ἐπαμεροι· τι δε τις; τι δ`οὐ τις; σκιας ὀναρ
ἀνθρωπος. ἀλλ` ὁταν αἰγλα διοσδοτος ἐλθῃ,
λαμπρον φεγγος ἐπεστιν ἀνδρων και μειλιχος αἰων.
Creatures of a day! What is a man? What is he not? A dream of a shadow is man. But whenever Zeus-given brightness comes, a shining light rests upon men, and a gentle life.
(Pindar, Pythian Odes 8, lines 95-7, 446 B.C.)
The Central Methodist Hall, Westminster
Every second year, I am given a precious opportunity to address the NADFAS Annual Directory Meeting at the sumptuous Central Methodist Hall, Westminster. Established lecturers are allotted a mere minute in which to peddle their wares. The aim is to introduce new talks and to persuade the secretaries of the regional societies, by their charm, eloquence and originality, to book them.
Rupert Willoughby in conversation with John Wesley
The new lectures that I am offering this year are ‘The Normans – Conquest and Legacy’, and ‘Knight Errant: The Life and Adventures of William the Marshal’, which I have already delivered many times on the provincial circuit. It is almost a cruelty to have to compress one’s enthusiasm into a mere minute. If only I been allowed to speak for two minutes, I would have said the following:
Ladies and gentlemen, in 2016, it will be 950 years since the Normans invaded England. The roughest of company, they came to this country not to civilise, but to seize. A mere eleven men in Duke William’s inner circle enjoyed an unprecedented bonanza, receiving almost half the land of the conquered kingdom. There followed an orgy of building in what was described as ‘a new manner’ – castles, churches, monasteries and cathedrals – that all but effaced the physical traces of Anglo-Saxon England. It was their way of showing us who was in charge.
These fabulously rich Norman patrons, many of them crusaders who had witnessed the marvels of the East, enabled a great flowering of indigenous craftsmanship. The ebullience of ornament that characterised this period is termed ‘Norman’. It was, in fact, peculiarly English.
My account of the mass of post-Conquest masonry, from landmarks like Dover Castle to humble parish churches, is made personal by reference to individual invaders – men like the deeply unpleasant Baldwin de Redvers, lord of the Isle of Wight. Baldwin’s coterie of Norman knights have left a considerable physical and cultural legacy on the Island, as well as actual descendants. I can offer you an insight into the lives of these men – as well as the disgusting details of William the Conqueror’s funeral.
Not for the faint-hearted
Continuing the Norman theme, my lecture on William the Marshal thrillingly evokes a gorgeous world in which the knights were dominant. In their coats of mail like silk shirts and their golden spurs, these were ‘the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon’. William has a key role in the story of Magna Carta. He is a national figure of the stature of Drake or Nelson, and deserves to be better known.
By the way, if the diet of medieval stuff is too heavy for you, rest assured that ‘Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture’ is still available.
For the text of my address in 2012, outlining my other NADFAS lectures, see the earlier blog ‘Wooing NADFAS: Setting Out One’s Stall at the Annual Directory Meeting’, at http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/archives/912.
Westminster Abbey from the Central Methodist Hall
Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870)
Commenting on my previous blog, my brother (a keen smoker) writes of Sir Walter Ralegh: ‘I am bewildered as to why he was beheaded. He is a national hero not least for introducing tobacco to this country. I still have a copy of the famous painting of him in Budleigh Salterton just outside the gentlemen’s club on the seafront.’ We were both brought up on Millais’s ‘Boyhood of Ralegh’, which hung in our bedroom in our grandparents’ house in the town, close to Ralegh’s birthplace at Hayes Barton. The same house, which had an enormous library and stained glass windows, and paths made up of pebbles from the beach, had been the residence of Dr Brushfield, the distinguished antiquary, to whose ‘Raleghana’ I owe much of the information in my article.
My brother may enjoy this image of Sir Walter’s tobacco pouch:
Made of leather, clay, bamboo, wood and silver, it dates from the period of his incarceration in the Tower and is inscribed ‘W.R. 1617’, within a heart. A further inscription reads: ‘Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore’ (He was my companion during that unhappy time). Ralegh gave the pouch to a friend, Sir Henry Spelman. Thence it passed to Ralph Whitfield of the Barbican and by descent through the Whitfield family until acquired by Sir Richard Wallace. When I visited the Wallace Collection the other day I was disappointed to discover that it is not on display there, but is kept in the Reserve Vault in the basement.
