysh color’ caused apparently by ‘the violent and forcible thrusting of Ann forth of her pewe’.

Further depositions suggest this incident was part of a longer campaign of abuse. Several deponents described how a few months earlier, on the Tuesday before Palm Sunday, Ann Fareley had insulted Jane Smith in her home. According to Jane’s 19 year old servant, Joanna, ‘her master and dame being at supper, The defendant then standing at the plaintiffes window overhearing there[their] speeches in very violent and malicious manner said unto the plaintiff Come up yow Lyeing whore, yow mangy whore sayeing that is one of thy old Lyes often tymes calling her the plaintiff whore wi[th] ill addicions which wordes were spoken at the wyndow of the plaintiffes dwelling howse in Bishampton in the hearing of this deponent[,] Edward Stevens and John Gawe’. Edward Stevens was also in the Smith’s service and in his deposition agreed that Ann was ‘then standing on the owtside [of] the wyndow’.

Woodcut included in ballad, ‘A good throw for three Maiden-heads’, London, 1629.

John Gawe[actually Gaywood],  a farmer, described what he saw of this incident as, on his way home, he ‘passed close by the plaintiffes husbandes howse … And as he was passing by he sawe Anne Fareley the defendant in the plaintiffes yeard nere to the wyndow of his [Smith’s] dwelling howse At which tyme this deponent heard the said defendant call Jane Smith divers and sundry tymes whore very maliciously And this deponent reproving her for so calling her in her owne yeard she grewe very impacient with this deponent’.

This case reveals a great deal, then, about housing conditions within this village setting. The Smiths must have occupied one of the more substantial yeomen houses within this village according to their customary seat in church and because they were of a status to employ two servants (at least). Yet access to this property was evidently quite open; John Gaywood passed close by his neighbour’s house on his route home from work and could see into his yard where Ann Fareley was standing outside a window. That window obviously gave onto the Smith’s hall or parlour where they were having supper and the ‘speeches’ between Smith and his wife as overheard by Ann seemingly prompted her malicious words. That window was presumably fully open, if glazed, but was more likely unglazed with shutters. Pendean farmhouse from Midhurst re-erected at the Weald & Downland museum is an example of a farmhouse built on a modern house plan with integrated chimneystack c.1600 but with unglazed windows.

Pendean Farmhouse from Midhurst, Sussex, built 1609 now re-erected at the Weald Downland Museum to reflect its original form, including unglazed windows.

Why Ann was standing there within the yard of Smith’s house is not explained. It is possible she was involved in day work for the Smiths; this might explain why she had a particular grievance against Jane as her mistress. But perhaps no explanation for Ann’s seemingly intrusive presence is needed since such scrutiny of the domestic affairs of others was expected, indeed encouraged, during this period.³ The rich painted wall decoration of halls and parlours – a common feature of interiors in the first half of the 17^th century – could, therefore, have been intended to impress passers by as much as social peers.

How the Smiths’ dining space was decorated is not known but if it resembled decoration elsewhere then Ann might have been gazing in upon a space adorned with phrases in black letter text such as:

‘to his neighbour doth none ill in body, goods or name / Nor willingly doth move false tales, which might empair the same / That in his heart regardeth not, malicious wicked men / But those that love and feare the Lord, he maketh much of them.’ [From The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into English Meter, first published 1562]

One of the black letter texts based on a selection of psalms and proverbs in the painted decoration of a first floor room at 1 Church Street, Ledbury.

Such texts from Psalms and Proverbs were common in the painted decoration of the best rooms in middling houses. Despite Ann’s unseemly disruption of their supper, the Smiths could take consolation from their superior social and moral status as householders.

Watch this space for more on domestic wall paintings, coming soon…

 

¹ Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, Worcester, Deposition Books, 794.052, vols 6-8 (1612-29).

² On the relationship between social status and church seating see C. Marsh, ‘Order and Place in England, 1580-1640: The View from the Pew’, Journal of British Studies 44.1 (2005), pp.3-26. On the gendered significance of church seating see Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer, 2007).

³ Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford University Press, 2007);

 

Daily Lives and Daily Routines

Looking forward to the European Social Science History Conference that will take place from 4 – 7 April 2018 in Belfast. We’re speaking in a session organized by Gudrun Andersson (Uppsala University) and Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘Daily Lives and Daily Routines: Spaces, Practices and Material Cultures, c.1650–1850’.

