Martock, Somerset

Well provided for

I always think of the Tudor and Stuart periods as the great age of English market houses, which are so often built in a kind of rustic classicism that suggests local pride and modest prosperity. The one at Chipping Campden is a favourite, Abingdon another, on a far grander scale and far from rustic. The stone town of Martock, however, has a mid-18th century one.

It’s quietly classical, with elliptical arches and piers that don’t have capitals but just a continuation of the stringcourse that runs around the building to show where the arch begins. Up above there are sash windows and, at the end, a Venetian window above a row of scroll brackets, and above that a blind niche in the form of a semicircle that, when you look at it closely, turns out to be a vent.  It’s very simple, a local builder’s assemblage of basic ingredients, but a satisfying enough recipe for a small country town.

Next to it is a structure known as the Market Cross or the Pinnacle. It’s a tall Tuscan column (about 6 m in total) that bears the date 1741. It is allegedly a copy of one once at Wilton, but wherever the idea came from, it’s effective enough as a corner feature on this junction. Not that it needs a landmark, with the Market House there too. In this, as in its profusion of stones buildings generally, Martock is well provided for.

Swerford, Oxfordshire

Lumps and bumps

It was only by chance that I came across this place. I was on the lookout for the church, but what I’d taken to be the main village of Swerford, a cluster of houses at Chapel End, is not where the church is – it’s next to another cluster a few hundred yards away. And then, when I did find the church what caught my eye first were various lumps and bumps in the adjacent field. They are all that’s left of a castle: two main raised grassy partly tree-covered areas – the motte or mound and the bailey or courtyard – plus another smaller one that looks like a lesser bailey or outwork. The churchyard cuts into the nearest bump, which you can see in my photograph just beyond the churchyard wall, telling us that the graveyard, and no doubt the church, are later than the castle.

This small fortification was built during the 12th-century civil war between rival claimants to the English throne: Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and Stephen, his nephew. The local lords, the D’Oyleys, were related to Matilda and so on her side; their neighbours, the de Chesneys of Deddington, backed Stephen and threatened to take the D’Oyley lands. This small castle was built by the D’Oyleys to defend the ford over the Swere Brook, a key point on a local route.

The castle would have been built of wood and put up quickly some time after the death of Henry I in 1135, so that a small garrison and their horses could be based here. Twenty years later it was not needed, as the war had ended with Stephen on the throne but an agreement that Matilda’s son would succeed him when he died. That son, Henry II, had the unauthorised castles of the civil war dismantled when he came to the throne in 1154, and this one was probably taken down then. Some of the rubble from the mound may even have been used to build the church, which dates from some time after 1300. Archaeologists say that whether or not this was the case, the site was cleared fairly comprehensively and there have been few finds.

Shorncote, Gloucestershire

Viva Maria!

A few weeks ago I injured a leg and for a while could hardly move and was unable to bend sufficiently to get in and out of the car – let alone drive it – without pain. By last weekend things had improved sufficiently for me to take my leg for a test drive, as it were, and, as things went well, I ended up a few miles beyond Cirencester and found myself in a tiny place called Shorncote, where I’d not been before.

The church at Shorncote is very small – just a nave, chancel, small side chapel and porch – but is full of the sort of things that I like: fragments of wall painting, an old timber roof, a tiny Easter sepulchre, a reading desk knocked together out of medieval panelling, and so on. As I was looking round, the sun came out and threw light on all this, and also on something I had not noticed until that point, a carved graffito on a window ledge, made up of a capital W or what this symbol is usually taken to be, a pair of overlapping Vs.

Matthew Champion’s excellent book Medieval Graffiti* is enlightening on this mark, which he and fellow graffiti-researchers have found in many medieval churches. He says that it is widely believed to symbolise the Virgin Mary, and written as two overlapping Vs is said to stand for ‘Virgo Virginum’ (Virgin of virgins), though it is also sometimes written upside-down, when it appears as a capital M, so it works that way too. Champion cites at least one place – a church at Fakenham, Norfolk – where the symbol is reproduced formally (i.e. not as graffiti), in the flint patterns on a late-medieval church wall, in association with the word ‘Maria’.

However, the symbol outlasted the Reformation, turning up in all sorts of places, including 18th and 19th-century secular buildings, suggesting that it might have acquired a significance beyond the church, as a kind of sign of good luck. In 20th-century Italy, incidentally, the symbol had an afterlife as an abbreviation for the word ‘Viva’ (long live).† There can be a lot to tease out of a small scratched mark on a church wall.

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* Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches, (Ebury Press, 2013). I reviewed this book here. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in these things.