Sir Walter Ralegh and his son Wat, 1602
On the eve of his execution, Sir Walter Ralegh bade farewell to his wife, Bess, at the Abbey Gatehouse at Westminster. She was distraught, and particularly anxious that his body should be given up to her for burial. ‘It is well, dear Bess, that thou mayest dispose of that dead which thou hadst not always the disposing of when alive,’ he said.
Key to West Horsley church
Ralegh went bravely to the scaffold on the morning of 29 October 1618. It took two strokes of the axe to sever his head which, bleeding profusely, was then held up for the inspection of the stunned onlookers. The silence was broken when a clear voice called out from the throng: ‘We have not such another head to be cut off’. It was an expression of the general mood.
Having been ‘showed on both sides of the scaffold’, Ralegh’s head was ‘put into a red leather bag, and his wrought velvet gown thrown over it, which was afterwards conveyed away in a mourning coach of his lady’s’. As she had feared, Bess was to be denied the disposing of her husband’s body. It was buried not at her brother’s church of Beddington in Surrey, as she would have wished, but in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the south side of the altar.
Filing cabinet marking Ralegh tomb
As for the head, it ‘seems that Bess had it embalmed and kept it with her to her dying day, and after her it came to her son Carew, with whom it was buried’ (A.L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, London 1962, p.319). Bess died in 1647, having lived with Carew, from 1628, in the manor-house at East Horsley in Surrey (which he purchased), and from 1643 in that of neighbouring West Horsley, where he succeeded his uncle, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton (Rowse, pp.329, 330). They also had a house in St Martin’s Lane, Westminster: Carew retired to it late in life, after selling his Surrey estates. He was ‘killed’ in unknown circumstances towards the end of 1666, and buried close to his father in St Margaret’s Church.
However, the parish register of West Horsley records Carew Ralegh’s re-burial in the church there in September 1680. According to the evidence of a young lad who witnessed the event – the son of Sir Edward Nicholas, to whom Carew had sold the estate – he was reunited in the tomb with his father’s head.
The tomb – in a side chapel, surrounded now by splendid monuments to the Nicholas family – is unmarked, but a kindly and well-informed member of the West Horsley Decorative and Fine Arts Society, to whom I lectured the other day, admitted me to the church with a magnificent key and pointed out the position to me, precisely under the front right-hand leg of the filing cabinet in my picture, but occupied until quite recently by a monstrous Victorian organ.
Nicholas monument in West Horsley Church
Heraldry on the restored tomb of Archbishop Scrope in York Minster
It is the agreeable and, I think, unique custom of the Harrogate Decorative and Fine Arts Group to invite visiting lecturers to contribute to their scrap-book. On Monday 20 January I lectured to them on the Bayeux Tapestry, in the elegant setting of the Cairn Hotel. I expected the ballroom to be cleared at any moment in readiness for the next thé dansant. My talk was not short of references to North Yorkshire, which, apart from anything else, was the scene of Harold Godwinson’s triumph in 1066 over the Viking army at Stamford Bridge. Here, then, is a summary of such references as my offering to the society.
The Cairn Hotel, Harrogate
The Bayeux Tapestry, completed within a decade of the Battle of Hastings, is wonderfully revealing of the life of the time. Harold Godwinson and other nobles are, for example, inseparable from their hawks, a detail that written histories tend to omit. Moreover, the artist is strictly accurate in his depiction of the hairstyles of the day. The smart, military haircuts of the French knights are contrasted with the shoulder-length hair and wispy moustaches of the English.
A Norman with facial hair stood out from the crowd. One such was William de Perci, the founder of Whitby Abbey, who was known (in the Norman dialect) as als gernons – ‘with the whiskers’. Since the fifteenth century, generations of William’s descendants, who became earls and then dukes of Northumberland, have been christened ‘Algernon’ in his honour. Undoubtedly the most famous ‘Algernon’ was the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose grandmother was a Percy.
In a scene of Harold feasting in his manor-house at Bosham, Sussex, his retainers use traditional drinking horns. These were prized possessions of the English nobles, often chased with gold and silver and jewels. Usually of ox-horn, they had a design fault: one was obliged to drain them before putting them down. The cup-bearer was constantly in attendance, napkin in hand, to recharge them, and there were endless pledges and toasts. As a result, the English nobles became rapidly inebriated. They were renowned for it.
