This is the severed head of John the Baptist, I mean what a lovely thing to pop in your living room. This was a popular image in the medieval period and it’s made of terracotta, dating from around 1380 to 1420.
It was probably once in a church at the top of an arch, but it ended up embedded in a cottage wall in the village of Barney, near to Thursford and was found in 1958 when the wall was demolished. I suppose that it’s quite inspirational in its own way.
Thanks to Norfolk Heritage Explorer (which is a really wonderful website) the exact location where it was found is marked accurately on the map (the little yellow triangle in the middle of the image), although they only got confirmation of the location in 1984 because a local man remembered where it was found.
Well, this is nice, it’s a map of Norwich which I haven’t seen before. It is showing me all manner of things that I didn’t expect to be there, so that’s a bit more time I will waste (well, maybe not waste, is any finding out about history a waste?) hours on now…..
This image should show at full resolution by clicking on it and zooming in to see the details.
This artwork is of St. Laurence’s Church in Norwich and was painted by David Hodgson (1798-1864) in 1863. This is one of the churches that was nearly demolished in the 1960s and I made reference to that when wittering on about a defaced statue found there. This artwork would have been painted from Westwick Street, but that area has changed too much to be able to put up a before and after photo. George Plunkett does though link to a watercolour which was painted in a similar place.
As usual, I’ve had AI try and bring back some of the original colours to the painting. Quaint as the building might look, it’s not entirely clear to me that it was actually structurally sound and pleasant inside.
Friends of mine know that I like books, especially when they come in their thousands at a time, but this is a rather special one published at some stage in the 1400s. I say published, but perhaps more written laboriously out might be more appropriate.
I let ChatGPT have a go at transcribing this and it didn’t cope with it. However, Google Gemini had a lovely time with it, describing it as text by John Wycliffe (c.1328-1384) that was likely published in the fifteenth century. I know this is correct as the museum stated that it is a book of tracts by John Wycliffe and was published between 1400 and 1500.
Google Gemini goes further and notes that the general thrust of this is that “it critiques those who hold great benefices and use their positions for worldly gain rather than spiritual care” and this does feel like the sort of text Wycliffe would have written. It’s yet another experiment in the incredible power of AI and I’ve established that it can read Middle English.
Wycliffe wanted a bit of modernisation in the Catholic Church, ending the abuses and bringing the message of the Bible closer to the people. Pope Gregory XI, who was broadly incompetent for various reasons, condemned that arrangement straight away. There’s a relevance to Norfolk with all of this, as Wycliffe stirred up the Peasant’s Revolt, a national uprising which gained traction in the area. And the Lollards were sort of led by Wycliffe and they had a strong presence in East Anglia.
There’s something a little tacky about this fascinating item in the collections of Norwich Castle Museum. It’s a special piece, it’s the pre-cut mould for pilgrim badges that were sold at Walsingham’s shrine before the Reformation.
This is obviously how they were made, but perhaps the pilgrims who went there didn’t realise just how mass produced this whole arrangement was. Or, maybe they did, but even the museum notes that this method was designed to be “quick and cheap” rather than something produced to a high standard. And maybe there was a choice of pilgrim badges, from rather more decadent ones to cheap and cheerful. It seems though that some pilgrimage sites were selling over 100,000 badges a year, this truly was the Great Yarmouth of its day.
King Henry III made a pilgrimage to Walsingham and the shrine of the Virgin Mary in the thirteenth century and then King Edward I, King Edward II, King Henry IV, King Henry VII and King Henry VIII all went afterwards during their reigns. That’s some destination and it’s clear why it also became desirable to pilgrims. King Henry VIII couldn’t have been entirely surprised and delighted by his visit as he later approved it being pulled down during the Reformation.
I haven’t been able to find any badges in museums or for sale that look similar to this, I had hoped to see what one would have looked like.
I’m finding this interesting as it’s a view of Tombland from 1830 which I haven’t seen before. Although in very many ways nothing has really changed here in terms of the Erpingham Gateway, the road layout and the buildings on the right hand side of the road, there are some other changes.
One change is the removal of the buildings to the right hand side of the Erpingham Gateway which is where the statue commemorating the life of Edith Cavell is now located. There’s also a gateway that I hadn’t known existed on the extreme left of the painting, that’s now gone but there is a blue door there today which gives entrance to Norwich School and there is today evidence of the former gateway that surrounded it.
Back to the artist, John Thirtle (1777-1839) who became a key member of the Norwich School group of painters and he became known for his watercolour landscapes. He was also an art framer and print-seller and Norwich Castle Museum, who own this artwork, have several of his paintings in their collections. Some of his artworks have suffered from the fading of the indigo pigment he used on many paintings, something which is a little sub-optimal. He suffered from illness towards the later part of his life, from long-time health issues from tuberculosis reducing his output.
I’ve asked AI to restore the image to how the sky might have looked and I think it’s done a generally decent job here. There’s a mistake that AI thought there was a fountain, and thus water, in the background that isn’t actually there, but the image does feel like it has been brought back to life.
