Lavenham, Suffolk

In plain sight

Back in 2015 I read Matthew Champion’s fascinating book Medieval Graffiti and was alerted to the interesting array of ‘unofficial’ marks and inscriptions in English churches. This has inspired at least two posts on this bog – one on overlapping Vs, said to refer to the Virgin Mary (‘Virgo Virginum’, Virgin of virgns), another illustrating the outline of a human hand and some initials within a shield. A further common motif used in church graffiti is what is now widely known as the daisywheel, a series of arcs drawn within a circle, which combine to create an image resembling a six-petalled flower. When staying in Lavenham, Suffolk, just before Christmas, I was intrigued to come across such a daisywheel not in a church but on a wooden beam above a fireplace at Lavenham Guildhall.

The usual interpretation. of such marks is that they provide protection from evil spirits. In churches they are often placed near doorways or arches, suggesting that they prevent or discourage evil spirits form entering the building. Drawing a ritual protection mark above a fireplace suggests that it stops such spirits entering the building down the chimney.

Fireplaces are of course important places in a building – they’re the source of heat for comfort and cooking, of course, but in addition are focal points and symbols of the house and home, and of the people who live in the building or use it. For these reasons as well as the fact that the chimney offers a potential way in for evil forces, they’re a place to look out for protection marks in secular buildings. The famous ‘witch marks’ I have seen in a Worcestershire pub are also located in fireplaces – in this case on the hearth itself.

While the pub’s ‘witch marks’ consist of white circles made with chalk, daisywheels are usually incised into the wood or plaster. Matthew Champion suggests that they were made using the points of shears, a tool much used in the late Middle Ages when it’s thought many of these marks were made. He has tried making them with shears himself, with successful results. For centuries these marks were unregarded because they are easy to miss when one is not looking for them. Now scholars such as Champion have alerted us to their presence, more and more are being rediscovered, hiding as it were in plain sight.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

Local colour

How could it be? I’d been to Suffolk several times and looked around so many of its towns – Aldeburgh, Southwold, Lavenham, Sudbury, Stowmarket… How had I not been to Hadleigh? This time, the Resident Wise Woman and I resolved to correct this omission, and quite early one December morning two weeks before Christmas, we arrived in Hadleigh, wandered around, and were very impressed. There is so much for the building-fancier to see, and so much of it is good.

It wasn’t long before we found the churchyard, and it was not only the church that caught our eye. Along one side of God’s acre is the conglomeration of brickwork, timber-framing and ochre-coloured plaster in my photograph. It’s now known as the Guildhall-Town Hall complex and the rooms inside are available to the local community for various uses. The earliest part is the timber-framed section in the middle, which was constructed in the mid-15th century. This was built as a market hall, with shops below and other rooms on the jettied storeys above. Behind this is the Guildhall, built as a wing projecting from the back of the market hall – a tiny portion of this is visible near the left-hand edge of my photograph.* The two-storey wings on either side of the timber-framed market hall are later.

The complex has had a variety of uses since the Middle Ages. It was the administrative centre when Hadleigh was a borough in the 17th century; until 1834, part of the building was used as the parish workhouse; more than one school had been based here; part of the structure was once almshouses; and in the early-20th century it was partly used as a corset factory. There’s something admirable about a building that’s in part almost 600 years old and has been used in so many ways – and is still an asset to the town. It’s also admirable that it has fulfilled these uses while keeping much of its ancient beauty.

- - - - -

* Guildhalls were the headquarters of guilds, associations of tradesman or merchants, formed for various reasons including religious (for example, paying for prayers for the souls of the dead) and charitable (for example, providing for the surviving families of deceased members).

Chard, Somerset

Statement in stone

Chard’s impressive Guildhall was opened in 1835. The building was designed by Taunton architect Richard Carver to combine the roles of town hall and market, and was a replacement for an old building on another site. Its grand double order of classical columns – Tuscan below, Doric above – dominates this stretch of the street and the very plain classical design of Ham stone columns and pediment could perhaps look a trifle sombre. But it’s topped by a little clock tower and cupola that set a different mood – still classical in design but slightly less straight-laced – and useful, originally, as few passers-by would have worn a watch.

One can imagine this building as the heart of the town, when the market was the focus of everyone’s shopping. I can also imagine the platform on the upper floor being a perfect stage for proclamations and election speeches. Something akin to the mixture of farce and seriousness that attends the election at the memorably named Eatanswill in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers comes to mind – though perhaps in real life there would have been less of the farce… Elections or no, this facade certainly makes a statement. Few towns the size of Chard can boast such a memorable building as their town hall, set among the shops of its main street.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Shop talk

I regularly give a talk about the history of shops and shopfronts and I’ve taken to using this image to explain what late-Medieval shops could look like and how they sometimes functioned. In the 15th century, glass was still an expensive commodity, restricted mainly to churches and high-status houses, so there were no shop windows like those of today. So, if you had a shop, you had unglazed openings, closed by shutters. This example has pairs of shutters, upper and lower, and in the ‘closed’ position the lower shutter would hinge upwards and the upper one downwards, to seal the opening. During business hours you could open the shutters as shown, or the lower one could be propped with a trestle and act as a counter or stall. The shopkeeper could put goods on it and stand inside.

In this period, of course, a lot of business was not done in shops at all, but on market stalls. But a few trades – those who needed work space, for example, from carpenters to butchers, had workshops and could sell from there. This sort of shutter arrangement worked for them, allowing them to maske things and sell things in the same space, and live above the shop.  It’s very unusual to find this kind of shop front today. This one, part of the Guildhall at Lavenham, is notable survivor and a useful visual aid when I'm giving my talk.

Ludlow, Shropshire

ORDER, ORDER (1)
You know the Orders, the modes, as it were, of Classical architecture? Doric, with its fluted columns topped with square abaci, Ionic with its spiral volute capitals, Corinthian, with its gorgeous bunches of acanthus leaves? The Orders were designed to provide builders with a complete architectural vocabulary, a set of standard designs for the key bits of a building – columns, with capitals on top of them, and entablatures on top of them. Everything standardized. Everything in order.

It was never quite like that, of course. The ancient Greeks rang changes on the orders and the Romans introduced two others (Tuscan and Composite). But there was still a sense of correctness, of decorum, to use a Classical word, about how to use these bits of architectural vocabulary. When English builders get their hands on the orders, though, quite different and bizarre things sometimes happen. What, for example, if you were to combine the idea of a Classical Order, with its column, capital, and entablature, with the pointed-arched Gothic style of the Middle Ages?

What you get is this Gothic doorcase of 1768 on the Guildhall in Ludlow. It’s all there – column, capital, entablature, but the columns are slender triple shafts, and the entablature is adorned with little quatrefoils, details straight from the visual vocabulary of the medieval parish church. And so between the columns is a doorway topped not with a flat Classical lintel but with a gently curving arch above which is a pointed Gothic arch. It’s a delightful combination, architecturally incorrect and very English. Capital!