Parish Maps from charters to community projects.

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Thomas Elmham’s map of Thanet accessed from https://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2017/03/wantsum-thanet-island-maps.html

It’s thought that long established parishes are based on pre-Conquest manors. Some of them may even have had their boundaries established as early as the Iron Age. After the Conquest the manor became the basis of the feudal system, so that by the twelfth century the parish system extended across England. Over time larger manor and parishes were broken down to smaller units while others merged together. Even so, until the Reformation the parish was the basic administrative unit not only for the local lord but also for the Church.

In 1086 the Domesday book recorded manors but by 1188 it was parishes that formed the basis of Henry II’s Saladin Tithe which required the payment of a tax of 10% on all movable property and income – the only exception to this was that men in holy orders were not required to pay a tax on their books, vestments and horses. Rather than the local sheriff doing the job of assessing the amount t to be tax it fell to the local priest or bishop. If you decided to join the crusade to win back Jerusalem you were not required to pay the tithe. Oh yes and if you failed to pay you could be imprisoned or excommunicated which came with the threat of eternal damnation. Ultimately Henry II never went on crusade, it was his son Richard who joined the Third Crusade.

Aside from taxing folk, the manor/parish was also the smallest area for justice to be applied, often by the lord of the manor, at the manor court. By the sixteenth century the parish was an essential component in the relief of poverty not to mention the maintenance of roads.

Unfortunately rather than using maps in medieval England charters relied upon descriptions to detail tenure and grants. This means that Thomas Elham’s map of Thanet in his Historia Monasterii S Augustini Cantuariensis dating to about 1414 is sometimes described as the oldest surviving parish map. He used the map to illustrate the foundation myth of Minster in Thanet, a stretch of land given as wergild to Domne Eafe after the murder of her brothers by their cousin King Ecgberht of Kent. An article by D.W. Rollason explores the accuracy of the parish boundary with Elham’s map which also contains illustrations of the churches on Thanet at the time.

Of course once the sixteenth century arrived estate owners became much more proactive in the commissioning of estate maps. One reason is that the parish system which had been in place for so many years was disrupted by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and by various enclosure acts. Estate maps were created for their ease of use in legal and administrative use. Wealthy landowners were better able to overview their estates than they might have done through a chartulary which included charters and terriers, although a notable exception is the Boarstall Cartulary map dating to the fifteenth century which is the earliest known map depicting a village. Like Elmham’s map, the Boarstall Cartulary map also enshrines the semi-mythical origins of the landowner on its vellum.

And of course a map enable the landowner to enjoy sight of his, or occasionally her, domains at a glance.

Throughout the history of Christian England, from Anglo Saxon times onwards parishes were required to pay tithes to the church – one tenth of a parish’s produce was paid to the vicar, curate or abbey who owned the rights to the church. After the dissolution these tithes were sometimes paid to private landlords. Unsurprisingly people increasingly resented paying these tithes. In 1836 an act was passed allowing parishioners to pay cash rather than goods and an accurate series of maps were drawn up to identify all the land in a parish so that tithes could be calculated accurately. And, it was the landowners who were required to pay for the survey of their land. These maps are now in the National Archives at Kew.

Today parish maps are often created by local communities to identify the things that are valued and to celebrate what makes the community from its wildlife and history to its people and buildings. They are about a sense of place rather than created for legal or administrative reasons. Somewhat ironically they often share more in common with medieval maps than modern cartography in that there is often no scale, bird’s eye illustrations of rivers, roads and bridges and used and houses are often pictorial rather than represented by symbols.

Edwinstowe Parish Mao completed 1991

A selection of modern parish maps can be found here: https://www.commonground.org.uk/parish-maps/

Pounds, N.J.G. A History of the English Parish: The Culture of Religion from Augustine to Victoria.

