The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  But the most interesting mark on this beam is barely visible in the flurry of face-marks that surrounds it. It is small and casual-looking but it is undoubtedly a merchant’s mark whose design is echoed in the bigger and firmer marks found on an old door in one of the attics of the same house. The practice of inscribing merchants’ marks on beams is not unusual in East Anglia, and they have also been carved on stone fire-places.1 The marks in the Needham building, however, link it with the richest period of the timbered house in this region – the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century; and they also identify it with the rising merchant or yeoman class who were largely responsible for building this type of house in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and who adopted the marks first as a trading device and then as a symbol of their emergence from the collective anonymity of the Middle Ages.

  It has not been possible to identify with any certainty the owner or owners of the marks found in the Needham house. But it is not unusual for the owners of these marks to remain unnamed; yet it would be safe to assume that they were connected with the wool trade since weaving, and especially wool-combing, were well established in this town during the period above mentioned. Merchants’ marks were used much as trade-marks are today: to ensure quick recognition of a trader’s goods. But at a time when comparatively few people were literate there was a greater need for a man’s goods to be identified by a mark rather than by his name. F. A. Girling2 has pointed out, though, that merchants’ marks is rather too exclusive a term: for the marks were adopted by people other than merchants and used as a means of personal identification. They were engraved on signet rings and used for witnessing documents; and they were sometimes used by their owners to mark their swans. They are, of course, closely related to masons’ marks to which they have an obvious resemblance.

  Some of the ‘new men’ of this period, the wool staplers and the clothiers who were getting rich and establishing themselves and their familes as new social groups to be reckoned with, attempted to make good their lack of status by elevating their marks into their own peculiar form of heraldry. Thus they had the marks engraved on their tombs either on brass or in stone. If, as often happened in East Anglia, a wool merchant contributed large sums towards the building of a church – either out of piety or a politic attempt to buy off spiritual retribution in the next world for getting rich so quickly in this – he was commemorated by having his mark carved in the fabric of the church, or incorporated in a stained glass window. Occasionally, when a merchant eventually attained a grant-of-arms, his mark was included in the blazon. The Springs of Lavenham, one of the richest English clothier families of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are a good example. Thomas Spring III, with the Earl of Oxford the lord of the manor, made himself responsible for building the great tower of Lavenham Church; and on the plinth of the tower the masons carved, in addition to the coat-of-arms of the de Veres, the merchant mark of Thomas Spring as a memorial of his part in the enterprise. But Spring’s fortune rose with his tower. He acquired a grant-of-arms just before his death in 1533; and with the 141 feet structure almost completed he was able to instruct the masons to carve a new emblem at the tower’s top. They were determined, it seems, that his new honour should not go unrecorded; and in carving the new Spring coat-of-arms no less than thirty-three times on the parapet of the tower they could not have carried out his wishes more thoroughly.3

  Some writers have read a fairly elaborate symbolism into these merchant marks. It has been suggested that the upright line around which most of them are constructed, represents the mast of a ship; and with the horizontal arm forms the shape of a cross whose purpose was to invoke the blessing of God on the merchant’s ventures overseas. The symbol at the top of the mast resembling a figure 4 stands – it is said – for the four corners of the world where the merchant seeks his trade. There seems to be little solid support for these theories, and it would be as well to be cautious about a subject which has not been much studied. Yet we do know that the symbol at the top of the upright was used in merchant marks long before the figure 4 was known in this form in the West. Arabic numerals did not appear in Britain until Elizabeth I’s reign; and it is for this reason that the carpenters made their crude markings in unmistakable Roman numerals.

  It is possible that this figure is a transliteration of a runic mark; for scholars agree that the linear type of mark (such as the bigger ones in the Needham house) are often similar to the old pagan runes or combinations of like runes. The writer already quoted gives an example of a sixteenth-century Aldeburgh merchant whose mark is built on the rune ‘E’ reversed. He also suggests that the addition of a horizontal line to the upright stem of the mark was a device to Christianize what was essentially a pagan symbol.4 And it came as a surprise to the present writer, after long familiarity with the Needham merchant’s marks to see the same basic line5 repeated in a tenth-century runic cross in the Dick Collection at Thurso near John o’ Groats. The fish-hook, or gladiate quality of the wedge-shaped engravings in the comparatively soft red sandstone of the Thurso cross was also identical with the carving of the sixteenth-century merchant’s marks on the hard oak of a Suffolk door.

  The runes, however, in addition to their function as letters were also magical symbols; and there is a theory that a runic mark was carved on the ridge-pole of a house as an apotropaic, or evil averting, sign. Undoubtedly the early masons took over a number of these pagan signs which had a ritual significance in their craft organization; and these still exist and are used in the derived society of the Freemasons. And it would well accord with a Tudor merchant’s temper that his marks should have a dual purpose: to identify his goods and to protect them on his pioneer ventures overseas.

