There is one structural feature of the house that helps to illustrate the way of life of the early occupants. This is a series of wall-cupboards-seven in all-in line along the south, brick wall; and continuing through adjoining rooms. Each is of the same size, and each has the same shape; a miniature gabled house with a sixteen-inch base, and a like measurement from the base to the gable’s ridge. Each is let into the brick wall for a depth of nine inches. A wall-cupboard, or keeping hole as it is called in Ireland, is a very ancient device; and its prototype is to be seen in the Stone Age settlement at Skara Brae in the Orkneys. These niches are not unusual in East Anglia for they were an essential feature of the medieval and early Tudor house, chiefly because it was very scantily furnished; and space to keep ordinary domestic articles which would be available close at hand was very limited. The church aumbrie is a development of the keeping hole and served roughly the same purpose.
It is worth observing that this particular shape and size of cupboard must have been common in medieval Britain. There is one in the dairy of a Welsh farmhouse8 which is identical with the Suffolk cupboards except that it is in a stone wall not a brick one. But there is one niche in the Needham house with a shape and size that is apparently rare. Its form is something like an early English, lancet-type window. It has a base of seventeen inches and a measurement of thirty-two from the base to the blunt point of the lancet. There is a narrow wooden shelf dividing the cupboard into approximately equal sections.
Finally, there is one surface detail which, though not occurring in the Needham house, is to be seen on houses of a later date in the same town; and it is mentioned here because it is sometimes assumed – perhaps wrongly – to be associated with old timbered houses. This detail appears to be a decoration on the sides or cheeks of gablets or dormer windows. From the ground they look like white ‘bull’s eyes’ surrounded by black circles; and anyone could be excused for thinking that they are a house-painter’s grace notes, a few flourishes to show his skill, or possibly a remnant of some ancient practice or belief long since forgotten.
In fact the ‘bull’s-eye’ or dot is austerely functional. They are known as soldered dots and they are made in this way. The carpenter first makes the wooden framework of the dormer and covers the cheeks with boarding which is then covered with lead sheets. But before the lead is fitted on to the boarding, the wood is first hollowed out at the places where it is to be screwed. Then the lead is placed against the boarding and dressed into the hollows. In the centre of the hollows brass screws fix the lead to the boarding; and to prevent water from seeping down the screw, the hollow – which is a couple of inches across – is filled with plumber’s solder. Before this is done, however, a circle of plumber’s black is painted round the outside of the hollow, partly to confine the soldered dot, and partly to give the whole a neat decorative finish. The black circle often disappears in time because the material it is made with is not a durable exterior paint; but house-owners sometimes have the circle renewed at a later period in the life of the house purposely to preserve its decorative effect.
1 C. F. Innocent, op. cit., p. 160.
2 L. H. Brown, 134 Fore Street.
3 Richard Church, Memories of my Double Life, London, 1965.
4 Nat. Hist., IV, Book XV (Loeb ed.), p. 349.
5 F. R. Penistan, Moat Farm, Earl Stonham.
6 Morley Papers 562/2 Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office.
7 A. W. Wythe.
8 Penywaun, Nelson, Glamorgan.
4
The Protection of the House
THE timber-framed houses of East Anglia were erected for the same reasons as houses at all places and periods: for protection against wind and weather; for comfort and security; for ease and – later with the increasing wealth of the merchant and yeoman class – even for the grace of living. But to these new men, the merchants and yeomen who had arrived and wished to build a house in the pattern of a medieval manor, no longer though with open hall but with separate rooms and brick hearth and chimney, the house was more than a necessary physical object, an essential adjunct of living: it was an affirmation of their position. To a man who had emerged out of the ruck and turbulence of the wars that saw the break-up of the political structure of the medieval system, who was as yet uncertain of his social identity, a house was both an extension of his new self and an assurance that he and his family had real status. ‘This is what I built,’ he could say; ‘and this is what I am.’ And the temper of the new age, especially the reaction of the individual against the remnants of the rigid communal ideal of the Middle Ages1 showed itself in the development of the house with private rooms that were not only formally separate but had the true privacy of sound insulation, as we have already seen.
The house was also something more: it was as much a hostage to fortune as a man’s own child; and when the wool merchant or farmer built his house he did not neglect to take the traditional steps to propitiate fortune and to avert evil from the spot where he hoped to spend the rest of his days. He did not do this in the manner of the revived ‘topping out’ ceremony today – in a kind of antiquarian wistfulness – but in severe earnest, believing that the devices he followed would have the effect that men had always hoped for them. The ways in which he did this are still to be found in these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses, small and usually obscure evidences of a ceremony, implied or perhaps actually carried out by the owner or his surrogates the carpenters, to ensure that his house would stand as long as it deserved; and that its occupiers would prosper and escape the many misfortunes that had been too evident in their time: plague, sword, fire and all the evils that attend on a weak or unsettled government.