Guest post Monday: How the Cheapside Hoard lifted the veil on Elizabethan society

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Screenshot – Cheapside

Today I’m delighted to welcome Sam Mee to the History Jar. It’s always interesting to meet people who have a specialist field of interest. He is the founder of the Antique Ring Boutique (https://www.antiqueringboutique.com/), which sells rings from the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and Art Deco eras. He has several guides on his website for buying rings from different historical periods. Sam is a member of both Lapada (https://lapada.org/dealers/antique-ring-boutique/) and BADA (https://www.bada.org/dealer/antique-ring-boutique). Speaking personally, I shall certainly be finding out more about Stony Jack!

Digging up historical artifacts is usually the work of archaeologists. But in the summer of 1912, workmen demolishing a 17th-century building cellar in Cheapside, London, made an astounding discovery. Beneath the floor was a rainbow mix of more than 400 pieces of jewellery that had lain undisturbed since about 1640. This find is now known as the Cheapside Hoard and is the biggest collection of Elizabethan and early Stuart jewellery ever uncovered. It gives a unique insight into those eras. 

Evidence of London’s role in global trade

In the early 17th century, the goldsmiths’ quarter in Cheapside, north east of St Paul’s Cathedral, was London’s main jewellery district. It was filled with workshops and showrooms. The trade was regulated by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, which originated in twelfth-century London and was one of the city’s powerful livery companies. 

The find was a mix of mostly finished jewellery, mixed in with ash and rubble. The theory is that the pieces had been poured into a box, long since decayed, by an owner, most likely a goldsmith or jeweller (hence some unfinished items), who buried it but then never returned. Some historians suggest this was due to the political unrest of the English Civil War (1642–1651). Others pin the cause on the plague. It’s hard to be sure as the date of the burial can’t be certain – historians put it between 1640 and 1666.

Caption: You can read a lot more about the finding of the Hoard in the Autumn 2013 issue of the quarterly journal of the Gemological Institute of America: https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/FA13-cheapside-hoard-weldon

Among the finds were pendants, brooches, rings, chains, and even a hollowed Colombian emerald fashioned into the case of a watch. There is vivid enamel work, Renaissance-inspired cameos and intricate settings. And the variety reveals two things about the early 17th Century.

First, Cheapside’s jewellers clearly catered to a wide clientele, selling to nobles and courtiers but also to rich merchants and professionals. A rise in the wealth of the professional classes meant an increase in demand for jewellery that had previously only really been worn in royal and religious circles. Enforcement of sumptuary laws, which dictated who could wear what (reserving purple and pearls for royalty, for instance), was also declining. 

Second, analysis of the find discovered New World metals plus gems sourced from Colombia, India, Burma and Brazil. These materials reached London through complex commercial networks. The East India Company, chartered in 1600, had opened direct routes to Asia. The Levant Company traded with Ottoman and Persian markets. And Spanish bullion fleets were transporting New World gold and silver through Seville from where they spread across Europe. The Hoard, therefore, proves England’s participation in this early global market economy. 

Caption: Gold chain enamelled in white. With interlinking lover’s knots symbolising eternal love. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fashion and symbolism in 17th century Jewellery

The Hoard also shows how fashions had evolved during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Tudor jewellery had been very bold and ostentatious. Think of Holbein’s famous 1537 mural image of King Henry VIII where his powerful stance, multiple chains and solid rings all signal his authority.

By the early 1600s, styles had started to become more refined, due to both technological improvements and wider societal changes. Enamelwork was now more delicate. Symbolic pendants as well as miniature cases reflected Renaissance styles. This was also the start of jewellery becoming more about personal identity and private relationships. Now, jewellery could be used more widely as currency in marriage: gifts cemented alliances, posy rings sealed vows and lockets with miniature portraits could signal loyalty to a patron.

There is also evidence of how clothing influenced design. Women’s high-necked ruffs and low square necklines meant that pendants and elaborate bodice jewels were visible focal points. Earrings grew longer to frame the face. Men used jewellery to decorate hats, swords, buttons and belts as well as standard chains and rings. 

Symbolism appeared to matter as much as style – evolving from the raw projection of power found in Tudor portraits. The Hoard includes love tokens, fede rings (clasped hands symbolising faith and union) and posy rings with secret inscriptions inside the band. There were also more devotional pieces and  memento mori jewels with skulls, skeletons and coffins (reflecting the time’s high mortality rates). Emeralds at that time signified renewal, pearls meant purity (again, think of the famous paintings of Elizabeth I wrapped in strings of pearls) with rubies or garnets signifying passionate love. Jewellery had become a visual language for expression emotion and loyalty.