  Before leaving this subject it is worth pointing out that the base of one of the Needham marks (ii) is like that of another mark6 on the brass shield of a grave in Nayland Church in Suffolk. The splaying of the central line makes a shape like an inverted ‘V’ – the rune for the letter ‘A’ – and this is complicated by a ‘V’ superimposed on this. The Nayland mark (iii) is note-worthy because it belonged to a wool craftsman or merchant – Richard Davy. Joined to the ring that threads the upright of the mark are two havettes or harbicks, twin hooks that were used in the finishing process of wool cloth. After the cloth had been fulled and stretched it was then treated with teazles to bring up the loose fibres of wool. The cloth then went to the shearman; he fixed it securely to a cropping board by means of these hooks or havettes, and trimmed it with his huge scissors to give it a final, smooth finish.

  1 F. W. Kuhlicke, East Anglian Magazine, Vol. II, 1951, pp. 427, 568.

  2 English Merchants’ Marks, London, 1964, passim.

  3 Nicholas Pevsner, Suffolk, London, 1961, pp. 296–7.

  4 F. A. Girling, ibid., espec. pp. 9–17.

  5 Especially the oblique cross-stroke at the base of the mark No. iv on p. 41.

  6 No. iii

  3

  More Detail

  THROUGH getting to know the structure of the Needham house fairly thoroughly the writer also noticed one way in which the Tudor builders of timbered houses effected a kind of primitive insulation. The spaces between the floor joists on the first and second floor had been packed tight with oat husks, presumably for both sound and heat insulation; but chiefly – one imagines – for the former. The practice of insulating floors with reeds, straw, or other material was once widespread.1 A house of a similar age in Suffolk – Rookery Farm, South Elham St Margaret – also has the same kind of packing between the floor-joists; and there are a number of houses so insulated at Bildeston, a wool town not far from Needham Market and of a like age and like size in its hey-day. One housewife there said that she well knew that the first floor of her house was insulated with corn husks; she was reminded of it every time there was a high wind. Then, the whole house interior was covered with a fine dust that sprinkled down from the decaying husks as the timber frame moved imperceptibly. Specimens taken from
the Needham house show that there is a large concentration of fine dust in the husks, which is to be expected after the husks had lain nearly four hundred years under the dry floorboards.

  But as well as oat husks walnut shells were found in the Needham house, mixed with the husks, as packing between the joists. The owner of an early seventeenth-century Ipswich house2 has also found walnut shells and oat husks under the floorboards; and there can be little doubt that this insulating mixture was used in many more houses in East Anglia. But sea-shells were used for a similar purpose in houses built as recently as the nineteenth century. At Theobalds House, Cheshunt – a house erected during the last century, a little to the west of the site of the Tudor Theobalds Palace – sea-shells were used as insulating material between the joists of the first floor at the front of the house; and an old house in Whitehall, now part of the Ministry of Labour, shows the same device: ‘This was the Duke of Buccleuch’s town house … every ceiling triple-layered and insulated with sea-shells, all the doors rosewood’.3 Yet the present writer has no need for further examples to convince him of the need for insulation of the old timbered houses. While living in the Needham house he and his wife often had occasion to discuss his youngest daughter who slept above the living-room. The parents were completely unaware of the room’s limitations until one morning the daughter came down and reported verbatim their conversation of the previous evening. It turned out that this part of the house had been reconstructed at some time, and the old insulating material had then been removed and nothing put back to replace it.

  But wherever sea or walnut shells are discovered in connection with the building of an old house it is arguable that their ‘magical’ or traditional significance must also be taken into account. The myth of Aphrodite’s birth from or, more accurately, arrival in a marine conch is too well known to need elaboration; and in fact the sea-shell, the snail figure, and the pearl were widespread emblems of love and marriage. The walnut, too, has a similar connection. The walnut tree is believed to have been introduced into the British Isles by the Romans: it was greatly valued by them, and they scattered the nuts at their weddings. The elder Pliny says4 that the walnut was used along with the fescennine songs at nuptials because it was a symbol consecrated to marriage, and a protector of the resulting offspring. It should not, therefore, surprise us to find in the chamber, the sleeping place of a Tudor dwelling, walnut shells performing a dual function in the house structure. Walnut trees, too, appear to have had a kind of special treatment in East Anglia, as well as being very highly valued for their wood, as indeed they are today. A Suffolk farmer5 has said that in his area the men who travel round felling walnut trees that have been sold often find a gold coin buried near the tree’s roots.

  A detailed examination of the walls of the same house revealed horse-hair used as binding for the plaster round an old doorway. The colour of the hair was unmistakably that of a chestnut horse – Suffolk Punch; and it was a reminder of how important hair – cattle-hair as well as horse-hair – was in the building and maintenance of timbered houses in eastern England. An eighteenth-century receipted bill shows how the cost of hair, along with other items, was set against the rent charge for £30 for a Suffolk farmhouse;6 Park Farm, Bacton:

  Account: George Pretyman of Bury St Edmunds

  £ s. d.