Our co-presented paper is: ‘Middling domestic routines in seventeenth-century England’

Here’s the abstract:

This paper explores a wide range of evidence for the material construction of domestic routines amongst a particular group in ‘early early modern’ England, the middling sort. As the social group most likely to be living and working within the household, broadly defined, undertaking practices associated with food processing, shop-keeping and craft skills, and professional identities, we explore the particular kind of interpenetration of domestic- and labour-orientated activity that they experienced on a daily basis. We do so within a particular context, that of the so-called ‘Great Rebuilding’ of houses across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exploring the routes, movements, practices and behaviours which shaped and were shaped by changing domestic forms. The paper will consider evidence of standing buildings, inventories, account books and diaries in particular, in order to position production and consumption practices within a new house shape, and determine the altered attitude towards both which it might have created in this period.

This later impression of a 16th century print raises several questions about the relationship between domestic space and domestic routine. This archetype of the multi-tasking industrious housewife locates gendered work and education/discipline in the hall as centre of the home. What was the impact of architectural and material changes to this central space, and the development of new spaces, on domestic practices and movements?

After Iconophobia

I may have been silent on this forum for a while but I have been blogging with my Reformation/visual arts hat on:

After Iconophobia: an online symposium

… hosted by the wonderful ‘many headed monster’ blog. Please visit and comment!

Books that don’t fit into the standard categories: a celebration

One of the most gratifying comments in response to the publication of Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life (Bloomsbury, 2016) is that it doesn’t “quite fit into the standard categories” (San Diego book review). A collaboration between researchers in the History department of the University of Birmingham and The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, this edited book aims to showcase some of the early modern artefacts from the Trust’s extensive museum collection with interpretation inspired by recent research in material culture studies.

The book develops from almost a decade of knowledge exchange activities, including a blogging project ‘Shakespeare’s World in 100 Objects’, which treats a single object from SBT’s collection in each blog. The challenge for us in translating and channeling this team research and public engagement into a print publication was the issue of how to create a coherent narrative thread through which to examine in a sustained form a disparate group of material objects; items traditionally separated and classified by media in museum displays and publications (that is, by categories such as rare books, ceramics, metalwares, manuscripts, textiles, paintings, furniture, engraving etc).

An Anglo-German oak box, possibly for storing medicines. STRST : SBT 2001-5.

A gentleman’s nightcap. STRST : SBT 1994-70.

Our solution was inspired by recent work on the relationship between material culture and the life cycle in early modern England. We had in mind, in particular, Nigel Llewellyn’s academic yet accessible book The Art of Death, published in 1991 to accompany an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and groundbreaking in its analysis of a wide-ranging but interconnected visual culture of death and remembrance. Since then, a good deal of scholarship has focused on the significance of crafted items in marking, negotiating and extending rites of passage in the life cycle such as birth, childhood, courtship, marriage and death.

The life cycle in early modern England was understood as a series of phases, based on the ancient concept of the Ages of Man. Shakespeare engages directly with this tradition in Jaques’ ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech from As You Like It. We therefore arranged our objects in groups to reflect these seven phases of life. This gave us the rationale through which to approach and interpret our selected objects; it proved remarkably easy to assign a phase of life to each of our objects, creating a sort of domino effect whereby interpretation of each object opened into the next, adding layers of meaning in the context of that particular phase of life, and moving the narrative on to the next. This is not, however, to suggest that understanding of these objects should be restricted to these themes and contexts; objects transcend fixed meaning and invite all kinds of personal reflection. As historians, however, we aim to make the mute and enigmatic material remains from the past explicable according to the social and cultural contexts that informed the circumstances of their making and use. The narrative of the life cycle seemed the most historically grounded and coherent interpretative apparatus through which to elucidate the significance of these items for Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

An example of the rich visual tradition on the ‘Ages of Man’ theme. A version of ‘The Staircase of the Ages’ by Cornelis Saftleven (1607-1681). University of Birmingham.