A foundation sacrifice was the most ancient method of ensuring that a house would not only stand but be blessed, and the victim was buried in the ‘footings’. Later it was considered sufficient for his shadow to be ‘bricked in’ to the foundations; and later still an animal became a substitute victim. By the late Middle Ages the bones of an animal were the usual apotropaic device, or just the animal’s image carved on the building. Bones, either buried in the foundations, built into the flint wall or concealed in the wattle and daub or somewhere about the structure of the house, are commonly found in East Anglian houses. There is the Gazeley example, and the number of bones collected from buildings in the Cambridgeshire Fens by Enid Porter.2 An ox-bone, part of the spinal vertebrae, was found in the Needham house, packed between the joists in one of the attics. Many of these bones are, however, horse-bones; and their significance will be discussed in a later chapter.
But at this point it would be as well to look at the premisses that underlie the treating of such obscure, tenuous and neglected detail as this with all the seriousness that is usually reserved for examining so-called hard historical evidence: the physical features of the house itself, the deeds or inventories or any other document concerning it. It is suggested that although much of the structure of medievalism had been dismantled by this time, men themselves still thought in the same traditional or primitive way: there were forces outside their control that had to be placated; their hold on life was uncertain; they lived closer to nature3 and they knew what nature’s dominance could mean: fair crops and plenty one year, poor harvests and subsequent famine the next. Murrain and pestilence fell upon them as though out of a clear sky and compelled them to use the small resources of knowledge, however misconceived, that they had at their disposal.
The Black Death, for instance, was known to have come into Britain from the south. It started in the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset and spread from there all over England.4 Evidently – so was the reasoning – the plague had been carried on a south wind; therefore it was sensible to expose the house as little as possible to the south wind – perhaps only a gable or a blank wall in that direction. They built houses on a north – south axis; and the man who built in a street would, if his house faced south, eschew a front door by which the plague might enter and be satisfied with a more
modest but perhaps safer entrance at the side.5 Measures like this, though ineffective, could not be proved to be so, and at the time they did a great deal to ease a man’s anxiety and give him that hope which is the necessary mortar of any new endeavour. He took the usual precautions according to his best knowledge; and if he was still anxious his anxiety could best be attacked directly by using the old traditional magic.
For magic, whatever its pretensions, is ultimately addressed to the mind of the person or persons concerned, its exterior object being no more than an extrapolation of his own desires or fears; and although – like prayer or ritual – its direct effect on external reality is almost certainly nil, its influence on the mind of the participant might be considerable. The rationale of the old magic might be obscure and lost in time but that did not make it any the less effective in this respect. Luck, like misfortune, need not be given a specific name; but if securing good fortune involved merely having a small animal image carved on the ridge tiles or the chimney, throwing a horse-bone into the foundation or secreting an ox-bone in the structure it was better to be on the side of luck. When this had been done, whatever eventually happened, the house would at least feel a more secure place to live in. It is, therefore, claimed that these small and obscure details about a house, although negligible in themselves, tell us a great deal about the mentality of the people who built the house and serve as a corrective to the tendency to read our own enlightenment (dare we say it?) into the minds of people who had been conditioned by an entirely different, less tamed and less predictable, environment.
To the people of the Middle Ages and of a much later time than is imagined, ill-luck took the more immediate and aggressive form of evil spirits and witches. Witches, although conceived as human beings, were nevertheless not subject to the ordinary physical laws: therefore, it was necessary that the chimney as well as the door should be protected against a witch’s entry. The hearth and the threshold consequently got special attention to exclude the evil influences that threatened the spiritual security of the occupants.
The main device for keeping the house spiritually sound was iron. To discuss the reasons why iron has been used as an apotropaic device by peoples all over the world and at all times of history would need much more space than we have here. But it is possible to put forward briefly an explanation of the supposed potency of iron against evil. First of all, the earliest iron worked by man was meteorite iron;6 and a substance that came from the sky was by its nature numinous and taboo. Its widespread use, moreover, for making tools and weapons came comparatively late in man’s history, and its spectacular superiority over stone and bronze both as a tool and a weapon caused it to be regarded with superstitious dread by the people who were still using the old materials. It is likely, too, that the users of the new metal played on this fear and claimed that they wielded magic. It is certain that the people themselves regarded the man who worked iron with some of the awe and suspicion reserved for the sorcerer. The first smiths were endowed by the people they served with supernatural powers; and it is understandable why the smith was deified in many cultures.
Yet long after it had become common in certain parts of the world, this awe still clung to iron owing to the numen that had traditionally inhered in the metal, and also to another more rational cause. For a primitive tribe at the lowest level of culture would have good reason to view iron with alarm; and this has been clearly shown in recent years when the introduction of a single steel machete to a tribe of Amazon Indians had a spectacular effect on tribal organization. Undoubtedly, to the earliest peoples iron appeared in the same ambivalent light as atomic energy does to us. It was taboo; something to be viewed with alarm because of the dreadful power inherent in it.