I led a walk, which was well attended which is rather nice, yesterday about the historic parish of St. George at Tombland, so expect a few posts now following my research about that.
I noted in a post in 2021 that it was really positive that this parish boundary marker had survived a move to a new building. However, it appears that it might have disappeared and the people that I’ve asked have no idea where it has gone. Dating from 1834, the marker is no longer visible following work undertaken on Princes House Residences.
The building with the parish boundary marker now missing…..
This is how Tombland Alley looks today, an alley that runs behind St. George Tombland and comes out opposite the Erpingham Gate. The areas of raised ground is where the burials took place and they were once more contained than they are now with railings, some evident in the photo taken by the late great George Plunkett in 1936.
This image is from Percy Stimpson (1880-1948) and so would date to around the 1920 or 1930 period. The iron railings that were removed during the Second World War for scrap iron are still visible, and I think interestingly, so are numerous gravestones. It’s not quite clear to me when these might have been removed, but it appears to have been around the 1950s or 1960s.
This post is more about the history of the Louis Marchesi pub, but here’s a photo of a beer that I’ve had at the pub whilst on an ale trail…..
The pub has for most of its licensed life been known as the Waggon and Horses, with the adjoining road still having that name. It became a licensed premises at some point in the early 1780s and became a pub owned by the brewery Steward, Patteson & Steward. The timber frontage is not original, that came at the beginning of the early twentieth century in an attempt to make it look Tudor with a similar thing happening to the Maid’s Head located over the road.
It wasn’t though built to be a licensed premises, there was a fifteenth century residential property here and the undercroft of that building is still present. Although the Tudor frontage and the roof might be twentieth century, the timber frame of the structure is also fifteenth century, although much changed over the centuries.
Although Tombland, which the pub faces onto, might not have changed much, the adjoining Waggon and Horses Lane has a different character today. To the disappointment of the sanitary committee, a second slaughter house licence was granted to a property owner in the late 1880s.
It later became a pub operated by Watney Mann in the 1960s and in 1975 it was renamed as the Louis Marchesi. Erminio William Louis Marchesi (1898-1968) was a local Norwich man who founded the Round Table, designed to be a younger version of the Rotary Club. The late great George Plunkett doesn’t have an older photo of the pub, but he has one from 1989.
Going back to some previous licencees, Daniel Fiddymont was the landlord between 1822 and 1830, but there was a tragedy in 1829 when his wife died. That meant that he was left running a pub with five young children, it’s perhaps not a surprise that he remained at the venue for only a few more months.
There was another tragedy in July 1831, when the new landlord Henry Morris died at the age of 46, leaving a wife and ten children. His widow looked after the pub for a few months until it no doubt became unsustainable and the brewery advertised for a new landlord. Henry had been a brewer for the Steward, Patteson & Steward brewery for over twenty years. Every morning at 06:00 he served purl, which was a warm ale served often mixed with gin and milk, with soups available for lunch.
Taking over in October 1831, John Bushell advertised in the Norwich Mercury that he had taken on the inn, which suggests that it did provide accommodation of some sorts. He noted that he had London porter and fine ales on draught, alongside a similar bottled selection. He remained the landlord of the pub until his death in 1839.
In 1851, the pub was once again advertised to let and in the newspaper the brewery mentioned that it was “doing a good trade and has accommodation for fifty horses” and there remains a large yard at the back of the venue today.
Probably to the annoyance of the landlord, in 1925 the pub was refused a renewal of their Saturday afternoon licence as the police said that they had found that it had been “badly conducted” when they visited. The pub’s representative complained and the magistrate suggested that they seek legal advice, which must have felt sub-optimal to the venue at the time. This meant that they lost their ability to open between 15:00 and 17:30 which were compulsory closing periods at the time.
More recently, in 2004 the pub became more of a cafe bar arrangement and took the name ‘Take Five’ which felt sub-optimal from a historical perspective, but since 2017 it has now once again become a pub and retaken the Louis Marchesi name.
Today, the pub offers around four real ales and from my experience they’re usually from local breweries. The undercroft and private room upstairs can both be booked for private events, but I don’t think that they’re routinely open for the public. I do prefer when pubs keep their original names, but at least it has the Louis Marchesi one back now….
I’m getting a bit niche now, so this is my last post about the Castle for a few days….. I posted about these stone inscriptions a few days ago.
I’ve just found this image drawn by Cornelius Jansson Walter Winter (1817-1891) in 1888. The castle ceased to be the city’s prison in 1887 and this image would have been done as part of the work for the new castle museum.
What I’m impressed by is that nearly 150 years later, the stonework is still in nearly the same condition as it was then. Although, there’s one exception and that’s in the top photo there’s a chunk of ironwork on the right hand side of the image and part of the stone above appears to have been removed. I should probably not be too worried about the removal of a piece of stone, but I’m intrigued.