  Allowed Thatching Bill 1 7 4

  Do. Bill for Straw 3 3 0

  Do. Brick Bill 1 18 0

  Do. Lump Bill 1 10 0

  Allowed Bricklayer’s Bill 1 2 9

  Do. Blacksmith’s Bill 10 5½

  Do. Hair Bill 4 3

  Do. Carpenter & Lime (?) Bill 13 5 6

  The item Lump Bill refers to clay lump: puddled clay that was cut into rectangular blocks, dried in the sun and used as building material. Clay-lump cottages or farm buildings are still to be found in East Anglian villages: the clay walls, treated with salt to prevent damage by frost and covered with successive layers of lime-wash, were very durable as long as they had been provided with good footings and covered with a well-kept thatch. This clay-puddling was another instance of the Suffolk horse being brought directly into the building operation. But on this occasion it was for his shortage of hair and not its abundance that he was preferred. The Suffolk was led round and round over the clay which had been softened with water and lightly covered with straw, thus working in the straw and puddling the material to the required consistency. He was better equipped for this job than the Shire horse, for instance, because the absence of feather (hair) on his legs made him much easier to clean and much less liable to develop ‘grease’ on his heels after the muddy exercise. A Suffolk builder7 described how he had seen the above process used in the last thirty years; and he pointed out that in the building of many of the timbered houses in the countryside the builders dug out the clay from the site. The digging served two purposes: as the clay was won, a pond was also made for the family’s water-supply. Observation has shown that many of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thatched ‘cottages’ (built it should be emphasized as yeoman’s houses) have ponds adjacent to them. These were in many areas the sole source of water; and some of the ponds had the rather ambiguous historical distinction of remaining so right up to nine or ten years ago in many Suffolk rural districts.

  The same builder also described how unbaked clay bricks were often used in the chimneys of timbered houses. In more than one cottage he found that baked bricks had been used for the base of the chimney and up to a point a couple of feet above the lintel-beam over the hearth. Above this, and up to a position just below the thatch, the chimney was made of bricks of unbaked clay. The Tudor builder probably did this to save cost – perhaps an early example of sub-standard material going into a house-but he assumed that the bricks would be baked in situ. The lower ones probably were. But most of the upper ones remained exactly as they were when laid. Yet there was not much harm in this provided that the thatch adjoining the chimney was kept in good repair; for, as already suggested, clay is no use as building material unless it has an adequate covering. Once the thatch leaked the unbaked clay bricks deteriorated. The Suffolk builder illustrated what happened then: the leaking thatch softened up the clay bricks; and in more than one house he knew the water had eventually caused a hole to develop in the chimney. It was only a matter of time and the occasion of a rather bigger fire than usual in the hearth for the heat to penetrate through the hole, to dry out the straw and set fire to the whole thatch.

  One more surface mark of historical interest was found in a loft at the rear of the Needham house. It is a rough circle engraved in the plaster of the wall: inside the circle are the initials S.A.M., and the date 1750. The monogram belonged to Samuel and Mary Alexander who lived here, and it is repeated on the front of the adjoining house. The Alexanders were Quakers and like many of their fellows had taken to trade because of what was, in the eyes of the State, their religious disability. This prevented them from entering a university and taking up a profession, and commerce was their only outlet. The Alexanders were originally ironmongers, but like other Quaker families, the Barclays, the Lloyds, and the Gurneys, they became engaged in banking, making loans and transmitting payments to many parts of the country by means of bills of exchange. In 1774 the Alexanders opened the first bank in Suffolk at this house which at that time included the present adjoining house. The Maws, another Quaker family who lived in this house in the nineteenth century were also bankers. Alexander’s Bank later became Barclays; and at its present branch a few doors away, banking has been carried on in this Suffolk town for over two centuries.

  The crown glass window-panes in the Needham house, though by no means rare in East Anglia, come under the heading of surface features of a house that are worthy of notice. They replaced the small leaded panes of the original Tudor lights. Some of the Tudor glass has been relegated to windows in the stables at the back of the house; some of it remains in a dusty corner of one of the attics where it was cast aside after one of the occasions when t
he house was brought ‘up to date’. One of the crown glass panes has been scratched with a man’s name in what looks like a nineteenth-century hand, and it is probable that the glass was fitted at the time when it received its new façade. The ‘bull’s eye’ effect of crown glass is considered by some to give the true atmosphere to an old timbered house; but originally the thick boss of glass was a very second best: indeed, it was a kind of reject. The glass-blower used to make crown glass by taking the molten glass from the pot with his pontil or ponty, the iron rod he used to support the glass while working it. It was then blown and whirled until it became globular. The craftsman next applied a pontil tipped with molten glass to the bulb, at the same time taking away the blowing tube, which left a hole. He then whirled the globe of molten glass on a flat surface until it flashed into a circular disc which still adhered to the pontil by a boss at its centre. The last step was to cut the panes from the clear glass at the periphery. The pane which contained the boss left after the pontil was snapped off was, as already stated, the least prized. Today, however, this type of pane has acquired a scarcity value; and is difficult to replace if it is broken. When it is replaced the new pane is often found to be of imitation crown glass-glass that has been cast in a mould and not blown in the traditional way. The difference can be detected by examining the boss at the centre; if the glass there has a sharp edge, indicating where it snapped when the craftsman removed the pontil, it is likely to be true crown glass. The boss in the replacement variety usually has a smooth, even surface.