Reception to the book has been generally very positive, yet intriguingly quizzical. In straddling categories such as ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Decorative Art’ or ‘Craft’ it has evidently proved difficult to label or characterise. There is a sense of mild bemusement around the immortal Bard’s connection with “cushion covers, bodices and oak cupboards” as well as with its public engagement agenda (described as one of the ‘cuter mementoes’ published to coincide with the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in an overview in the Evening Standard).

Tapestry cushion panel. SBT 1993-31/299.

Its multifarious nature and applicability to unexpected fields is borne out by its appearance on certain Amazon Bestsellers lists, spanning ‘Poetry & Drama > Shakespeare, William’ but also – less predictably – ‘Media & Communication Industries > Press & Journalism’ and ‘Literary Theory & Movements’.

Oak cupboard. SBT L513.

Embroidered bodice. STRST : SBT 1993-35.

It seems to me that working collaboratively and across traditional disciplines will necessarily produce publications and other outputs that resist standard categories. Part of their role is to unsettle modes of thinking in silos, especially in relation to subjects long considered ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture and therefore mutually exclusive. I therefore take this comment as a ringing endorsement of our interdisciplinary approach and its published product.

*

Images Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Information about objects in the SBT’s collections, with downloadable images, is available online via the SBT’s new integrated catalogue: http://collections.shakespeare.org.uk/

Old Robert’s Girdle: The Incan Connection

In an essay published in a volume edited by Alec Ryrie and Jessica Martin, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (2012), I considered an account of a remarkable object known as ‘Old Robert’s Girdle’. It is described in William Hinde’s biography of the puritan householder John Bruen (1560–1625).* Hinde tells us that, despite being illiterate, a servant called ‘Old Robert’ was mighty in his knowledge of scripture. The key to this knowledge was a ‘strange Girdle’, which Robert apparently fashioned ‘for the help of his memory’. The girdle is described in some detail; made from leather it was long and large so that ‘for compass it would go twice about him’. The belt was then divided into partitions, like a carpenter’s rule, to represent every book of the Bible in order. Every chapter of each book was distinguished by a long ‘point’ (similar to a shoelace), with knots by fives or tens to identify the number of the chapter. Additional points served to divide the chapters into their particular parts, or verses. This device enabled Robert to recall any saying or sentence from the Bible and so he became ‘a godly Instructor’ to the household.

Hinde’s account of Robert’s girdle is an unusually detailed description of the appearance and function of an early modern crafted object and how it was used in particular circumstances and locations. Having been created to serve as a mnemonic device to aid Robert and the household in their command of scripture and sermons, the object’s biography also continued after Robert’s death: his Master, Bruen, thought the girdle worthy to be set up in his study as ‘a monument of Gods mercy’ and to represent ‘old Roberts both piety and industry’. Unfortunately, there is no indication what happened to the girdle after Bruen died – it is presumed lost, and so we are left with this fascinating, yet tantalizing, description.

Since writing about Robert’s Girdle, I came across another group of artefacts which bear a striking resemblance to the description provided by Hinde and which allow us to visualise what this extraordinary object might have looked like. I happened to watch a TV programme dedicated to Incan Khipu…

An Inca Quipu from the Larco Museum in Lima

A khipu – or quipu – is a series of knotted or coloured cotton cords. It consists of a main cord from which pendant cords hang, as well as pendants of pendants (called subsidiaries). The different kinds of knots tied in these pendants, together with other signifiers such as the numbers, positions and colours of the cords all had meaning, representing an immense amount of information. It is known that these knotted-string devices were used for bookkeeping and recording statistical information, most notably by the Inca but also by other peoples of the central Andes from ancient times.

There is considerable debate about the extent to which quipu were used to record narrative information (stories) as well as for administrative (numerical/statistical) purposes; it is possible these devices offered a way of storing and retrieving communal memory. After the Spanish conquest the quipu faded from use, replaced by European writing systems. But in many villages quipu were preserved and continued to function as important items for their local communities, but as revered items used in rituals relating to authority and office-holding rather than for recording information.

The presence of an object that might well have resembled these Incan artefacts as the focal point for communal practices in a noted puritan household takes us some way from the conventional understanding of post-Reformation religious practice as text-based and interiorized. Old Robert’s Girdle operated through physical, haptic interactions with tactile materials and facilitated social exchanges on religious matters. The Incan connection – the similarities with quipu – might help us to reconsider the nature of household religion in Protestant England and acknowledge its continued dependence on material props, that functioned not only as repositories of information and memory, but as special, ritual objects to bind communities together.

