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Dealing with the Devil: The Ritual Protection of Buildings Against Evil with James Wright - Ep 27
263 Plays5 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. In this talk, Archaeology in the City proudly presents - James Wright on *“Dealing with the Devil: The Ritual Protection of Buildings Against Evil”* This talk took place on Thursday, October 25th, 2019 at the Red Deer in Sheffield.
James Wright is an expert in recording and analysing historic standing buildings. He specialises in medieval and early modern buildings, vernacular architecture and the study of architectural fragments. In this episode, James teaches us about his work documenting ritual marks at historic structures and explains how these marks were used to protect against demons, devils, and other evildoers.
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email archaeologyinthecity@sheffield.ac.uk or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)
**Content Warning: Listener discretion is advised as there is adult language**
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 27 of the Archaeology in Ale podcast, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. The talks take place at the Red Deer, a popular pub on Pitt Street in Sheffield near the archaeology department.
Guest Speaker: James Wright
00:00:48
Speaker
It is a busy place, so there might be some background noise in our recordings, and be advised that strong language may be used from time to time. This month, our guest speaker is James Wright, here to tell us all about dealing with the devil and the ritual protection of buildings against evil.
James Wright's Archaeological Work
00:01:21
Speaker
Thanks to Kate for inviting me back after speaking about, was it Tattershaw last year, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, okay. So yeah, thanks for inviting us back. Clearly I didn't bugger it up too much. And because we are being recorded, I promise not to say fuckshit or twat at all.
00:01:43
Speaker
So yeah, for those of you who haven't met me or heard of me or come across me in any shape or form, I'm a buildings archaeologist. I formerly worked for Trenton Peak Archaeology in Nottingham, formerly worked for the County Council in Nottingham, most recently for Moeller in London. Now I am obviously put and finished in touches to my PhD on Tattershall, Big Brick Castle in Lincolnshire, and
00:02:07
Speaker
I am also running my own business, a small one man band basically called Triscally Heritage and it's sort of in that aegis that I'm speaking to you tonight.
00:02:16
Speaker
So yeah, I'm going to do the Halloween talk for you, which is amazing because it's my favourite time of the year. Basically, I view Halloween as Christmas for rockers. It's absolutely perfect, lovely time of year. So it's also my busiest time of year because a few years ago I was working on a project at Knoll House in Kent and we found something really spooky.
00:02:38
Speaker
and witchy which referred to the gunpowder plot so as a direct result of that Halloween and bonfire night have become my time of the year and I'm out three four times a week during this sort of period of the year so it's really good to come and see you but also this is sort of a brand new iteration I decided to sort of write something new for you when I say write something new I mean I'm mashed together a load of lectures
00:03:01
Speaker
But as a direct result of that, I'm not quite sure what order things are going to come in. So it might get a little chaotic as
Ritual Protection in Medieval and Tudor Times
00:03:08
Speaker
we go on. But broadly speaking, I'm going to talk to you tonight about how and why people felt the need to protect their houses, their churches, their buildings effectively.
00:03:20
Speaker
from the threat of evil in this country in the late medieval and the Tudor and Stuart period. So this is quite a widespread phenomena. It can be found in virtually every building that went up before about 1750. You'd be really hard pressed to not find an example of ritual protection in one of these buildings. So
00:03:44
Speaker
I will mention to you that there are some trigger warnings for people tonight, that there will be gratuitous use of popish plots in my talk. There will be cute cats, but some of them won't be alive.
00:03:59
Speaker
And there'll be some hellish minions in the form of witches for you. There'll be a little section on black metal, obviously it's a Halloween talk, and I do apologise that right at the end there will be a shot of Justin Hawkins from The Darkness's nipples. So if anyone's not comfortable with any of this, I suggest you exit right now.