Incidentally, they would not have been drinking ale or even wine, which was somewhat of a luxury, but mead, which is made from honey. Domesday Book is evidence of immense honey production in England, fuelling the demand for this drink.
The Horn of Ulphus
York Minster happens to possess the only horned cup that, to my knowledge, survives from that period. It is known as the Horn of Ulphus. The eponymous Ulf was a Viking who, about 1030, made a gift of it to the Minster, along with a grant of land. He is said to have poured a libation of wine over the altar as a way of marking his donation. A particularly fine example of such a cup, the Horn of Ulphus is not, in fact, an ox-horn but an oliphant – carved from an elephant’s tusk. It is thought to have been a product of Amalfi in southern Italy, where there were ready supplies of ivory. The animal motifs are, moreover, copied from Syrian and Babylonian designs. An early Frith postcard shows it hanging from a hook on the panelled wall of the Vestry, where it was no doubt kept for centuries. It is now displayed, more reverentially, but less in the original spirit of the gift, in a glass case in the Treasury.
Finally, North Yorkshire is the heartland of the Scropes, one of the most prominent British families of Norman descent. Unusually, they were already settled in England at the time of the Conquest, their ancestor, Richard FitzScrob, being one of Edward the Confessor’s Norman favourites. They had no doubt met during Edward’s twenty-five years in exile in Normandy, while Cnut and his son held sway in England. Richard seems to have built Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire, one of a number of pre-Conquest outposts against the Welsh. Presumably of the ring-work (ditch and palisade) type, these were the earliest true castles in England. They are an innovation otherwise associated with the Norman Conquest.
York Minster
The Scrope family motto, Devant si je puis (‘Forward if I am able’), is a sardonic allusion to their name. Scrob means ‘crab’ in the Norman dialect. Establishing themselves in Wensleydale in the 12th century, Scropes distinguished themselves on the Crusades and in the Hundred Years War, were regularly summoned to medieval parliaments as barons, and have produced five Garter knights, as well as an Archbishop of York in the person of Richard Scrope. My obituary of a recent head of the family, Simon Scrope (1934 – 2010), can be read on The Daily Telegraph website – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7607958/Simon-Scrope.html.
No.2 Dover Street, Canterbury (second building from right) - scene of Patrick Leigh Fermor's romantic encounter with Nellie Lemar. The city walls are in the distance
The King’s School, Canterbury, in the precincts of the Cathedral, is reputedly the oldest school in the world. Believed to have been founded by St Augustine in 597, it was incorporated by Henry VIII in 1541. Its foundationers are called ‘King’s Scholars’ in his memory.
The stupendous Norman staircase at the King's School, Canterbury - Galpin's in the background
For Patrick Leigh Fermor, who attended the school from 1929 to 1932, there was ‘a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity’ (Time of Gifts, p.15). Paddy boarded in The Grange (now the music department), where his housemaster was Alec Macdonald. Humane and unconventional, Macdonald struggled against the prevailing snobbery, reminding his boys on one occasion that they would all have ‘common’ accents if they ‘lived a hundred yards from here’. I remember that as late as the 1970s, the boys at my own nearby prep school – a ‘feeder’ for King’s – gave short shrift to anyone affecting such an accent.
Though a natural rebel and misfit, Paddy threw himself into school life. It was at Canterbury that he discovered Horace’s Ode 1.9, ‘To Thaliarcus’, famously recited in a mountain-cave in Crete to General Kreipe. However, ‘it was a one-sided love in the end’. Paddy’s downfall was what he described as ‘a bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature … Translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos’ (Time of Gifts, p.16).
The Old Grange - Patrick Leigh Fermor's boarding house
Inflamed by images of ‘long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls’, Paddy flirted in desperation with one of the school kitchen-maids, who is described by his contemporary, Alan Watts (In My Own Way, London 1973, p.73), as ‘dowdy’. He then discovered a more deserving object of his gallantries in the person of a grocer’s daughter, one Nellie Lemar, who was ‘the vision of just such a being’.
Paddy describes how his ‘latest wanderings’ had led him ‘beyond the Cattle Market’ to an area of the town – just outside the city walls – that was decidedly on the wrong side of the tracks. Dover Street was – and is still, for it survived the ‘Baedeker Raid’ that devastated much of the surrounding area – made up of creaking jettied buildings of great age and mean Victorian terraced houses that would have been occupied by the very poorest members of the community, interspersed with a sprinkling of disreputable-looking pubs and beer shops. To frequent such an area ‘broke a number of taboos too deep-rooted and well-understood to need any explicit veto’.