*William Hinde, A faithful Remonstrance: or the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen of Bruen-Stapleford, in the County of Chester, Esq., (London, 1641), pp.56-7.

The Early Modern Sleepover: A day (and night) at home in the Weald and Downland Museum

On a relatively warm summer’s evening a few weeks ago, as the visitors gradually disappeared from the Weald and Downland Museum, we watched the light fading through the massive windows in the hall of Bayleaf Farmhouse over a period of several hours – the best evening of the year. How lighting conditions influence the way we perceive and experience decorated domestic interiors was a key question for our Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior Network, 1500-1700. The museum gave us the opportunity to explore this further and directly thanks to a timely representation project. As Catherine has discussed in a previous post, the museum recently commissioned a new painted cloth from Melissa White, based on a mid 16^th century wall painting, for installation in Bayleaf’s hall, which is presented as it might have been around 1540. A grant from the University of Kent’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KIASH) provided support to create a film about the making and viewing of this cloth, including time-lapse photography to capture its changing appearance over the course of a day and night.

     

We were able to stay at Bayleaf overnight while the time-lapse filming took place and this provided an extraordinary opportunity to witness the cloth in natural and dimming light as well as by candlelight. This also meant treating the building as a place of accommodation rather than as a museum exhibit. We lit a fire in the hearth in the centre of the hall, read prayers to accompany the lighting of candles from Richard Day’s Booke of Christian Prayers (1578) ‘Great and thick darkness overwhelmeth our harts (O Lord,) until thy light do chase it away…’ and slept in the tester and truckle beds in the solar upstairs, with its unglazed, shuttered windows.

So, did time of day and lighting conditions change the way the new cloth looked? And what did our sleepover experience in a timber-framed hall house ‘in the raw’ (that is, without the accretions of subsequent ‘improvements’ and modern day comforts), contribute to our sense of how these buildings facilitated, accommodated, framed and structured early modern patterns of life?

Here are 8 things we found out that we didn’t know before:

1. The cloth appeared to glow by candlelight. No, really! What had seemed strong, vibrant colours in Melissa’s studio appeared more muted in situ, toning with the natural colours of the plaster and timber environment, with its soot-blackened quality. But in candlelight the colours appeared much richer and bolder with an almost fluorescent quality. This makes us wonder – was this sort of decoration meant to make its greatest impact in the evening? What does this indicate about the relationship between decoration and social practices in a domestic context?

    

2. The glowing appearance of the cloth was particularly striking from outside. It is possible to see therefore how this sort of cloth might have particular impact in an urban setting by night – advertising the quality of the interior to people outside with all this implies about the status and wealth of the owner.

3. The main problem with the open hearth is not smoke, as you might expect, but ash.  The open roof was surprisingly efficient in drawing smoke upwards and away from standing and sitting level but a large quantity of ash rained down onto the high table, still laid with its replica tableware. Good job we didn’t have any Tudor recipes to serve. Ash garnish, anyone?

4. Chinks and knots in the floor are particularly noticeable, indeed strikingly obvious, in the evening. A knot in the wooden floorboard of the first-floor chamber of the 17^th century  Pendean Farmhouse, where we tried out some prayers, was hardly noticeable by day (as pictured above) but appeared to glow when the shutters were closed and the room below had the shutters open, drawing attention to the hole. This made it difficult to resist the urge to peek! No wonder court depositions feature so many accounts of peeping through holes to spy on neighbours, but  now we’re aware this may be contingent on lighting conditions too.

5. Sound travels in early modern buildings. We knew this, of course, but there is a real sense of connectedness with people’s movements in other rooms  (Darren’s movements filming down in the hall) as well as with outside (the honking of geese). We tried out reading aloud from prayer books and  devotional manuals. Voices, even when spoken softly, carry readily and clearly from room to room, upwards and downwards. Eavesdropping must  have been quite hard to avoid, especially between upper rooms and the lower ones directly beneath them.