One of the most interesting pieces is that emerald watch case. It’s a large Colombian emerald, hollowed out and fitted with a tiny watch. It’s a unique find – nothing like it has been found from the period. And it shows both the technical skill of the gem cutters (to hollow a stone without it shattering) together with the idea of a timepiece as a luxury rather than functional object.

Caption: There’s a book about the find: “London’s Lost Jewels: The Cheapside Hoard” by Hazel Forsyth

There’s also an enamelled parrot pendant set with small gems. The exotic bird is a symbol of the New World and overseas trade, with parrots prized due their mimicry and often included in portraits of the time. The piece shows how jewellery reflected society’s wider fascinations. And its playful design is in contrast to the more traditional devotional pieces in the Hoard, showing jewellery’s growing evolution.

There’s also a set of Byzantine intaglios and ancient gems, some dating back more than a thousand years and re-set in 16th- and 17th-century mountings. In the same way that we are interested in the past, they show the Renaissance era’s own obsession with previous times – the revival of classical antiquity, with gems engraved with Roman emperors and mythological figures designed to signal learning and sophistication.

The role of Stony Jack

You may be surprised that the Hoard survives – and wasn’t sold by those who found it. That’s all down to one man: George Fabian Lawrence (1862-1939), known as “Stony Jack”. He was a surveyor with a passion for collecting stone artefacts and well known for dealing in antiquities.

Caption: The story of Stony Jack is told in this book by Victoria Shepherd.

Lawrence had cultivated a network of workmen with a simple arrangement. If they found anything unusual, they would bring it to him. He would pay them cash on the spot, at a higher rate than a scrap dealer. He often donated or sold these items cheaply to museums, particularly the Guildhall Museum (the forerunner of the Museum of London where the Hoard is mostly kept). When the Hoard was found, he hurried to the site and persuaded the labourers to sell him the bulk of the treasure (a few pieces were kept and sold separately by the builders). He then ensured the Hoard was placed in the Guildhall Museum, securing its preservation.

The Hoard today

Most of the Hoard is still in the London Museum. You can read about it here and see photos of many of the pieces: https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/cheapside-hoard/. There’s also a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIqSp3VTiU

Five pieces are in the V&A Museum, such as this chain: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74076/cheapside-hoard-chain-unknown/

The British Museum has a further 25, such as this pendant: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1914-0423-8

The Hoard will never be sold – but it is worth tens of millions of pounds. It was an extraordinary find by the workmen in 1912 – not just for its value but for what it can tell us about London and British life three hundred years earlier. 

Sir John Hardyng – soldier, diplomat, map maker, spy

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File:Bodleian Libraries, Central Scotland.jpg
Bodleian Library MS. Arch. Send. B. 10, for. 184r Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hardyng was born in Northumberland and, at the age of 12, was at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 in service to Hotspur. Having survived the battle, he entered service to Sir Robert Umfraville who was closely associated with the Percy family. Hardyng found himself taking part in Anglo-Scottish hostilities as well as the Hundred Years War under the command of Henry V. In between making war on the Scots, Umfraville was also sent north of the border on diplomatic missions. Later, when he wrote his chronicles, Hardny would describe Umfraville as the perfect knight.

In 1418, Henry V sent Hardyng to Scotland to complete a topological survey and to find evidence of English overlordship of Scotland. Hardyng remained there for three and a half years making his map – designed to assist with an English invasion as well as unearthing (writing them himself) documents evidencing English claims to political overlordship of the Scots. Unfortunately he had to wait until the 1440s for his reward due to Henry V’s death. Little wonder that his chronicle makes much of the fact that he personally retrieved, at great personal risk, the all important documents from Scotland. He even claimed that James I of Scotland would have given 1000 marks of gold for the documents. Among the documents to survive is a forged letter granting him safe conduct to enter James I’s presence whenever he was in Scotland and to stay in the country for 40 days with six servants and horses – so no imagining a solitary spy surveying the landscape.