A quaint mixture of styles - the farther end of Dover Street
Paddy describes the greengrocer’s shop that Nellie ‘tended for her father’ as ‘a sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation’. She ‘was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty … I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent. This sudden incongruous worship may have been a bore but she was too good-natured to show it, and perhaps she was puzzled by the verse which came showering in.’
Heading for the shop as often as he could, Paddy was hardly inconspicuous in his black clothes, wing-collar and boater. ‘My footsteps were discreetly dogged, my devices known and after a week, I was caught red-handed – holding Nellie’s hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed; we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets – and my schooldays were over.’ An exasperated Alec Macdonald, who regarded Paddy as a persistent troublemaker, had duly sent him to the headmaster and he had been summarily ‘sacked’ (Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, London 2012, pp.20-7).
His expulsion from King’s was a considerable setback for Paddy, who had yet to sit his School Certificate exams. Had he remained at school, he might have ended up at Sandhurst or at Oxford. As it was, he was to embark in December 1933 on the epic journey across Europe that would take him, on foot, to Constantinople and beyond, immortalised in his trilogy, The Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. Literary history owes much to Nellie Lemar, without whom these books would never have been written.
According to Kelly’s Directory of Kent and Sussex (1927 edition, p.157), the premises of ‘Edward Jn. Lemar, greengro.’, were at no.2, Dover Street. (The Lemars were well entrenched here: I note that a Mrs Emily Mary Lemar was the landlady of the Bee Hive Public House, further down the street at no.52.) I am glad of the opportunity to recognise this literary landmark, pictured above, which today is the Lanna Thai Restaurant. It is otherwise unmarked.
Not a suitable area for well-bred boys
J.M.W. Turner's 'Okehampton' (c.1826)
The Bayeux Tapestry, made within about ten years of the Battle of Hastings, splendidly illustrates the military architecture of the time. There are five depictions on the tapestry of ‘motte-and-bailey’ castles – those that consisted not of battlemented stone walls and lofty towers, which are characteristic of a later period, but of earthworks and wooden palisades.
The bailey or courtyard was usually on high ground, surrounded by a deep ditch and entered by means of a drawbridge. It was intended to accommodate an entire community. To one side of the bailey, or occasionally in its midst, was the motte, a great cone of earth topped by a wooden stockade, where there was space only for the lord and his immediate entourage. The banks of mottes were notoriously steep and difficult to storm.
These were relatively cheap, hastily-erected fortifications, which any peasant or soldier had the skills to construct. They had proved their usefulness during the minority of William the Conqueror, when Normandy had been ravaged by private wars. The erection of numerous motte-and-bailey castles had been a feature of this dark period, when country people had had to organise their own defence, sometimes under the leadership of the parish priest.
Many of the feuding families of that time, such as Montfort, Tosny, Beaumont and Montgomery, were subsequently to participate in the conquest of England. As they spread across the land, reaping their rewards, they erected yet more motte-and-bailey castles as a means of subduing the native population, who had enjoyed years of peace and stability and were unfamiliar with castles of any kind.
The Englishman who designed the Bayeux Tapestry, thought to be an artist of the Canterbury School, had clearly experienced the post-Conquest castles at first hand. In some of the early panels of the Tapestry, we see Harold and William participating in a minor campaign in Brittany. The artist depicts the Breton castles of Dol, Rennes and Dinan, which he would never have seen, as typical motte-and-bailey castles, though all three were probably at least partially built of stone. The ducal castle at Bayeux is also credited with a motte which, in reality, it never had.
The Castle at Dinan was never of the motte-and-bailey type
The observant artist is very precise in matters of detail. The tower at Dinan appears to consist of a fighting platform raised on stilts. Evidence of such a tower has been found at Abinger in Surrey. He neatly illustrates the inherent weaknesses in their design. Wood is flammable, and the Normans have only to apply firebrands to the walls of Dinan in order to smoke out their enemy. Moreover, it is not possible to raise walls of wood to any great height: those at Dinan are so low that the surrendering rebel, Conan, is able to lean over them and pass the heavy keys of the castle to William at the end of his lance.
Further on, we see the construction, within days of the landing, of a motte-and-bailey castle at Hastings – ‘at Hestenga caestra’, according to the caption. (The Latin should have read ‘ad Hestenga castra’; by slipping into his own tongue, the artist reveals his nationality.) The Englishmen conscripted to perform the task, all armed with shovels, seem thoroughly disgruntled. Such unhappy scenes were soon to be enacted across the land.