00:04:20
Speaker
The way I'm going to do this then is after I finish making some introductory remarks I'm going to talk about scribed and signed cypherd symbols on the walls of buildings effectively ritual protection graffiti sometimes called apotropaic symbols from the ancient Greek meaning to ward off or turn away from essentially reflect deflecting evil so as well as
00:04:45
Speaker
marking up their buildings people also concealed objects which they thought would deal with the problem of evil and they also burned their buildings as well with little taper burns as well so we'll talk about that and I'll give you a couple of case studies from a couple of buildings that I worked on when I was down at Moeller. So the point being really is that
00:05:07
Speaker
I suppose in our very scientific enlightened age of reason, I'm not really sure that's true given current political events.
00:05:16
Speaker
I suppose in a slightly more ideal world. We maybe don't view the world in quite the same way, but I suppose as a roomful of archaeologists, this won't come as too great a shock to you. But 400 or 500 years ago, the world was a radically different place in a psychological way. So people literally didn't think about the world in the same way that we do.
Societal Beliefs and Witchcraft
00:05:41
Speaker
To make some comments about what life was like during this period, we can say firstly that childhood just did not exist, really, in a meaningful sense, that people were...
00:05:51
Speaker
Effectively taken out of their families or taken into different households at a very very young age probably seven or eight You would either be if you were an aristocrat you will be taken into another aristocrats household If you were of an artisanal Bent you might be sent to be an apprentice with somebody else so you're not really being brought up by your own parents Which is immediately gonna engage a different psychology to the ones that we have and that
00:06:19
Speaker
Essentially, within those households, there isn't really a concept of privacy. So you can see this in buildings archaeology when you go into a 16th century house and you find a distinct lack of corridors. So if you want to go from one room to another, you literally have to pass through the room. There's no private access to these spaces. And again, that is going to affect people's psychologists quite significantly.
00:06:45
Speaker
Overarching all of this is just a constant sense of mortality. I'm 41. I would be pretty damn old, to be honest with you, in terms of life expectancies. Life expectancy in London in the 16th century was 32. Really quite young.
00:07:01
Speaker
And, you know, there were various reasons for this. Plague is a big one, but also childbirth and infant mortality is a big thing. Harvest failures too. So you've got a really poor life expectancy. You haven't really got private life and you're not growing up with your family. So it's going to lead to different ways of thinking. And over the top of all of this, it's an incredibly religious society. And there isn't really the concept of atheism at this point.
00:07:28
Speaker
Effectively, we've got a completely different society to our own. And one of the problems with this society is effectively absolute obsession with the problem of evil. And this really, really takes off in the 16th and into the 17th centuries.
00:07:43
Speaker
There are many reasons for this. I've already mentioned religion, but of course it's not just one religion at this period. You've got many competing versions of Christianity and wars and arguments and all sorts of trials and executions surrounding that. Add to that a huge societal change.
00:08:04
Speaker
doubling of the population. That's natural regeneration, not immigration. It's putting huge pressure on resources. The enclosures are starting to happen so that landowners are turning over from cereal cropping into sheep herding. As a result, people are losing their livelihoods ability to feed themselves and also places to live as well. So that's problematic and obviously creates a problem of a lack of food too.
00:08:29
Speaker
Lots of people start flooding into towns and cities. Yes, that's one thing. But as a result, it becomes a businessman's market effectively. So wages really drop and you get this massive expansion between rich and poor.
00:08:45
Speaker
Does any of this sound remotely familiar? Right, yeah. Particularly for us as archaeologists at the bottom of the economic pile, effectively. You can take the word witch out of there and you can essentially insert the word Muslim benefits grandeur or Muslim, possibly chav as well. And you're looking at liminal, marginalised edge of society
00:09:08
Speaker
alien other people effectively on the very very brink of society and when you consider that these problems are created by that society but they don't want to take responsibility for it or they can't conceive that it's a perfectly
00:09:25
Speaker
natural socio-economic issue. If you run your society like that, they start othering and blaming
Ritual Protection Methods and Symbols
00:09:33
Speaker
people. And when you start blaming these other marginalised witches, 75% of witchcraft accusations are towards women and the vast majority of those are teenage girls or very elderly women. So it's very problematic and it becomes enshrined within law. So by 1604, witchcraft is considered to be a capital offence.