Sir James Frazer has listed7 many examples from all over the world of this long-standing taboo. No iron was allowed in the sacred grove of the Arval Brothers in Rome, and if a stone inscription had to be cut with iron they sacrificed a lamb or a pig to cleanse the pollution; the Roman and Sabine priests would not shave with iron only with bronze razors. In the Celtic countries, especially, iron has been taboo for certain functions up to recent times. In Wales iron was used as an amulet against Y Tylwyth Teg, the fairies, within this century; and there is a theory that the fairies in Wales were a pre-Celtic race, shy and small of stature. They were driven into the fastnesses by a race of conquerors who used iron; and for them iron was not only a substance to be feared, but something to be hated as a symbol of their subservience to an alien race. Some of the legends, notably The Lady of the Lake, are built round this taboo on iron; and for the conquerors an insurance against an attack or a visit from the original people was to place iron about the house to prevent their entry. In Wales within the last few generations a poker was placed across a baby’s cradle to prevent the child being taken and a changeling put in its place. In Suffolk, in the Eye district, it was a recent custom to place a poker upright against the bars of the grate thus forming a cross ‘to keep old Lob from the hearth’. This practice still continues today in some parts of Suffolk because it is alleged to make the fire burn more brightly; and it has even been rationalized in detail by those who say that the upright poker divides the draught and causes the chimney to draw more efficiently.
In many religious ceremonies or rituals whose origins ante-dated the use of iron this metal has remained taboo, as already suggested. The mistletoe, the Golden Bough,8 was gathered without the use of iron, as was the dwarf elder and St John’s wort, plants that were believed to be effective against witches; and in Scotland the need-fire was never re-kindled with steel and flint but by the old method of rubbing wood against wood. The taboo on iron remains fixed in the ritual and is therefore an indication of its age; and though we should hesitate to call the modern Freemasons superstitious we can point to a part of their initiation ceremony which contains at least one of the elements of an ancient ritual which in other circumstances would be recognized for what it is, and promptly be labelled as something that stands over from a former culture. An initiate to the order of Freemasons has, it appears, to divest himself of all metal before undergoing the ceremony. The Masons themselves give three reasons for this; the initiate should bring nothing lethal or offensive into the Lodge; again, if he is received in a state of poverty – without brass – his lack of metal is a tacit form of sympathy with those of the brethren (if there are any) who are permanently in that condition; and lastly, the divesting of metal celebrates the building of the Temple of Solomon at which no metal tool was supposed to have been used. To the Masons themselves these reasons may have sufficient weight to explain the injunction against metal, but considered from the outside along with other elements in the Masonic ritual – the All-Seeing Eye, the ritual circumambulation of the Lodge according to the direction of the sun, the broken column – it points to an origin which is pre-Christian and in some aspects even prehistoric.
But to return to the ‘vulnerable’ parts of the house. The use of iron in the form of a horse-shoe above the threshold is common, especially in the rural areas. The threshold was also protected in another way which will be described later. But in some Suffolk farmhouses horse-trappings were built into the chimney for the same purpose; and it is likely that iron connected with the horse was considered to have an extra potency, as did the horse-shoe particularly.
Another substance used to keep away evil from the house was salt. Chimneys of some of the older houses in East Anglia were lined with salt-glazed bricks because salt had a powerful evil-averting quality.9 It was considered sacred in pagan times, and even today it is apparently used in the baptismal chrism. It had special significance for the Semites and Moslems, and Egyptian priests carefully observed the taboo on its use.10 ‘The spilling of salt is still considered unlucky, and the sowing of salt on the site of a sacked town probably meant that the place was taboo and ought not to be cultivated.’ The scarcity of salt in many countries gave it a special value, and it was in addition a symbol of immortality: not decaying itsel
f it also prevents decay in other things. It was also a synonym for wit or wisdom, and was one of the essential ingredients of the primitive ceremonial meals which established blood brotherhood between individuals.
In Suffolk salt was placed on a corpse up to recent years ‘to make sure that it doesn’t start rising’; and in the Cambridgeshire Fens,11 as in Wales,12 salt was associated with sin-eating, a ceremony in which a person undertook for payment to eat a small piece of bread and a little pile of salt that had been placed on a dead person. By this action he took upon himself the sins of the deceased, having previously received permanent absolution for his own. The custom of placing salt on a corpse underlies this story from Cheshire: at a hiring-fair in that county a farmer approached a worker with the object of engaging him for the coming year. He first asked:
‘Why did you leave your last farm?’
‘I didn’t like the food.’
‘What was wrong with the food?’
‘Well, while I was there a cow slinked a calf, and we had veal for very nigh on a month. Then the old sow died, and we had hog’s meat till we looked like it. One day the Missus died; and when I saw the Master going upstairs with a bowl of salt I thought it were right time for me to leave.’
1 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1944, pp. 81–2.
2 Curator of the Cambridge Folk Museum.
3 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 72.
4 Hugh Braun, Old English Houses, p. 89: v. Thomas Tusser, Five Points of Good Husbandry, ‘The South (wind) as unkind draweth sickness too near’. H. C. Wolton, a Bury St Edmunds estate agent, has noticed that most of the larger Tudor houses in East Anglia forgo a southern aspect. The builders believed that the south was ‘too enervating’.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 4