† To go off piste for a moment: The American poet E. E. Cummings gave one of his collections the title VV [ViVa], with the Vs printed to overlap (and often, given the limitations of typography, as a W), in the ancient manner. Cummings liked titles that were unusual or difficult to pronounce. Another of his was XAIPE, which is Greek, and I’m told sounds roughly like ‘chiry’, with the ‘ch’ as in the Scottish ‘loch’ and the word rhyming with ‘wiry’; the meaning is ‘Be happy!’, as witness Lawrence Durrell in Reflections on a Marine Venus: ‘When you see the gravestones from the little necropolis of Cameirus . . . it is the so-often repeated single word – the anonymous Xaipe – which attracts you . . . . It is not the names of the rich or the worthy . . . but this single word, “Be Happy,” serving both as a farewell and admonition, that goes to your heart with the whole impact of the Greek style of mind.’

Bristol and beyond

Small but perfectly formed

Before I return to regular posting, I would like to offer my readers one more selection of past posts, to celebrate this blog's tenth anniversary. This, time, I've chosen a handful of very small buildings. This is in part a reminder that, over the past decade, the English Buildings blog has taken pride in noticing very small structures that many people pass by without a thought. It's also, in a way, a tribute to the great architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner and the colleagues with whom he worked. A very long time ago I bought my first volume in his Buildings of England series: it was Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds, and I added it to my shelves shortly after it came out, in the 1970s. In fact, it was one of the volumes not actually written by Pevsner – the great man was getting old and realised that the only way to complete the series was to enlist some help. So the Gloucestershire volumes were written by local expert David Verey. Be that as it may, they followed Pevsner's lead in including many small buildings among the more obvious churches and big houses.* I was made aware of this when I looked up the entry on a place I knew to find that the most unassuming building of all – a privy – had been singled out for notice. I learned something that day, that even the most modest structure could be worth looking at. I have tried to keep that in mind ever since. So here are five of my posts on small buildings, easy to miss but very memorable...

A public lavatory in Bristol

A Turkish bath in London

A fountain in Warwickshire

A lock-up near Oxford

A churchyard seat in Herefordshire.

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* Now that revised editions of the Pevsner volumes are appearing, with more and larger pages allocated to each county, more and more of these small buildings are included, and a good thing too.

Shugborough, Staffordshire, and more

Retrospective (3): Feline tales

It has been said à propos of social media that, having invented the most sophisticated form of communication yet devised by humankind, we use it for sharing pictures of cats. I offer no apologies, though, for this short selection of cat posts, offered as my third retrospective to celebrate a decade of this blog. These, after all, are architectural cats, and the image of the feline form, used as an embellishment on or near buildings, says something about our fascination with these intriguing, beautiful, and sometimes infuriating creatures.* My handful of posts contains cats from the mid-18th to the late-20th century, but which show artistic influences stretching back thousands of years. And that is proof enough that not just our relationship with cats but also our artistic engagement with them is far, far older than the internet.

A sea-going cat in Staffordshire

A church cat in the Cotswolds

A museum mouser in Hereford

A landmark cat in...Catford

The Egyptian-style cats of Mornington Crescent

A ginger tom in Thaxted.

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* The novelist Raymond Chandler referred to his cat Taki as his 'secretary' because whenever Chandler tried to write anything, the creature would drape itself over his notepad or sit on the copy he wanted to revise. I have had this experience with a cat myself and have found it beguiling and maddening by turns.

Burford, Oxfordshire, and beyond

Retrospective (2): A handful of fragments

As my next short sequence of backward-glancing links to celebrate ten years of blogging, I'm concentrating on fragments – those broken bits and pieces that can tell us so much about history – or occasionally fox us – while also being so evocative. Whether it's bits of medieval stained glass or chunks of old masonry, such unregarded scraps have often surfaced on the English Buildings blog over the last ten years. Here are a few you may have missed...

Tantalising bits of stained glass in Oxfordshire

Old bits of pottery put to architectural use in Northamptonshire

Traces of a mason's yard in Shrewsbury

A revealing broken pinnacle in Somerset

A whole wall of fragments in Gloucestershire.

Dungeness, Kent, and more

Retrospect (1): a poetic handful

To celebrate ten years of blogging, I am going to do a short series of retrospectives, each highlighting a small selection of posts on some of miscellaneous themes that have preoccupied the English Buildings blog over the past decade. These past posts are some of my personal favourites, and all but the most dedicated of regular readers will have missed quite a few of them, so I hope the following links will give them another place in the sun.

The sun is relevant to the first of these posts, but the overriding theme here is poetry, and the way my encounters with buildings have reminded me of some favourite poems...

John Donne and Derek Jarman in Dungeness

Philip Larkin and doors in St John's Wood

Thomas Hardy and wagonettes in Worcestershire

P J Kavanagh, mourning, and temperance in Fulham

C P Cavafy and Patrick Leigh Fermor in Gloucestershire