Arlingham, Gloucestershire

Round-up

I belong to a local Facebook group here in our corner of the Cotswolds. People post news, coming events, and other items of interest. If someone spots escaped livestock (sheep usually, occasionally cattle) on a nearby road, they put up a post with details of the location and before long another member who knows which farmer is responsible lets them know. Back in the Middle Ages, before the enclosure of land into small fenced fields, stray livestock was much more of a problem. Animals grazing on open common land wandered off regularly. The answer to this problem was the village pound.

If someone’s animals strayed on to your bit of one of the big open fields and you didn’t know whose they were, you could drive them to the pound, a walled enclosure in the middle of the village. When the owner found out what had happened, the creatures could be retrieved. Most village pounds fell out of use after enclosure of the land into the self-contained fenced or walled fields we know today, when stray livestock became much less of a problem. But a few pounds survive. The one at Arlingham is a rectangular enclosure bounded by walls of a mixture of stones – red sandstone and green pennant stone brought across the River Severn from the Forest of Dean, together with local lias. In c. 1870 when the pound was repaired, a fourth type of stone was used – recycled Cotswold stone from a demolished house, Arlingham Court, which once stood nearby. Amongst the reused stone was part of a window surround, which can still be seen among the masonry on the inside of the front wall (see photograph below).

To pay for the upkeep of the pound and presumably to provide feed for the animals if they spent long there, a charge was levied for each animal impounded. A modern notice lists the charges in force in the 1780s: 1 penny for a horse, 2 pence for a cow, 3 pence for ‘a score [20] of sheep’ and 4 pence for a sow. Quite enough, one would imagine, for an owner to look after their animals (and, after enclosure, their fences), to ensure that they would rarely have to pay up before driving a stubborn cow or pig back home.

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* Arlingham was enclosed in 1802, but the pound was clearly useful enough post-enclosure for these repairs to take place.

Pershore, Worcestershire

 

Pershore beasts, Pershore plums

I’ve noticed the former church of St Andrew near the abbey in Pershore several times, and my photograph of the medieval carving on the tower is not actually the first I’d taken of this curiosity, although it’s the first in which strong sunlight picks out the details. Admiring this carving, and wondering exactly what the beast it depicts actually is, made me look closely at its bared teeth, bulging eyes, and bushy tail. Hitherto, peering up at it (it’s quite high up) in poor light, I’d wondered if it was Jesus’ donkey with a palm tree in the background. A better look at the teeth through a zoom lens made me inclined to think it might be a muzzled dog. But in that case, is that really a tree behind it? And is that the faint impression of a face, popping up above the creature’s back?

No reference book I have seems to throw any light on this carving. Pevsner mentions some ‘grotesque carvings’ and moves swiftly on. The listing description says that the grotesques adorn buttresses, which is true, but says no more. Maybe there’s not a definitive solution to this question; many such carvings are the result of artistic whimsy.*

Curiosity did at least make me look up the history of the church. In the 1060s the crown gave much of the land in Pershore to Westminster Abbey. The abbot of Pershore refused tenants of Westminster the right to worship in his abbey, so the church of St Andrew was built to give these people somewhere to worship. After the abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII, the monks’ church became available to the locals and the two churches continued side by side. Nowadays the parishioners worship in the abbey church and St Andrew’s is used as a parish hall. The abbey rents the land on which St Andrew’s stands for a very small sum, and one that speaks of one of the drivers of the local economy. The annual rent is one pound of Pershore plums. Truly they are plums beyond price.†

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* However, see the update, below. Nevertheless, to make a general point, I was pleased to hear no less an authority than the medievalist Professor Paul Binksi refer to medieval grotesque carvings in this way in a recent Zoom lecture I attended. He sees such church carvings – grotesques, sheela na gigs, and the like – as equivalent to the whimsical marginal illustrations in some medieval manuscripts, in which images, sometimes apparently outrageous or even erotic, appear in the margins of serious, often sacred texts.

† I have only an online source for the ‘pound of plums’ story. I do hope it is both true and still current.

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Update One of my readers suggests that the carving represents a wolf with the head of St Edmund. This is almost certainly correct and I am kicking myself for not having picked up this allusion. St Edmund was killed by Viking raiders, who shot so many arrows at him that he bristled, then cut off his head. The king’s men heard cries, and found the body and head guarded by a wolf. When they put the head back on the body, the parts fused together. Miracles were attributed to the king, and he was made a saint. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey, and the links between Pershore and Westminster make this interpretation of the carving very likely indeed. I am indebted to my reader ‘Per Apse’ for this suggestion. 

Black Country Living Museum, Dudley

Pigeon post

This surprising little building is a pigeon loft. It would not have been so surprising in Bliston in the 1920s when it was built, because keeping pigeons was popular in the area and this loft belonged to a well known local pigeon fancier, Charlie Purslow, whose birds were famous for winning prizes.* Charlie Purslow (1906–98) raced pigeons for some 70 years, and won prizes over most of that period. During World War II he was in the National Pigeon Service, which used the birds’ remarkable homing ability to send messages behind enemy lines.

To keep his thirty or so birds, he did not need anything elaborate – his wooden loft was made for him by a work colleague. Charlie repainted it every year, limewashing the brick plinth on which it stands, and renewing the black and white stripes of the wooden structure itself. I don’t know why he used black and white stripes. Was it thought that the birds could locate it more easily if it was painted in this pattern? It certainly stands out at the Black County Living Museum. Is there no aspect of Black Country life that they don’t cover?

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* Pigeon-keeping has a long history. The Romans used the birds for carrying messages, there were postal services that used pigeons in the 19th century, and pigeon racing became popular in the late-19th century.

 

Wells, Somerset

I have lived in houses with mice, watched swallows nest under neighbours’ eaves, and fretted about martens in roof spaces. I’ve found wasps’ nests in attics, heard tales of badgers undermining foundations, and once lived in a house where there was a fox’s earth beneath the garden shed. In a country house I’ve visited, bats (members of a protected species) fluttered around the upper floors, the owners nonchalantly ignoring the daily fly-past.

Animals have a way of colonizing our spaces. We’re not always pleased about this of course. Few of us take kindly to the common furniture beetle or his other timber-destroying cousins. And some owners of buildings go to great lengths to prevent birds landing on ledges and dropping droppings on the masonry. But there are more benign animal visitors to our buildings. Take the bishop’s palace at Wells. Perhaps the most outstanding bishop’s residence in England, it dates from the 13th century, and is surrounded by a set of outer walls from the 14th century that are in turn surrounded by a moat fed by one of the wells of Wells, around the back. This moat is remarkable for its occupants, for swans have lived here for many long generations. The current pair have managed to produce a very healthy family of eight cygnets this year, and they have gathered by the gatehouse bridge because someone, just out of shot, has begun to throw bits of bread into the water for them to eat.

This bounty means that these elegant creatures are not doing what Wells swans are supposed to do. Around the corner there is a metal chain attached to the palace wall, its lower end comfortably within beak’s range. At the other end of the chain is a bell. The swans of Wells know if they ring this bell someone will be summoned, bearing swan-food. Bell ringing. It’s hungry work, as any campanologist will tell you.



The bell-ringer at work