00:09:54
Speaker
When you statistically model these things, you find that the vast majority of these accusations are somebody who's slightly higher up in society, blaming somebody slightly lower down. So again, things haven't really changed too much there either. You're looking at a farmer blaming the milk made for hexing the cow, which meant the cow went barren, which meant that when he took it to market, he didn't make any money. It's that kind of issue that's going on.
00:10:19
Speaker
So we've got this tremendous obsession with evil and witchcraft and Satan and hell in this society.
00:10:27
Speaker
which is somewhat compounded in the later 16th century by James VI of Scotland, when he gets it into his head that there is a coven of witches in North Berwick in Scotland who were trying to essentially assassinate him. And he writes a pamphlet about this coven called Newsome Scotland. He writes it anonymously.
00:10:50
Speaker
But he tells us all about this situation and how he himself sat on interrogations, presided over trials and actually sent over I think it's several hundred people to their deaths as a result of this between 1590 and 93. So James I right at the top of society in both Scotland and England is a firm believer in the threat of evil to his own personage.
00:11:17
Speaker
He goes on to write another book this time. It's not a pamphlet, it's a solid book called The Demonology, which is his manual of how to hunt witches and evil spirits and how to protect yourself. And in this, there's a very illuminating passage for buildings archaeologists, because it tells us effectively that they believe that evil spirits
00:11:39
Speaker
passed into a building wherever there was a draft, effectively, wherever the air is flowing. So it's your door, it's your window, and it's your, there is one behind this screen, it's your fireplace, okay? Now you can block your door and your window up, but you can never block your fireplace up. So these become these sort of portals into buildings, liminal regions, which start to create problems for people.
00:12:05
Speaker
So we can see, obviously, in these late medieval houses, early modern houses that are now at the Wealden down the museum, that there's tremendous opportunity for these drafts to come into these buildings. The doors don't close firmly. The windows are shuttered or covered with a kind of a waxed linen.
00:12:25
Speaker
rather than glazed. And the fireplaces are becoming really common at this period. By the 16th century, it's abnormal to have an open hearth fire and that these chimney breasts are becoming very, very common. And so these are the areas where we can start to see ritual protection marks.
00:12:43
Speaker
And again, this idea has come right the way through to the 21st century because it's why Harry Potter travels by flu powder. It's why he travels via the chimney, because there is this consistent belief in the idea of spirits traveling through the air and into these portals, into buildings. So the first section of how people protect themselves that I want to talk about are these graffiti inscriptions, apotropaic symbols.
00:13:13
Speaker
And I should sort of come clean and say that a lot of what I do in my career is rather nerdy and rather specialist and rather geeky. And it is effectively the study of historic graffiti. And most of my life looks like this. So it's two foot away from the buildings of walls with torch light using the raking light technique to pick out very, very lightly inscribed
00:13:41
Speaker
graffiti inscriptions on walls and roughly 25% of graffiti inscriptions in some way relates to the protection of buildings from evil. Another caveat is that some of these things are not particularly easy to see and unfortunately in the late medieval period they did not have photoshop. So a huge number of these illustrations that I'm going to show you have been overdrawn simply for clarity.
00:14:10
Speaker
So where are they drawing their inspiration from for these signs and ciphers on their walls? Well, initially they look back to ancient Judaism for inspiration. And they come across a passage which describes God giving King Solomon a seal ring which would repel demons. Now, we're not told, annoyingly, what that cipher is on the ring.
00:14:37
Speaker
However, when it starts passing down the Abrahamic faiths, we see the Muslims picking it up first and they interpret it as a six-pointed star. And then the Christians pick it up in Europe and it's a five-pointed star. Again, another caveat here is that the five-pointed star in Christianity has nothing to do with black metal and Satanism whatsoever. That's not how we're looking at things.
00:15:03
Speaker
that kind of idea of the pentagram or the pentacle really comes in in the very late 19th century and into the 20th century with people like Crowley and Leveille writing about the idea and because it was an accepted wisdom that the pentagram was a symbol of good and protection if you invert something good it becomes bad it becomes evil so the inverted pentagram therefore becomes associated with
00:15:33
Speaker
effectively Satanism in the 20th and 21st centuries. But in the medieval period you can go and read your poems such as Seguin and the Green Knight and you can find out that they absolutely loved these things. The late medieval poet describing Seguin's quest from the court of Camelot to take on this supernatural entity who can behead himself and survive digresses for a full two pages of the poem to tell us that everywhere
00:16:01
Speaker
Gawain can possibly wear one of these things. He's wearing a pentagram.
