Category Archives: Seventeenth Century

Gardens, daffodils and embroidery as a statement of faith

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Daffodils – I defy anyone not to think of Wordsworth’s lonely wanderings! Or Wales where it translates as St Peter’s leek. Or the Marie Curie Cancer charity – so having established that daffodils play an important part in modern symbolism or romantic ramblings what about the past, setting aside Greek myth?

They have many common names including bell rose, faerie bells and ladies ruffles. More tellingly, thanks to the time they flower, they are also known as lent lilies and lenty cups. Christian lore states that the daffodil first made its appearance in the garden of Gethsemane and to add to my growing picture of a Mary Garden, daffodils are also known as ‘Mary’s star’. It has been suggested that the occurance of daffodils in the wild in England and Wales can be an indicator that there was once a monastic house on  the site- in London, Abbey Wood is the home of wild daffodils and the location of Lesnes Abbey (Phillips, An Encyclopedia of Plants).

In all there are more than one hundred flowering plants associated with Mary. Incluing lavender which also goes by the name of Mary’s drying plant and lily of the valley which are sometimes called Mary’s tears. The frequency of the names is an aid to demonstrating that in medieval England that Mary was deeply revered. There’s even a mystery play about her childhood and betrothal to Joseph. The Wilton Diptych that belonged to Richard II shows him kneeling before her and the angles surrounding her all helpfully wearing the king’s badge of a white heart. 

And then of course, we arrive at the Reformation in Tudor England which saw the vibrant colours and stories of the past white washed away. In the Seventeenth Century, Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads destroyed even more of the iconography that they believed to be idolatrous.

Even so, when Charles II sat upon the throne about 5% of the population, in some parts of the country, was still Catholic. While devotional pieces of the kind owned by Elizabeth Stuart (she married into the Howard family) are rare, as indeed are liturgical clothing. The work of Helena Wintour was born in 1600 is an exceptional collection. Her father Robert and uncle Thomas were executed for their part in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Helena remained a Catholic throughout her life and set up a secret Catholic School in Worcestershire where she lived so that catholic children could be educated in England rather than having to go abroad.  She designed and embroidered vestments for the Jesuits who visited her home. 

 There seems to have been little written about secular Catholic embroidery that I can find (if anyone can recommend any reading I’d love to hear from you) but it would be logical that if people were planting gardens to link them to their beliefs; hiding priests in holes behind fire places; educating their children in secret and paying huge fines rather than attend the local protestant parish church – it does not seem unreasonable that they were embroidering their faith into the clothes that they wore. 

Father Henry Hawkins, a Jesuit, published a text in 1633 about the symbolism of flowers associated with the Virgin Mary called Sacred Virginity (Partheneia Sacra) which was smuggled into Catholic households enabling them to use the flowers described as a symbol of their faith.

 blog.nms.ac.uk/2022/05/31/embroidered-crucifixion/

sites.google.com/ushaw.org/fabricofresistance/fabric-of-resistance-online-exhibition

Embroidered crucifixion
Embroidered crucifixion

Samuel Pepys’ lion

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Tower of London, lions

Alright – I know that the seventeenth century is not medieval by anyone’s stretch of the imagination – however, I just couldn’t resist.

Samuel Martin, a consul in Algiers and husband of one of Samuel’s old flames, sent Pepys a ‘tame’ lion as a gift in 1674. Sam decided that the lion would be best accommodated in his admiralty office in much the same manner as any other moggy. He wrote with his thanks and the information that ‘as tame as you sent him, and as good company.’ The cub eventually grew too big to be accommodated in Sam’s office at Derby House and he joined the menagerie in the Tower of London. Samuel had written about visits to the zoo in 1660 to see a lion named Crowly who was very tame.

Should you happen to be wandering near Seething Lane Garden where Pepys had his home you can find a carving of a lion.

https://symbolsandsecrets.london/2021/05/20/monkeys-and-lions-in-seething-lane/

The Tower of London has had a menagerie since the 1200s – which is definitely medieval. In medieval times, in order to get into the Tower visitors would have to cross a drawbridge to the lion tower built by King Edward I in about 1275 before entering. The tower was demolished during the Victorian period . In addition to lions the barbican also housed leopards.

Eventually it came to be believed, so it is said, that if a lion died someone in the royal family was about to die. The rumour was given credibility when a lioness died in 1603 shortly followed by Queen Elizabeth I.