‘ I wil fall on sleep, and take my rest…’

6. The bed furniture was surprisingly comfortable (if too short as we didn’t follow the practice of sleeping propped up). With Catherine in the tester and Tara in the truckle (hmm, seniority evidently came into play with the sleeping arrangements) there was little sense that we were ‘co-sleeping’ – more like sharing a room with twin beds. With such acute awareness of other people elsewhere in the house as well as the sense of connection with outside (see observation 5 above) awareness of another person in the same room seemed less significant, somehow.

7. Shutters to unglazed windows are surprisingly effective at blocking out light (if not sound). The increasing use of glazing and window curtains in the later 16^th and 17^th centuries must have had a tremendous impact in changing the quality of light at different times of the day.

‘So soone as ye see the day breake, and light appeare in the skie, praie…I wished for daie, and lo, the starres of the twy-light doo appeare; and I see (I thanke thee) the dawning of the daie’ .¹

8. Because the shutters worked so well there was little cognisance of dawn and, after a night of honking geese, we both overslept! This raises the question – how did people wake themselves up in early modern England?

‘Let not my sleepe be unnmeasurable to please excessively the ease of my flesh: but only to suffice the necessity of my nature…’

There is no question that the lived experience of staying overnight at Bayleaf – the sounds, smells, quality of light, the movement of air, the feel of the furniture – has given us a unique and enhanced perspective on how this kind of building behaves under specific conditions. But what added value does this experience offer to inform our research on domestic life in the early modern period? There is a huge methodological challenge here in subjecting this kind of empirical evidence in the present day to critical analysis that could be incorporated within written historical narratives. My colleague, Jonathan Willis, blogger over at the many-headed monster, tells me that he struggles with similar issues in studying early modern music. So, where do we go from here? Back to Bayleaf, perhaps, while also thinking forward to the potential for a study day dedicated to theoretical and practical approaches to experiential and site-specific research in humanities disciplines…

¹ From ‘Christian prayers and meditations’ in Thomas Bentley, Monument of Matrones, 1582, p.367. Other extracts from prayers are from Richard Day, A Booke of Christian Prayers (1578).

 

Wallington’s Household Hazards

Continuing a series I started some time ago, here is the second instalment of ‘Wallington’s Household Hazards’. This time I consider the impact of chimneys on early modern lifestyle and beliefs…

Domestic hazard no. 2: Chimneys

Most accounts of Tudor and Stuart architecture (including my own) repeat the same quotation from William Harrison’s Description of England (1577) in which he notes some of the major changes in the manner of domestic building that had taken place within the space of a generation. He identifies “the multitude of chimneys lately erected” as one of several things “marvellously altered” according to some old men of his village, who remembered “in their young days there were not above two or three, if so many, in most uplandish towns of the realm (the religious houses and manor places of their lords always excepted, and peradventure some great personages), but each one made his fire against a reredos in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat.”

Harrison’s account has fostered a trend within subsequent scholarship to hail the development of chimneys as a decisive progressive step towards a more modern, clean and comfortable way of life. It is generally accepted that a move away from the previously open hearth in the centre of the hall towards enclosed flues allowed the division and separation of internal space to create distinct areas with specialised functions, which in turn fostered a sense of individuality and privacy which we associate with a more advanced and sophisticated way of being.

Yet it is the case that attempts to incorporate this new innovation within existing buildings were not always immediately successful. Many early chimneys were experimental and structurally unsound, constructed from highly inappropriate materials such as timber and wattle and daub. The inevitable chimney fires resulting from this period of experimentation and makeshift building represented one of the main household hazards of early modern England.

Transitional technology: a smokehood above the open fire in the re-erected ‘Merchant’s House’ from Bromsgrove at Avoncroft Museum.

The experience of living with these first-generation chimneys may well have been less satisfying than is often assumed. Here again, Nehemiah Wallington provides a glimpse into the realities of everyday life in the early modern household in documenting an incident involving an unruly domestic hearth. After the birth of his daughter, Sarah, in December 1627, Wallington described in his notebook:

“and three weekes after this: the weather being very coulde wee keepte a fire continually in the chamber but the fire burnt downe under the harth and burnt the beame whereone the chemnie stood: that the coles of the fire fell downe in the next nabours hows: and had they not spoken in time: and it had gone a little furder wee had not onely lost our estate but our lives also but God hath keept us / his name be praised for ever and ever.”[1]

A very similar situation was recorded by Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex. After the birth of his son in the early hours of 30 December 1643, Josselin recorded in his diary, “wee were scared with our Chamber chimney Hearth firing but espying it in time it was prevented from any great hurt. This was a great mercy”.