Englishmen conscripted to raise a motte at Hastings
At least 84 motte-and-bailey castles had been raised in England by the end of the eleventh century. There are examples in every county. In some cases, temporary wooden walls had soon given gave way to more permanent ones of stone. Castles like Dover, founded by William the Conqueror on the motte-and-bailey pattern, are still dominant features of our landscape.
The subject of two watercolours and other sketches by Turner – the one illustrated above dates from about 1826, and is in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia – Okehampton, on the edge of Dartmoor, is a castle of the motte-and-bailey type. Early in 1068, William marched into Devonshire at the head of his army, intent on mopping up the remaining pockets of resistance. He took the surrender of Exeter and threw up a castle there, before proceeding into Cornwall, where a further four such castles were swiftly raised.
William gave the lordship of Exeter, and of 200 other manors in Devonshire, to his second cousin Baldwin de Meules, the son of his former tutor, Gilbert, Count of Brionne. By the time of Domesday Book (1086), Baldwin, now called ‘the Sheriff’, had built his chief residence on a raised spur at Okehampton. The motte there, formed of material cut from the surrounding rock, rose a further 80 feet above the natural level. Unusually, it was surmounted from the start by a tall, square tower of stone, which may, indeed, have been three storeys high. The earliest fortifications at Okehampton seem otherwise to have been of wood.
Meanwhile, Baldwin’s brother, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, was acquiring estates at the opposite end of the country, including the lordship of Tonbridge in Kent, where he built an equally impressive motte that commanded the Medway crossing. Richard was one of William’s inner circle, a mere eleven men among whom he distributed about half the land of the conquered kingdom, apart from that held by the church. The Saxon thegns whom they displaced, men like the shadowy Osfrith at Okehampton, were, if not already killed or exiled, simply dispossessed.
As for Okehampton, it was the eventual inheritance of Baldwin’s great-granddaughter, the lady Hawise, who married Renaud de Courtenay. Their descendants – hereditary sheriffs of Devon, keepers of Exeter Castle and, from 1355, Earls of Devon – have been, ever since, the foremost family in the county. Okehampton Castle was abandoned by the Courtenays in 1538, and is now a romantic ruin, but the present (Eighteenth) Earl, seated at Powderham, near Exeter, continues to occupy ancestral land.
The new ruling class imposed by the Normans has proved remarkably durable. As Melvyn Bragg points out in a recent article, ‘more than half the land is still in the hands of the ancient looters from the time of the Conquest to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the occupation of the common land’. To describe the current Earl of Devon in such terms seems a little strong. One has to concede that, as far as Baldwin or Richard are concerned, Lord Bragg has a point.
(David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror, London, 1977, pp.41-3, 213, 216-17, 269; Lucien Musset, The Bayeux Tapestry, Woodbridge, 2005, pp.138, 144; Alan Endecott, Okehampton Castle, Devon, English Heritage Guide, 2003. For Melvyn Bragg’s article, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9093724/British-culture-may-be-our-new-great-industry.html.
Constant, Marquis de Thierry de Faletans
L’invention du crayon «de plomb» est créditée aux Anglais en 1564. L’inventeur du taille-crayon était un Français, Thierry des Estivaux. À Paris en 1847, il fait breveter sa conception du tube classique équipé d’un cône qui rétrécit et d’une lame. Il s’agissait d’une invention qui a sauvé les doigts de générations d’écoliers, qui auraient dû tailler la pointe de leurs crayons avec leurs canifs. Il s’agit d’un objet qui est universel et pris pour acquis.
Constant de Thierry des Estivaux était un vaillant officier et patriote. Celui-ci est né à Paris en 1797, le fils aîné du colonel Gaspard de Thierry, baron des Estivaux en Lorraine, le commandant fringant des 9e hussards pendant les guerres de la Révolution, et sa belle épouse Romarine, comtesse de Faletans et Digoine, une franc-comtoise.
En 1814, alors qu’il était encore écolier, Constant participait à la défense de Besançon, et en 1815, âgé de 17 ans, combattait aux côtés de son père à la bataille de Waterloo, d’où cinq blessures. Il servit ensuite dans les dragons de Besançon et, à partir de 1822, dans l’armée russe, en tant qu’aide-de-camp personnel de son «oncle», le général comte de Langeron. L’un des grands hommes de son âge, Langeron avait sauvé la vie du duc d’York, le «grand vieux», combattit les Turcs sous Potemkine et commandait une division à Austerlitz. Un parent éloigné, il traitait Constant comme son propre fils.