Graffiti and Architectural Symbols
00:16:05
Speaker
It's all over his harness and his horse's comparison and also his shield as well. It's a protective symbol. He's fighting a supernatural agent. We're also told that there are many interpretations of this endless knot design, one of which is that it symbolizes the five wounds of Christ.
00:16:25
Speaker
moving on through time you can see it in the early modern period and really beyond in the writings of Robert Greene. Obviously Marlowe has this idea of
00:16:40
Speaker
I suppose, sort of holding in the devil using a circle, a magic circle, and it even goes right the way through to Goethe in the early 19th century. So there's these ideas of these protective designs, pentagrams and circles. We can see that in buildings archaeology.
00:16:59
Speaker
Here is a beautiful illustration from Suffolk and it shows a brilliant demon with bug eyes and a squab nose and serrated teeth and flapping ears and a lolling tongue and over the top of this medieval demon.
00:17:14
Speaker
the parishioners of Trosten have drawn a pentagram and they've drawn it and redrawn it and gone over it to renew this magic because as well as the rather ecclesiastical view of a pentagram as this endless knot design symbolizing the five wounds of Christ amongst other things there's a common late medieval belief that demons are not very bright and that if they see a line they want to find the end of the line if you create an endless line you've pinned your demon to the wall for all times
00:17:42
Speaker
So if we start with the pentagram, then we can start interpreting other graffiti inscriptions. So we've got kind of the documentary evidence for what the pentagram means in this context. And here's a beautiful visual version of that. But we can start seeing things like checkerboards and mesh patterns in our churches, cathedrals and historic buildings, domestic houses, secular buildings, too. Again, it's endless line designs.
00:18:10
Speaker
PELTA patterns, which again are endless, not work designs. We can also see what have been interpreted as gaming boards, but in this case, this Meryl's, this three men's Meryl, three men's Morris is only about two inches high and it's vertical on a wall, so it's not a gaming board, but it is an endless line.
00:18:31
Speaker
We can see these beautiful compass-drawn designs on walls as well, often called hexafoils or daisy wheels. It's a very ancient sign which has been reinterpreted by many, many cultures, but in this instance we can be fairly safe in saying that this is probably a 15th century daisy wheel which is there to protect Haresborough Parish Church in Norfolk.
00:18:54
Speaker
slightly differently is invocations to the Virgin Mary. So this is asking for her protection for these buildings and we can see lots of M's and interlocking double V's as well with the M standing for Maria and the double V standing for Virgo Vergina. Now you could say yes but these are just people's initials aren't they? People's initials graffiti all the time but there's just statistically too many of these two initials. Everyone in the medieval and early modern period must have been called Walter and Math.
00:19:24
Speaker
you. It's not quite the case. Also, again, we can corroborate this by looking at formal architecture. And here's lots of examples of those motifs in graffiti, but being shown as architectural renditions. So there is a pentagram in the west window of Exeter, which is where you used to live, isn't it?
00:19:47
Speaker
We can see a daisy, well three daisy wheels here on the gate, 14th century gate into Norwich Cathedral and then a Marian symbolism, the crowned AMR of a Maria Regina and also the VV for the Virgo Regina down there as well.
00:20:05
Speaker
So these are quite common late medieval architectural renditions of that graffiti culture. And just in case you don't still believe me, here is a circus 1600 illustration from Germany, and it shows a witches sabbat with all sorts of unmentionable things going on here and here.
00:20:30
Speaker
And we can see again, thinking back to these liminal dangerous portals into buildings, we can see here is the chimney breast and the smoke hood. There is the witch with the broom attempting to enter the building. On the lintel are ritual protection marks, which have actually been scored through to cancel out that white magic.
