Lavenham, Suffolk

Pebbles and nodules

Regions said to be poor in building stone (or far enough away from good stone to make transport prohibitively expensive for all but the most high status structures) often display ingenuity in the way builders use what is available. One example is the use of pebbles and nodules of such materials as flint, chert and quartzite, all of which are found in and near Suffolk, among other areas. These rounded or irregular forms seem at first unpromising building materials, but they have all been used to make pleasing walls. I was reminded of them when I came across this picture of a section of wall in Lavenham when looking through my photographs for something else.

The wall has obligingly fallen into disrepair, giving us an insight into how it was constructed, There seems to be a core of brick combined with rubble, together with areas of brickwork on the surface that must key into the core masonry and give the structure strength. Much of the outer surface, however, is covered with pebbles and small nodules of stone. The majority of these stones come in various shades of grey and are probably flint. There are also a small number of orangey stones, which are likely to be chert. They’re all arranged roughly in courses and stick out a lot from the mortar in which they are embedded, which may have eroded away with time to produce the very knobbly effect.

Erosion, moisture and frost certainly seem to have affected the wall badly, as a large area of the pebble surface had come away when I took this photograph a couple of years ago. Water has probably got in at the top and then frozen, in spite of what looks like a top course of hard grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks, designed to protect the wall and probably added later than the rest of the structure. Full marks for effort. Perhaps with a little care and attention, what is still in part a very attractive wall could be put right – maybe it already has been.

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.

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.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Colours of memory

I’ve blogged before, more than once I seem to remember, about buildings and memory: so often, I find, architecture is a trigger for some recollection. When I was looking through my pictures and wondering what next to share here,* a memory from decades ago welled up from somewhere.

‘Green and pink,’ said my friend, looking out of my window in Oxford and taking in the view of backs of cottages.
‘Sorry?’
‘Green and pink. Painted walls. I keep seeing the colours next to one another; they seem to look good together.’
‘Yes, that’s true. I’d  not thought of it before.’

And so, brought up among the ubiquitous limestone of the Cotswolds and the white stuccoed walls of Cheltenham, I learned to look out for the splashes of pale colour that English buildings throw at us and to like them too. Pinkwash instead of whitewash, plus pale green, yellow, blue, ochre. I get the impression that my readers like these colours too, because posts about colourful facades – in Saffron Walden, Alcester, and Launceston, for example – have proved some of my most popular. So too did the discussions (in the comments section and elsewhere) about the different colours used on medieval buildings and their sources (pink from animal blood, for example).†

So here are green and pink again in Lavenham, spotted in the sunshine last summer: modern pastel shades on buildings several hundred years old, and no worse for that. To my mind the colours enhance this modest vernacular architecture and contribute to a wonderfully effective streetscape. Often it’s the original features – sash windows, timber framing, jetties – that we notice, taking the colour for granted. But it’s the colour that makes these buildings (at least from the point of view of the passer-by), both the colour of the walls and of those wonderfully variegated tiles. Long may they delight the eye and start the  memory working.

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*My usual way, as regular readers will know, is to post about buildings I've seen recently. But now and then, for the sake of variety and to relive old visits, I choose something I saw a while back.

†Another post concerning colour, this time in Tewkesbury, inspired a number of comments from readers.