Constant quittait la Russie après la mort de Langeron en 1831, avec l’intention de s’installer à Paris. Il est arrêté à Briançon, à la frontière française, apparemment sur les ordres d’Adolphe Thiers, le ministre de l’Intérieur. Ses bagages, contenant des documents volumineux de Langeron, ont été saisis. Les documents sont éventuellement placés au ministère des Affaires étrangères à Paris, et dont diverses parties ont depuis été éditées et publiées. Sans toujours l’avouer, Thiers tire pleinement d’eux dans son Histoire de l’Empire (publié dès 1845), duquel, à son tour, son livre fournissait Tolstoï avec beaucoup de son matériel de base pour la Guerre et la Paix (publié dès 1868). Le récit de Langeron du briefing de Weyrother avant la bataille d’Austerlitz constitue la base d’une scène particulièrement mémorable (Livre III, chapitre XI). Tolstoï le fait jouer avec une tabatière en or, tandis qu’il écoute les inanités de Weyrother, un sourire ironique sur son visage alors qu’il tente de piquer sa vanité. Langeron, que Byron avait déjà évoqué flatteusement en vers dans Don Juan, n’aurait pas été mécontent.
Le Château d’Abbans-Dessus (Doubs)
Autant que l’on sache, Constant ne devait plus jamais être officiellement employé. Au lieu de cela, il a essayé sa main comme inventeur. Il brevetait une de ses inventions en Angleterre en 1839, et, pour aucune raison particulière utilisait le pseudonyme de «Morillon». Le 21 Avril 1846, il brevetait, cette fois-ci en France, sa conception d’un «propulseur palmipède propre à la navigation maritime et fluviale». Sa tentative d’améliorer la propulsion nous fait penser au «pyroscaphe», le bateau pionnier avec des rames équipées de lames rotatives propulsé à la vapeur, inventé par son parent âgé, le marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, et testé sur le Doubs à Beaume-les-Dames en 1776. À la retraite au château d’Abbans-Dessus (Doubs) dès 1816 Jouffroy d’Abbans était un proche voisin des Faletans (ces derniers s’étaient retirés pendant les périodes troublées dans leur propre château de Busy); transférait-il, peut-être sa passion pour l’ingénierie au jeune Constant. Jouffroy d’Abbans avaient reçu peu de récompense ou de reconnaissance pour son invention, et décédait comme retraité nécessiteux dans l’Hôtel des Invalides, en Juillet 1832. Si Constant ne s’est pas ruiné positivement par ses efforts, de même, ils ne lui ont guère enrichi.
Le Château de Faletans (Jura)
Constant de Thierry des Estivaux a été autorisé à ajouter à son patronyme celui de sa mère, de Faletans, par décret en 1851, et en 1863, après s’être installé au Château de Faletans (Jura) a été créé marquis de Faletans en tant que représentant de la famille marquisale de Faletans, dès lors éteinte. Il était mon arrière-arrière-arrière-grand-père. Jusqu’à tout récemment, je n’avais aucune idée qu’il était l’inventeur du taille-crayon. C’était surement sa plus belle réussite, mais, malheureusement, celle-ci n’est pas la base d’une fortune familiale. La production en masse de crayons date de la fin du 19e siècle. La demande énorme et continue des crayons, pour les écoles et les bureaux, a décollé dans les années 1900. Constant, lui, est mort en 1871. Il mérite d’être mieux connu.
Mon histoire de la famille, The Incredible Journey of Victor Hugo’s Dog, est en préparation: http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/books.
(This blog was originally published in English in July 2011: see http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/archives/683.)
St Andrew's Church, Sherborne St John
There was great consternation in St James’s, Bramley, last winter, when the boiler failed, and doughty congregants were left perishing in the pews. However warm the welcome, church-going became a distinctly uncomfortable experience!
To generations of our ancestors, however, central heating would have seemed an unimaginable luxury. Until the nineteenth century, in the absence of all the comforts and conveniences that we now take for granted, attendance at a country church was almost invariably a penance, if not an ordeal.
