Anyone alighting from the train at Beverley station should find it easy enough to locate the remains of the medieval Dominican friary in Friars Lane – we stumbled on them straight after arriving in the town. The friars followed a teaching and preaching vocation and so their friaries are generally sited in towns and cities and this fact means that most of them have disappeared because of property development in the centuries after Henry VIII dissolved them in the 16th century. So standing friary buildings are scarce and, in my book, worth a look. At Beverley, the friary church has long gone (its foundations are in part buried beneath the nearby railway), but there is a substantial remaining building that may have originally housed the friars’ dormitory and library.*
The surviving buildings became a house after the dissolution, and its owners, the Warton family, preserved and enhanced them. One glimpse into their world is a series of fragments of wall painting visible in the surviving rooms. Some of this decoration (inscriptions on trefoil-shaped backgrounds surrounded by twining foliage, below) may in fact date to the time of the friars. But some particularly delightful, if now flaking, floral paintings (above), are post-Reformation. The geometrical pattern of bands in which the flowers are set have a Jacobean (i.e. 17th-century) look about them.
It’s good to be reminded that coloured decoration in the early-modern period was not limited only to the grand houses of the super-rich, with their coats of arms and mythological subjects. Here in a Beverley side street is evidence of the floral sensibilities of a middle-class family, who enjoyed bringing images of nature inside their house. I wonder if they were enthusiastic gardeners.
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* Today, the friary is a Youth Hostel. The building survives as a result of a campaign by preservationists when it was threatened by the expansion of a nearby factory that produced shock absorbers.
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