Having been granted the manor of Geddington in Northamptonshire and a pension of £10, Hardyng retired to the Augustinian priory at Kyme in Liincolnshire where he began to write his history of England. This was presented to Henry VI on 1457 together with his map of Scotland and those largely forged documents pertaining to overlordship. Hardying sought to promote political unity within his own country by allying English political factions against the Scots – working on the premise that war across the border would bring about peace at home. His forged documents provided a watertight rationale and he handily provided a map that detailed distances between military objectives, castles and rivers. While not to scale, and the drawings of the fortifications more akin to fantasy than reality, the map was both an itinerary for invasion and a visual encouragement for the English. On this occasion he received an additional annual pension from the Crown of £20.

Undeterred by the decade’s hostilities, not to mention the change from the House of Lancaster to the House of York on the throne in 1461, Hardying continued to polish his histories, happily explaining Edward IV’s pedigree as a way of winning the new monarch’s approval. The end result was two historical chronicles in rhyming couplets – I am truly thankful I don’t have to blog in rhyme- and a colourful history of a man who as well as being all the things in the title was also something of an antiquarian he was also the first chronicler to detail a quest for the Holy Grail and would provide Sir Thomas Malory with a source for his story about King Arthur.

Armstrong, Jackson, W. England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Society in the Fifteenth Century Scottish Marches. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Palgrave, Francis, Sir. Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland and the Transactions Between the Crowns of Scotland and England. Volume I (Great Britain Record Commission: London, 1837)

Hair Powder – taxing fashion

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James Gillray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons- “Leaving Off Powder, or A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea”, March 10th 1795 

When Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 he brought with him a French fashion for wigs. Apparently the Merry Monarch’s uncle, Louis XIII, favoured them to hide his baldness and the rest is history. Wigs were rather expensive so an alternative was hair powder. By the eighteenth century if you aspired to be properly turned out you, or your wig, needed to be doused in hair lotion and then scented hair powder which stuck to the pomade.

In 1786, William Pitt the Younger introduced a tax on hair powder, perfumes and other preparations for beautification and fashion. It proved so effective that he introduced a second tax on hair powder in 1795 (The Duty of Hair Powder Act) to help fund Britain’s campaign in Europe against the French. From 5 May 1795, if you wanted to look like an accident in a BeRo factory (other flour brands are available etc) you would have to pay a guinea (21 shillings) at a stamp office for which you would receive a licence to powder your hair. In theory sellers of such cosmetics would not hand over the goods until they clapped eyes on the licence.

Obviously Pitt wasn’t completely unreasonable. A father with two unmarried daughters at home could get a discount on the amount he had to pay and you didn’t have to pay a guinea for each servant – good news for parents with teenagers everywhere as well as for people with footmen! You did not have to pay the fee if you were in service to the Crown, a member of the royal family, a vicar or in the armed services below a certain rank. And clearly if you had the time to wander around with a ton of flour/starch in your hair then you were part of the social elite in any event. If you couldn’t afford the guinea then, quite frankly, in the eyes of some, you shouldn’t be rocking the look anyway.

Unfortunately for Pitt’s calculations, rather than coughing up for their certificate, Britain’s wealthy and fashion conscious opted to stop using hair powder. Those who were caught wearing hair powder without a certificate faced a fine of £20 with an award of half the fine going to snitches who informed on the unlicensed dedicated followers of fashion. Those who did pay up were rather mockingly called ‘guinea pigs’ while proud male refusers of the new tax, ironically often members of the Whig party, had their hair cut short. Although it was sometimes hard to tell whether they objected to the tax or felt some sympathy for the revolutionary French. In either event short hair had arrived to stay. The law was eventually repealed during the nineteenth century.

Of course, if you’re smiling at this particular post, you may want to consider that today we pay VAT on most things and of course, it had its origins in Pitt’s hated stamp duties on every day items including hair powder.

And no, you really don’t want to know why I’ve suddenly and somewhat randomly started posting about a period in history which up until now I have largely avoided.