The frost fair of 1608

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The Thames froze for six weeks in February 1608 – and the people of London held a fair on the icy expanse. The rive was wider, more shallow and flowed more slowly. The water froze. Not only did people come onto the ice to skate and to hold a fair but they burned fires. It was the culmination of the so-called Great Frost which began in December the previous year.

Much to my delight there is a primary source, with a typically seventeenth century snappy title, available The great frost. cold doings in London, except it be at the lotterie. With newes out of the country. A familiar talke betwene a country-man and a citizen touching this terrible frost and the great lotterie, and the effects of them. the description of the Thames frozen over. It was written by Thomas Dekker. It wasn’t only the merchants of London seeking to make a profit from the cold snap which was actually a symptom of the so-called Little Ice Age.

Dekker wasn’t the only one to put quill to paper, the poet John Taylor also described the scene.

Clearly boatmen weren’t happy but it wasn’t long before carts were using the river as an impromptu road.

Let us hope the current cold spell isn’t quite so long lasting – having been snowed in today with intermittent power and even telephone lines coming down I can only admire the pragmatism of seventeenth century Londoners.

Sir Richard Leveson

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Sir Richard Leveson was named after his godfather, and cousin, Sir Richard Leveson of Lilleshall – who was one of Elizabeth I’s admirals. The admiral died without children and Richard inherited although his claim was contested by the Curzon family. In 1613 he also inherited his elder brother’s estates in Kent. The family was troubled by debts and contested inheritances so Richard was not particularly wealthy. Following his mother’s death he sold off his Kent estates and made Lilleshall his home.

Lady Katherine Leveson by Cornelius Jansen owned by the Lady Katherine Leveson Foundation

In 1629 he married, against the advice of his friends, Katherine Dudley the daughter of Robert Dudley who abandoned his family in 1605 when the Star Chamber concluded that his father the Earl of Leicester and his mother Douglas, Lady Sheffield had not been married. Poor Katherine was tarnished with the potential slur of illegitimacy herself as her father had declared himself to be clandestinely married to Frances Vavasour when he married Katherine’s mother. Nor did it help that Dudley’s estates, inherited from the Earl of Leicester, were confiscated by the Crown and that Sir Robert Sidney and his family claimed the lands by right of legitimate inheritance. When the matter was resolved he and Katherine were able to build a fine Manor House at Trentham outside Stoke. Trentham like Lilleshall had once been a monastic property. His and Katherine’s home was replaced by a Georgian building in 1690.

In November 1640 Leveson was elected to Parliament where he was initially neutral but eventually came to support the cause of Charles I. He was a cavalry commander and sat in the Oxford Parliament. During this time he and his brother-in-law Robert Holbourne persuaded the king to re-examine the Dudley case which resulted in his mother-in-law Alice Dudley being recognised as Duchess Dudley and his wife the place of a duke’s daughter. Lilleshall Abbey was eventually taken by Parliamentarian forces in 1645 and Leveson found himself imprisoned in Nantwich where his health suffered. In the aftermath of the wars he was forced to pay fines for his support of the royalist cause. When he drew up his will he arranged for trustees to look after his wife’s interest and for his nieces to inherit after her death. He died in 1661 and is buried in Lilleshall Church.

https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/leveson-richard-1598-1661

Pharmacopoeias

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A pharmacopoeia is a handbook of medicines. The seventeenth century texts I’m perusing at the moment for a very specific cure-all are deeply underwhelming although strangely fascinating. Remedies includes the “turds” of geese, goats, hens, swallows and a peacock . One requires millipedes. Another lists amongst its ingredients discarded nail clippings. If you weren’t ill before you certainly would have been afterwards.

Many of the more exotic ingredients would have come from the mediterranean and beyond. And as navigators explored further and colonialisation took hold the ingredients of the pharmacopoeias did become more exotic – rhinoceros brain anyone?

The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis was published on the orders of James I and it effectively created a list of all official drugs – frogs lungs…if the goods you wanted to sell to an apothecary and then on to a physician were not on the Royal College of Physicians list then quite simply it wasn’t a cure. The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries was created in 1618 so now regulation was ensured. Little old ladies with herbal connections might find themselves in real bother and so could a male apothecary not following the guild’s rules. The College of Physicians which had controlled the apothecaries retained the right to license them in London but not to prevent them from dispensing medicines or treating people and the pharmacopoeia was a way of the physicians maintaining some kind of control because they dictated what was admissible to the list.