Vivid descriptions of Sherborne St John, the neighbouring parish, remind us of the sheer discomfort and, frankly, the squalor of our relatively recent past. In 1827, the lordship of the manor was inherited by Wiggett Chute. The estate had been mismanaged for a century and was, in Wiggett’s view, a blot on the landscape. A typical Victorian reformer, he had a keen sense of responsibility towards his tenants and was determined to sweep away the unwholesome relics of the past. He was to do so very successfully, and was the architect – literally – of the prosperous community of today.
Sherborne St John: not so pretty then
The Sherborne of two hundred years ago was an agricultural settlement perched on a sea of mud, with cattle and horses passing to and fro in areas where they are never seen today. There were open streams across the roads that served as sewers (all drinking water was drawn from back-yard wells). The villagers lived in ancient, dilapidated cottages with thatched roofs and, usually, only one bedroom, although they often had large families. Such cottages were not then regarded as picturesque, but as slums.
Sherborne would have seemed much busier and livelier than today, with most people employed at or close to home. The workshops of the various tradesmen – the carpenter, miller, blacksmith, tailor, shoemaker, brewer and so on – were scenes of noise and activity. The place would have swarmed with children, as there was no school to keep them occupied. It was Wiggett Chute who founded the school at Sherborne St John, on the site of a working farm, directly opposite the church. Much to his outrage, the churchyard had been regularly used as a pasture for sheep.
The medieval church was still intact. It bore no resemblance to the spacious and well-ordered church of today, another of Chute’s creations. The seating was crammed into the original nave and chancel. With a low, lathe-and-plaster ceiling that sounds positively dangerous, the building was stuffy in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter.
Prominent among the interior features were the boxed pews of the ratepayers, which occupied the top end of the nave, on either side of a single, narrow aisle. These were high, narrow and uncomfortable. In some cases, there was barely space to kneel.
Whilst the ratepayers sat bolt upright in their allotted pews, the poor of the parish were segregated to the rear according to their sex. They perched on make-shift seats that were ‘not much better than benches with backs’, females on one side of the aisle, males on the other. Attendance was generally good, probably a majority of the village population. Some of the men had to be accommodated in a gallery at the back. They included the best singers, loosely affiliated into a ‘choir’, accompanied by a band consisting of both wind and stringed instruments. Their music, of the type evoked by Thomas Hardy in his novels, is described as ‘primitive’.
The seating arrangements at St Andrew’s were much the same as in any country church. A bizarre and possibly unique feature, however, was the ‘Esquire’s Pew’. So far forward in the nave that it was almost in the chancel, it is described as ‘a large square room with a ceiling over it’. The Chutes could only see out by standing up and peering through a narrow grill. Remarkably, this was a double-decker pew, as there was an upper gallery, reached by a narrow flight of steps. The overhead pew belonged to their grand neighbours, the Brocases of Beaurepaire, although they no longer used it.
Brocas monument in Bramley Church
The Brocases had long since abandoned St Andrew’s for St James’s, Bramley, where their supremacy was not in dispute. The rival families must at one time have had adjacent pews, but one or other of them must forever have been nudging his pew a little further forward, in an attempt to outrank his rival. Eventually, having crossed the line into the chancel, they must have agreed to a compromise in the form of the double-decker pew, ‘in which arrangement,’ says Wiggett Chute in his memoirs, ‘the Brocas appear to have certainly got the upper hand’.
One wonders what the parishioners had made of it. Needless to say, those sitting immediately behind the pew – apparently these were the servants at the Vyne, well forward of ‘the poor’ and clearly ranking high in the village pecking order – would have had no view at all.
This would not have concerned many of the male congregants, whose attendance was unwilling but a condition of their hiring agreement as labourers on the estate. They were not obliged to stay awake. All along the walls on the men’s side, there were permanent stains that had been made by their greasy heads as they slumbered during years of interminable services.
It is as well that they were clad in their warm peasant’s smocks, as winters were harsher then than they are today, there were no double doors, and a single stove provided the only heating. There were no lights, either, except for the pulpit candles, which the clerk would only light immediately before the sermon. The stove almost invariably smoked, adding to the general discomfort.
Few, if any, took part in the responses. Many were unable to read. The lugubrious parish clerk, Smallbones, was himself barely literate. One of his duties was to call up the children to recite their Catechism, a terrifying ordeal. Otherwise they must have been bored stiff. There was a lot of bad behaviour, and Smallbones was constantly administering discipline with a stick. The worst troublemakers could expect to be beaten with the bell ropes after the service.