Roman maps in Britain

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A plan of Rome showing fragments of the Forma Urbis, drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and published in Le Antichità Romane (‘Roman Antiquities’) in c. 1756. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Evidence of Imperial Rome’s charting of Britain comes in the form of the Peutinger Table, the Antonine itineraries and the Ravenna Cosmography. They are copies taken from earlier maps, tables and itineraries. The truth is that there is currently no, known, example in existence of a Roman map made in England unless you include the Rudge Cup which is thought to depict Hadrian’s Wall. However, Roman engineers and surveyors must have been present in relatively large numbers to lay out roads, forts and settlements.

Medieval copies – complete with errors of transcription are what remains and fragments of maps discovered elsewhere in the empire – and of course it’s always good if the aforementioned map is etched on stone as the materials tends to survive better than papyrus or parchment. There’s a fragment of a stone map in marble depicting the suburbs of Rome The Forma Urbis Romae, or Severan Marble Plan of Rome was originally 18 X 13 m when it was carved in the third century and placed in the Temple of Peace on the orders of Septimus Severus. Today it’s a jigsaw of more than 1,000 pieces with most of it missing. What the plan was used for is another matter entirely!

And while we’re on the subject of those military engineers it’s worth recalling that the Vatican hs a copy of a Roman document from the Corpus Agrimensorum which is a set of documents about surveying, some of them even include bird’s eye view maps which give an approximation of the landscape as well as planning for things such as allocation of land to military veterans.

Clearly there were maps and plans and as one of Rome’s 44 or so provinces, Britannia – or at least parts of it- will have been similarly recorded. But aside from the medieval copies historians and archaeologists initially had to rely on reconstructions made by men like William Stukeley in the eighteenth century. His interest in the past led him to create a series of detailed plans and drawings – unfortunately he was not applying modern archeological rigour to his work and so his plans of camps and towns are not always accurate. One of the places he mapped, Little Chester in Derby, or Derventio, still retained a wall above ground level at the time he mapped it. Today York Archeology have used Stukeley’s map – and modern LiDAR to gain a clearer understanding of what the fort once looked like and to decide where an archeological dig might best be located.

York Archeology

Barber, Peter. (ed.) The Map Book

Parker, Philip, History of Britain in Maps

The Tabula Peutingeriana

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Known as Peutinger’s Tabula or the Peutinger Table it shows the layout of the Roman Empire’s Road network.  Stretching across Europe, North Africa, India, Asia, and parts of the Middle East it very sadly does not include Britain which suggests that a section of the map did not either did not survive antiquity or the early Middle Ages. The version that exists today dates from about 1200 and is a copy of an early scroll, made by a monk in Colmar, which seems to date to about AD400 and which in turn was a copy of an early map. It can today be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna but is too delicate to be put on display.

Rather than looking like a modern road map it bears a greater resemblance to the London Underground map because of its schematic nature. The map was designed to be used with Roman ‘itineraries’ which identified locations and the distances between therm in typically efficient manner. The most important of the Empire’s cities – Rome, Constantinople and Antioch are decorated so that they are easy to find and then journeys can be calculated from and to these locations. In total there are 555 cities on the map as well as more than 3,000 other place names. These correspond with elements of the Antonine Itinerary.

The scroll was rediscovered in a library in Worms in 1494 and was bequeathed to Konrad Peutinger in 1508, although its not entirely certain whether the scroll was acquired by legitimate means. The map was first published in 1598 but rather distressingly Peutinger took pains to hide where the map originated when his friend Conrad Celtes ‘acquired’ it. It sounds like a novel waiting to happen if you ask me!

Today Peutinger’s Table can be explored online:

https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/space/tpeut.htm

Barber, Peter. (ed.). The Map Book.(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

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Amesbury Abbey and Priory

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Queen Aelfthryth founded a nunnery at Amesbury in 979 to atone for her sins – the murder of Edward the Martyr while he was visiting his step-mother at Corfe to ensure that her own son Æthelred (the Unready) became king. Until Æthelred reached adulthood it placed Aelfthryth in a position of considerable power. Whether she had a hand in killing her step-son or not, she founded two abbeys at about the same time. The second was at Wherwell. Amesbury may have been located on the site of an earlier monastic house. It was written by Sir Thomas Malory, for those of you who like Arthurian tales, that Queen Guinevere became abbess at the first of the monastic foundations upon the site.