The profound sense of relief and reprieve expressed in these accounts by Wallington and Josselin perhaps reflects the heightened anxieties of new fathers trying to nurture their new-born infants through the harsh midwinter cold [and lack of insulation was another early modern household hazard]. But Wallington’s account especially is inflected by the providential language of the reports in ballads and pamphlets of the calamitous fires that destroyed large parts of towns and cities. This literature lamented the destruction caused by town conflagrations while accepting that they were a necessary instrument of God’s will.  No doubt religious faith offered some comfort to individuals like Wallington and Josselin who could reassure themselves that whatever occurred, good or bad, was part of the divine plan.

Woodcut from ‘A brief sonnet declaring the lamentation of Beckles, a Market Town in Suffolk’, which describes the fire of 1586.

But what about those individuals without a strong belief in predestination, or for that matter without sufficient trust in the orthodox practices of the Christian faith? There is evidence that some individuals tried to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves from the dangers of household hearths using supernatural means. Recent research on vernacular buildings has called attention to the practice in the early modern period of marking buildings with apparently ‘ritual’ symbols. These markings are generally interpreted in relation to belief in witchcraft, but as they often cluster on and around fireplaces (especially chimney lintels) it is possible that they were intended to offer physical as well as spiritual protection. Various examples documented by Timothy Easton include common groups of religious symbols on lintels representing Christ and the Virgin Mary; it is thought that these markings may have been an attempt to invoke their divine protection or, after the Reformation, a residual element of traditional superstition to avert bad luck.[2]

Drawings of ritual marks from T. Easton’s article (note 2, below).

The widespread fashion during this period for decorating interiors and especially chimney overmantels with biblical scenes, as described in my book and elsewhere on this blog, may also represent an attempt to mitigate fears and associations surrounding the risks posed by the domestic hearth. As a reminder of scripture and key doctrinal messages these scenes placed above the fireplace served to edify and offered comfort to occupants of the room, diverting their attention from the untrustworthy presence of the chimneybreast and the threat posed by the capricious cinders that smouldered inside…

This post summarises part of a paper I delivered at the ‘Sin and Salvation’ conference in June 2013. The paper has since been revised as a chapter and is published in Johnathan Willis (ed) Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Routledge, 2015). 

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[1] David Booy (ed.), The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection (Ashgate, 2007), p. 63.

[2] C.J. Binding and L.J. Wilson, Ritual Protection Marks in Goatchurch Cavern, Burrington Combe, North Somerset, with an appendix on the use of conjoined Vs to protect a dwelling by T. Easton, Proc. Univ. Bristol Spelaeol. Soc. (2004), 23 (2): 119-133.

Conference Programme – Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior

Here is the Conference programme for this event at the Geffrye Museum next month. It is still possible to register – please see details below…

Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500-1700

The Geffrye Museum of the Home, 12th September 2013

FREE Conference Registration now open. Please note: there are a limited number of places which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

To reserve a place at this conference please email Claire Taylor: C.L.Taylor@kent.ac.uk

This conference explores how people engaged with decorated domestic interiors in early modern England, and considers how we might use this information to enhance our experience of visiting historic properties in the twenty-first century.

Lady Paine’s Bed-chamber at Strangers’ Hall, Norwich, showing replica dornix hangings

The event will promote and facilitate active dialogue across two complementary strands; firstly the conference represents the culmination of an AHRC-funded research network, focused specifically on the experience of decorative textiles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Papers will present new information about a range of textile objects, exploring the activities and findings of this project with a focus on the collaborative research methods that could be applied to a broader range of pre-modern objects and spaces.

The second strand will explore potential directions for interdisciplinary and cross-sector research for the study and presentation of domestic interiors. We will hear about various projects utilising recent developments in visualisation technologies and digital humanities to facilitate engagement with virtual or augmented spaces and objects.

Speakers will include experts on early modern textiles and domestic interiors as well as leading computer and cognitive scientists working on visualisation and vision.

Please let Claire know about any dietary or special requirements when requesting a place.