The Vyne, seat of the Chute family, where Jane Austen's brother dined every Sunday
Presiding over these strange scenes was the vicar, Jane Austen’s brother James, dressed in his black gown and perhaps with powdered hair. There is no knowing whether he preached a lively sermon. Perhaps, like his father, he kept a collection of his own sermons and used them again and again. They were probably sprinkled with archaisms, uncompromisingly erudite and far above the heads of most of the congregation.
The later nineteenth century was marked by the widespread renovation or even rebuilding of country churches, the removal of boxed pews, the introduction of organs and the composition of lively and inspiring hymns, all of which transformed the experience of going to church. Wiggett Chute was in the vanguard of this movement. James Austen’s son was to sum up his achievement as a landlord: it was, he said a general ‘draining and letting in of air and sunshine to the dark places of the earth’. The reforms of Wiggett Chute exemplify in miniature the general improvement in our lives that we owe to the Victorians.
Rupert Willoughby is the author of Sherborne St John and the Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen. See www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/books.
I have been to Queen Victoria’s private beach at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, to swim. English Heritage, who manage the estate, have restored the alcove or exedra, colourfully decorated with blue and pink tiles, which she favoured for letter-writing and sketching. The Queen’s bathing machine, also restored – after lengthy service as a chicken coop – is displayed there, a very superior construction akin to a small house. Deck chairs may be hired, there are regular Punch and Judy shows, brass bands occasionally perform and there is a pleasant café with changing facilities.
Queen Victoria's bathing machine at Osborne. It would be lowered into the sea on metal tracks.
It was here that Queen Victoria bathed for the first time, when she was in her late twenties. In her journal for 30 July 1847 she writes: ‘Drove to the beach with my maids and went in the bathing machine, where I undressed and bathed in the sea (for the 1st time in my life)… I thought it delightful till I put my head under water, when I thought I should be stifled.’
In fact, the sea here is so shallow, except at the highest tides, that one could almost walk to Portsmouth. As a swimming place it is ideal for young children, as there is little danger of their getting out of their depth. Queen Victoria’s own children played happily on the beach for hours and had swimming lessons from Prince Albert, a firm believer in the health-giving properties of sea-bathing. Although the Solent is a narrow strait, the view from here reminded him of the Bay of Naples.
The private beach at Osborne
I wondered whether my grandfather, a cadet at Osborne during the First World War, would also have swum here. In 1902, Edward VII presented Osborne to the nation. A year later, a Royal Naval College was opened in the former stables, the main house being put to use as a convalescent home. The accommodation was damp and spartan, a suitable training ground for the nation’s martial élite. (These included Prince George, later the Duke of Kent, who was my grandfather’s servant.) The College was to become notorious for its epidemics of ‘pink eye’, a minor but unpleasant infection, treatable with drops, that was said to have been left behind by the horses.
Disappointingly, I discover that there were no opportunities to swim, nor indeed swimming lessons, in my grandfather’s day. There was no pool, and the Admiralty had banned swimming in the Solent, on the improbable grounds that it was unsafe! Swimming lessons were deferred until the boys arrived at Dartmouth, which had a pool, though I suspect my grandfather would already have been a competent swimmer.
View of Osborne House from the Valley Path down to the beach
One of the delights of visiting this beach is the path from the main house that leads to it. A near contemporary of my grandfather writes: ‘the grounds which formed the park of Queen Victoria’s favourite country home … were quite lovely. Though we were not allowed to approach the house, on half holidays and Sunday afternoons the paths through the woods and down to the sea were open to us, and in the infrequent intervals between organised games I used to love to wander there. But our lives were so strictly circumscribed and controlled that these opportunities were rare.’
Osborne House itself was off limits. Another former cadet recalled: ‘Funnily enough, while I was at Osborne I never saw Osborne House. I never caught sight of it at all and we were quite close by, just through a few trees and shrubs and things.’
Personally I am much taken with Prince Albert’s Italianate fantasy, which appears at its best under a blue sky. I feel sad for Queen Victoria, fussing about with her maids and bathing machine and voluminous costume, failing to enjoy the sense of liberation that comes with even a moderately wild swim. She should have been as untramelled as the voluptuous statuary that surrounded her at Osborne.
(See Michael Partridge, The Royal Naval College, Osborne: A History, 1903-21, Stroud 1999, pp.29, 30, 116-17, 105-6, and
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/osborne/beach/history-of-the-beach/