Amesbury was mentioned in the Domesday book but in 1177 Henry II refounded the nunnery with nuns from Fontevraud. The old nuns were required to co-operate with the change but could, if they wished, be transferred to a different nunnery. Unfortunately things were not so clear cut. The existing abbess did not depart without a fight. She and thirty of her sisters were expelled – apparently they all led scandalous lives- and the abbey became a priory – a daughter house of Fontevraud.

Eleanor of Brittany, Henry II’s granddaughter, was during the reign of her uncle, Richard the Lionheart, a very marriageable young woman indeed. However, when her Uncle John ascended the throne, and personally murdered her brother Arthur of Brittany (who actually should have inherited being the son of John’s older brother Geoffrey) her situation deteriorated. John kept her a prisoner as did his son, Henry III. By the time she died she had been in custody for thirty-nine years. She was buried in Amesbury. The priory had long established royal links and its dedication to St Melor who was a Breton prince murdered by his wicked uncle was a reminder of her own life. There is no memorial to her now and nor is there a memorial to Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Province whose body was placed before Amesbury’s high altar after her death. She is known to have had her own quarters at the nunnery, having retired there in 1285, even though she was never a Benedictine nun.

It should be added that King John had other links with the priory. During the Barons’ revolt, he hid part of his treasury with the nuns while Henry III visited on several occasions and made several gifts to the sisters. Plantagenet links with the monastic foundation at Amesbury continued down the years. Edward I sent his youngest daughter, Mary, to become a nun there but she does not seem to have had a calling preferring travel, cards and potentially an affair with the Earl of Surrey to prayer. She cannot have been short of company. Many other noble girls were sent to Amesbury to receive an education. Isabel of Lancaster, Henry III’s great granddaughter, became a nun there before 1337 and ended up as prioress.

By the end of the medieval period, Amesbury was still wealthy – Cromwell ranked it in the top five nunneries in the country. A clock was commissioned during the fifteenth century that can still be found in the church.

Inevitably the Dissolution of the monasteries saw the end of Amesbury’s long monastic tradition. The nuns signed the surrender in 1539. The Seymour family acquired much of the foundations lands while the church remained as the parish church for the population of Amesbury. Edward Seymour, who was 1st Earl of Hertford at that time, had the abbey pulled down. Amesbury Abbey is today a seventeenth century mansion and nothing remains of the priory above ground, other than the church.

Romsey Abbey

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In 907 Edward the Elder founded a nunnery at Romsey. His daughter, Elfleda, became its first abbess. The nunnery was rebounded some sixty years later after a period of decline by King Edgar who established a group of Benedictine nuns there. Not that it was all plain sailing- the Danes attacked it once in 993 forcing the nuns to seek sanctuary in Winchester. When they returned, the nunnery was rebuilt from stone and the nuns continued to welcome the daughters of kings and nobles so that they might be educated.

By 1086, another Saxon princess was abbess at Romsey. Edward the Exile’s daughter, Christina, who originally went into exile with her sister Margaret to Scotland was at Romsey. Also in residence, receiving a royal education, were her nieces Edith and Mary. Edith would eventually become Henry I’s wife and take the name Matilda. The nuns continued to thrive during the Norman period. Between 1120 and 1140 work began on the current building including the choir, transepts and a Lady Chapel. The nave which was created at this time was extended between 1150 and 1180.

The nunnery was not without its scandals. In 1160, the abbess, Mary (a daughter of King Stephen) left her post to marry a son of the Earl of Flanders by whom she had two daughters before, according to Matthew Paris, returning to the abbey.

In 1349 the Black Death wrought havoc. At the end, only nineteen of the nuns remained. But the end came in the sixteenth century with the dissolution of the monasteries. The abbey church was saved because it became Romsey’s parish church when the town paid Henry VIII’s commissioners £100.