The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis continued to be published until 1854 when a new British listing was produced. By that time goat’s urine had been removed from the list.

https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/weapon-dressed-book-pharmacopoeia-londinensis

Jane Mosley’s remedies, cuttlefish and Galen

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Image of peony from Gerard’s herbal

Jane Mosley lived in Brailsford, Derbyshire during the seventeenth century. The record office has her personal books of recipes and remedies.

She was probably born in the summer of 1669. The family had links with London as well as being an established Derbyshire family. In 1697 she married Edward Soresby of Darley. The couple went on to have eight children before Jane died in 1712. The county archives contains letters, accounts and land transactions as well as family wills.

Amongst her remedies is a cure for the falling sickness, or epilepsy as we would recognise it today. Peony roots grated and drunk and worn around the neck – Jane spells it pionie and it turns up elsewhere as danpi. It will probably come as no surprise to discover that Galen, the Roman physician, recommended peonies as a cure for falling sickness. So all though it features in Jane’s book it would have been something understood in the medieval period as well. Anyone with seizures would likely be prescribed a drink containing peony roots and required to wear it around their neck as a talisman. The remedy can also be found in Gerard’s Herbal.

There are several toothpaste recipes, the most straightforward of which involves salt and cuttle bone – ground up cuttlefish bone was also used as a polishing powder by goldsmiths. A second recipe involved rosemary and harts horn as well as cuttlefish. She also knew of a mouthwash to make teeth “steadfast.” The rinse involved vervain roots in cold wine.

Derbyshire Museum Service. 1979. Jane Mosley’s Derbyshire Recipes

A 1614 map of Earl Sterndale

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1614 map of Earl Sterndale

Earl Sterndale is part of the parish of Hartington Middle Quarter in the Derbyshire Dales.  It was created as an ecclesiastical parish from a chapelry in 1763.  It’s church, St Michael’s and All Angels, has the distinction of being blown up by the Luftwaffe with a stray bomb in 1941.

I’m posting about Earl Sterndale today because I came across this 1614 map in a file of documents – it’s a random find and to be honest it has no reference on so I don’t even know which book it was taken from by whoever copied it. It’s a reminder though that whilst I tend to teach history in a neat linear pattern that history itself is much more untidy. The fields shown are a mixture of open strip farming and enclosed land. Enclosure was something that began more or less in the thirteenth century and escalated until at the end of the eighteenth century farming practises and land ownership wrought wholesale enclosure.

Records indicate that the farms around Earl Sterndale were largely monastic granges belonging to Basingwerk Abbey, Flintshire, Wales.  The abbey was a Cistercian foundation and it’s lands including the granges near Earl Sterndale were sold following the Dissolution of the Monasteries.   Basingwerk was a lesser monastery with an income of less that £200 per year.  It is perhaps not surprising that Basingwerk Abbey held property and the rights to churches in other parts of Derbyshire including Glossop.   But it’s not completely a monastic story – again history tends to be taught or written about in neat units but the distribution, in this case literally on the land, tells of different administration systems abutting one another and in some cases overlapping.

Within the medieval Manor of Hartington, of which Earl Sterndale was part land belonged in part to the Duchy of Lancaster – the land in Earl Sterndale once having been in the holding of the de Ferrers’ Earls of Derby until the 6th earl fell foul of Henry III and the land was given to Henry III’s second son – Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster. edmund’s great grand daughter Blanche (the daughter of Henry Grosmont the 1st Duke of Lancaster) married John of Gaunt – for those of you who like to make links.

Meanwhile the manor of Hartington of which Earl Sterndale was part worked on the three field open system where strips of land were allocated to various tenants (villeins).  Rent was paid along with labour for the lord.  In addition to which part of the manor functioned as demesne land which was farmed on behalf of the Duchy of Lancaster itself rather than the income all coming from tenants.  By the fourteenth century sheep had become an important part of the venture for the Duchy – as it was for the Cistercian granges. I’ve read elsewhere that as the Black Death plotted it’s course in 1348 demsesne farming was abandoned in the parish of Hartington; it being more profitable to rent land out.

It’s also worth noting that the village of Earl Sterndale held common grazing rights to a portion of land adding yet another dimension to the equation of who held the land.

The map of 1614 pictured above demonstrates that the three field system with its open strips didn’t suddenly stop here at the end of the medieval period nor was the dissolution of the monasteries sufficient to bring about total enclosure. It is  evident that strip farming around Earl Sterndale continued into the seventeenth century – although there is also evidence of enclosure in the form of Mr Thomas Nedham’s land.  Enclosure when it finally came was at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Dr Simon Forman – a Tudor version of Pepys…with magic and poison

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Simon Forman was born on December 30, 1552, near Salisbury. Unlike Shakespeare for whom there is no evidence of attending grammar school we have Forman’s account of his teacher and his education which began when he was seven. Unfortunately Simon’s father died suddenly and the boy had to leave school taking employment with a merchant who sold herbs and drugs.

Ten years later Simon left Salisbury, apparently after an argument with his master’s wife, and went to Oxford to live with his cousins. It appears that although he was eager to continue his education that he was unhappy in Oxford so when back to Salisbury where he became a teacher.

In 1579 things changed, Simon became a prophet! “I did prophesy the truth of many things which afterwards came to pass…the very spirits were subject unto me”. He also moved to London where presumably there was more need for doctoring, astrology and magic – remember these three things weren’t at odds with one another during the Tudor period. What made the real difference to Forman’s career as a doctor was that he remained in London during the plagues of 1592 and 1594. As a result he became known for his skills and the publication in 1595 of a book entitled Discourses on the Plague. He claimed that he was able to work with plague cases because he had caught and recovered from the disease.

Unfortunately the Royal College of Physicians took umbrage because he lacked their training. They described his herbal medicines as “magical potions.” In short they determined that he was a quack, fined him and told him not to call himself a doctor. Forman ignored them but within nine months a man died soon after taking one of his prescriptions and he found himself in prison. He finally gained a licence from Cambridge University in 1603 despite the fact that he had never studied there.

Forman wrote a lot of books and kept a diary which recorded his own life as well as his consultations with people from all ranks of society. He recorded some of his womanising activities even though he’d married Jane Baker in 1599.

William Lilly

We even know how Forman died thanks to another astrologer, William Lilly. In September of 1611, Forman apparently told his wife that he was about to make his last prophesy, namely that he would die the next Thursday evening which he did whilst rowing on the Thames.

That wasn’t the end of Forman though. Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset went on trial in 1616 for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. Whilst she was still Lady Essex married to Robert Devereux. Frances had gone with her friend Anne Turner to see Forman for potions that would keep Lord Essex at arm’s length and another to attract the attentions of James I’s favourite Robert Carr as he seemed a better financial and political bet than the spouse that she had been required to marry when they were both children. Forman was also accused of providing the poison which added to some tarts killed Sir Thomas Overbury whilst he was in the Tower.

Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset

Ultimately Forman’s papers ended up in the care of Elias Ashmole, the founder of the Ashmolean in Oxford and thus his diary which includes visits to the theatre to see Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale survive – though not without some dispute as to their veracity.

Kassell, Lauren (2007) Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician

Rowse, A.L. (1974) The Casebooks of Simon Forman

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Basher Dowsing and iconoclasm in Suffolk

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The medieval splendour of Suffolk’s wool churches took a bit of a battering during the Tudor period. By the time Cromwell and Protestant reformers had removed saints from their niches and destroyed assorted altars and rood screens.  Saints were toppled from their niches and altars removed to be replaced by communion tables.  Then came the orders to white wash wall paintings. Everything started to look decidedly monochrome.

Matters deteriorated even further when William Dowsing (who was born about 1596 and pictured at the start of this post)  was appointed by the Earl of Manchester to inspect the parish churches of East Anglia during 1643 and 1644.  He visited something in the region of one hundred and fifty churches in Suffolk. Dowsing was not sympathetic to Armenianism of Archbishop Laud.  He destroyed stained glass, removed brasses from tombs and defaced anything that could have been defined as Papist idolatry.  Altar rails were removed, steps to altars lowered, fonts took a bit of a battering as well and holy water stoups were deemed to be fit only for Papists.  He defaced tombs that requested prayers for the Dead as this was a bit too close to the Catholic idea of purgatory for comfort.  He wasn’t wildly keen on any depiction of the Trinity either.  He also had a thing about angels – in that he didn’t like them one little bit.

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Dowsing was born in Laxfield, Suffolk from farming stock – with a large landholding.  During the 1620s he married Thamar Lea who was a member of a minor gentry family.  Her name is redolent of Puritanism.  She bore him ten children. Her death in 1640 seems to have made William a stricter puritan than ever. As a consequence of his deepening beliefs he let his land and moved to Dedham, a parish noted for its strict Puritanism. He demanded that the region’s churches should become more godly – and ensured that a letter to that effect reached the Earl of Manchester (a religious moderate who let Dowsing get on with it.)  Part of this belief stemmed from the theological argument against graven images – which is where “pictures” whether of glass or paint or stone met with Dowsing’s disapproval.  There was also the fact that Archbishop Laud had been rather busy reintroducing altars and altar rails to prevent the masses from getting up close and personal with the Almighty.