It means that today, despite damage done during the English Civil War, that the church is a beautiful example of Norman architecture with some wonderful Saxon features remaining, including a Saxon rood (cross) inside the church and an even older eleventh century one outside the building. There is also a capital depicting King Alfred’s victory over the Vikings at the Battle of Edington. The sixteenth century reredos screen, that was once on display behind the altar, was removed after 1539 and repurposed, surviving the destruction that occurred in many other churches at the time. Also among the survivals is a fifteenth century cope that was later turned into an altar cloth. It is made from Italian green velvet with hand embroidered stars of silver thread.

A more recent and no less beautiful addition is the Florence Nightingale window which was installed in 2020.

Sackville leopards or ounces

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In 1507 John Sackville married Margaret Boleyn of Blicking Hall. Their son Richard did rather well from the dissolution of the monasteries having a role in the Court of Augmentations. And since Margaret was Anne Boleyn’s aunt, it is perhaps not surprising that Elizabeth I, who valued her Boleyn kin, should give preferment to family after she ascended to the throne. Richard’s son, Thomas, was something of a favourite with Elizabeth and it was she who promoted the family to the peerage and granted them Knole. It was at about the same time that the Sackvilles, who’d arrived in England with the Conqueror, began to use a coat of arms supported by two snow leopards or ounces.

In 1604, Thomas was created Earl of Dorset but it was the reign of George I, in 1720, before the family attained its dukedom. The new earl rebuilt Knole, making sure to place his heraldic emblem in prominent positions in stone, wood and glass. His descendant, the duke, who added to the building, did the same. The screen in the Great Hall was carved by William Portington, Elizabeth I’s carpenter, Unsurprisingly it is topped by the Sackville coat of arms and, of course, the snow leopards.

The Sackvilles were using their heraldry to demonstrate their status – they were after all descended from someone who arrived with William the Conqueror – but the leopard has a hint of royalty about it…. and who doesn’t want to hint at that, especially if they’re building what was once described as the largest private residence in the country. Buildings associated with the family will often have an ounce on display somewhere, the almshouses in East Grinstead for example, as a code to remind people of its association with the Sackvilles.

Cathedrals in Kent

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As regular readers are aware I do like a list. Some people might set off Munro-bagging but I prefer castles, cathedrals and stately stacks. At the moment I’m looking at cathedrals and trying to work out which cathedrals I need to visit that I’ve never been to before as well as those I have been to but which I now need to re-photograph thanks to the pesky external hard drive which still contains all my photos but which won’t let me look at them. Please don’t mention the importance of backing up. I’m still kicking myself.

The bishopric of Rochester was set up in 604, not that long after Augustine set up Canterbury. Sandwiched between London and Canterbury, it seems a bit of an unusual choice today but the Roman city was at an important river crossing. A small diocese, the medieval bishops, who were also Benedictine monks, were largely dependent on Canterbury. It was only in 1124 that a bishop was appointed who was not one of the Benedictines who lived in the monastery there. It was the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 that improved Rochester’s finances. Bishop Glanville founded a hospital for tired pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury. Then in 1201 William of Perth went to the Holy Land and was murdered on his way home by his servant in a wood near to Rochester. A woman was cured of madness having touched the murdered man’s body and William, who was a baker, promptly became a martyr and the subject of a Rochester’s own miracles and cults – bringing in more income. The revenue helped pay for building work.

Rochester’s prosperity ceased with the reign of King John and never recovered. Matters were not helped by the political intrigues of the town’s Benedictine monks. Rochester soon found itself deeply in debt. It was 1539 though, before the monks were finally evicted from the cathedral with the dissolution of the monasteries. Rochester’s most famous bishop, Fisher, had been executed four years previously for his refusal to accept the split from Rome.

It should be added that Canterbury, infinitely more wealthy, had its own problems during the medieval period, despite the wealth that poured in with the pilgrims following the brutal murder of Thomas Becket. It has also been rebuilt many times including by Simon of Sudbury who was murdered during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. In 1539 Becket’s shrine was dismantled and centuries worth of accumulated wealth, in the form of twenty-six cartloads of jewels, was sent off to the royal treasury.