 

Having wrought destruction in Cambridgeshire Dowsing moved into Suffolk in April 1644 and spent the summer smashing up churches.  He charged parishes for the privledge.  We know this from his journal.  This is supported by the evidence of various church accounts – and from the fact that there are lots of defaced churches with missing brasses, plain or Victorian glass, damaged fonts and various chunks of masonry missing their faces.  The journal often also accounts for what was destroyed.

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Dowsing spent a lot of time trying to remove hammer beam angels from their perches.  In Blythburgh church there’s plenty of evidence of Dowsing’s defacement but the angels survived.  It was believed that he had attempted to shoot them down but when the roof was restored it became apparent that the lead shot dated from eighteenth century bird scarers.  By 1663 Blythburgh was in danger of falling into disrepair – no doubt shattered windows didn’t help matters very much.

 

In nearby Southwold he and his men broke down more than one hundred and thirty pictures and four crosses. Today it is possible to see the thirty-five vandalised Rood Screen panels with their faces scratched out ( just be grateful that the screen survives.)  Dowsing also managed to remove twenty angels from the roof – demonstrating that he was nothing if not determined.

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In 1646 in the aftermath of the First English Civil War William Dowsing married for a second time to Mary Cooper and then lived long enough to see the monarchy restored.  He died in 1668 and is know to history as Basher Dowsing.  His journal is available to read online http://www.williamdowsing.org/journal_online.html

 

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Cooper, T. (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War. Woodbridge, 2001.

http://www.williamdowsing.org/journal_online.html,

J. ‘Dowsing, William (bap. 1596, d. 1668)’, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: University Press, 2004

 

The man who made priest holes

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DSC_0094.jpgYesterday I found myself in the garderobe, sliding into a small space, ducking my head to avoid a low beam and then straightening to find myself in a priest hole.  Fortunately for me no one was going to slam the lid back into place and leave me in total darkness until it was safe for me to emerge or I was discovered and dragged off to the Tower.  I was enjoying a sunny afternoon at Oxborough Hall.

 

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During the reign of Elizabeth I Jesuits priests were feared as enemies of the state and hunted down by pursuivants.  Catholic priests moved from Catholic household to catholic household, often purporting to be cousins or other distant relations.  Wealthy families built hiding places in their homes so that when the priest hunters came calling there was somewhere to hide their illicit guest.

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The most successful priest holes were built by Nicholas Owen – not that he built the hole at Oxborough. Owen, an Oxfordshire man, was born in 1562.  He had three siblings one was a Catholic priest and another printed illegal Catholic books.  The brothers’ father was a carpenter and Nicholas in his turn was apprenticed to a joiner.  By the time he was in his mid twenties he was working for Father Henry Garnet and had become a lay brother in the Jesuit order.  He suffered from ill health including a limp from a poorly set bone and a hernia. Despite his physical frailty he travelled from house to house constructing priest holes.   Most of the people he worked for didn’t know his real name – to them he was Little John.  He worked by night in total secrecy to create his hiding places.  Many of the priest holes were so well concealed that they were only discovered in later centuries when houses underwent renovation.  Unfortunately the occasional hole is still found with its occupant still in situ.

 

Owen’s favoured locations seem to have been behind fireplaces and under stairs.  The pursuivants were men who could judge if an interior wall looked shorter than an exterior wall so Owen had to be very careful as to where he located his priest holes.

 

Nicholas was a man strong in faith.  He was eventually captured in 1606 at Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.  It is thought he allowed himself to be captured in order to distract attention from Father Henry Garnet who was hiding nearby.

There were rules about torturing people with disabilities but this didn’t stop Robert Cecil from demanding that Owen be taken to the Tower and taxed about his knowledge by Topcliffe.  He was racked.  This caused his intestines to bulge out through his hernia.  Topcliffe ordered that they be secure by a metal plate. This cut into the hernia and he bled to death in his cell. He died rather than give away his secrets and the lives of the men who depended upon him keeping them.  The State announced that he had committed suicide.

St Nicholas Owen was canonised in 1970 and is the patron saint of illusionists and escape artists.

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Hogge Alice.  God’s Secret Agents

Reynolds, Tony. (2014) St Nicholas Owen: Priest Hole Maker

https://soul-candy.info/2012/03/mar-22-st-nicholas-owen-sj-d-1606-martyr-artist-builder-of-hiding-places-for-priests/