00:20:51
Speaker
so that the witch can enter the building and engage with the sabat there. So that's a visual representation from the collection, I think it's in the British Museum or British Library, from about 1600.
00:21:05
Speaker
So we can also sometimes see shoe and handprint outlines as well, which may have this apotropaic connection. But
Folklore and Protective Objects
00:21:15
Speaker
in particular, I want to delve into the use of shoes and boots as a vehicle for ritual protection in buildings. So this is where we're sort of moving on to objects placed in buildings. So this is behind walls, up in the roofs,
00:21:30
Speaker
in voids, under harves, under thresholds, that kind of thing, where we're finding deliberately concealed, ritually placed artefacts. And one of the very most common of these is the boot, or the shoe. It's also very, very long-lived, so we can see these things and we can date them, clothing historians can date them. I think the earliest examples are late 13th, early 14th century, and it runs on right into the modern period as well, into the 20th century as well.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's noteworthy that these boots and shoes are always single. There's never a pair. They are from all sectors of society, all sexes and all ages. Huge numbers have been found and recorded, particularly at the museum in Northampton. They've also all been literally worn to death. They're all
00:22:22
Speaker
beyond repair. Many of them show evidence of many, many repairs, but most of them have been absolutely worn out. And there is this idea that's quite current in folk history and folklore of the idea of breaking something and sending it into another plane of existence to fight another battle for you.
00:22:43
Speaker
So it's kind of similar to those Iron Age or Bronze Age swords in bogs which have been broken or snapped or bent and thrown into the water as offerings or protection. It's sending it into a different plane of existence. And this is probably a latter example of that, the idea of wearing the boot to death. So why might people be interested in boots? Well, firstly, if I were to get completely naked right now, and I'm not going to do that, the only nipples we're going to see are Justin Hawkins nipples.
00:23:13
Speaker
All of my clothes would just look like a heap of rags on the floor, but my boots, somewhere in German army paraboots, they would retain the shape of my body. So there's an element of humanity about them. There is also what looks like a really good folk tradition which tells us about how these things actually worked.
00:23:34
Speaker
So we get the boot here, again from Devon the Exe estuary, and we can relate it to the late medieval unofficial English saint Sir John Sean, who is reputed to have conjured the devil into a boot. His cult was tremendously popular in late medieval England, so much so that the Plantagenets
00:24:00
Speaker
or rather the Yorkists under Edward IV, actually moved his shrine from North Marston in Buckinghamshire into St George's Chapel in Windsor so that they could capitalise on the amount of pilgrims bringing money to his shrine. So it's a really big cult which stretched all over Lowland England effectively and he's always represented as holding a boot with the devil in it.
00:24:24
Speaker
So there's a very clear connection here between shoes and boots and in a sense containing evil. We can see that in other folk tales as well. So in Iceland they don't have just one gift bringer as we do at Christmas time, they actually have 13 of them.
00:24:43
Speaker
They're called the Yule Lads and they turn up one after the other in the run-up to Christmas, right? And they're all a little bit sinister, if I'm honest with you, right? They're a little bit sinister and quite frankly, Operation U-Tree would be interested in one or two of them.
00:24:58
Speaker
This is one called the window peeper, and he peers in to scare the children through the window. Again, it's the portal, the liminal portal into the building associated with the spirit, and the children put a shoe on the window sill to appease him, and then he puts treats in there. So again, it's that idea of portal into a room spirit and shoe and protection, effectively. And of course, that's almost identical to what's going on with our own Father Christmas, who is, of course, a spirit who flies through the air
00:25:28
Speaker
enters the building through a chimney and then we in a sense appease him with the stockings on the mantelpiece. It's all related to each other. So, Sir John Sean, the Yule Lab's Father Christmas, that's kind of the origins of this, but it shows that there's a very clear tradition of linking shoes to spirits in northern European belief systems.
00:25:48
Speaker
So we've got shoes being put into buildings to capture devils, effectively. We also have cats being used. Now, cats are interesting characters. Is anybody else here owned by cats, as me and Tom are? Yeah, a good half of you. So you'll be aware of what contrary little buggers they can be.
00:26:11
Speaker
and how you can't really train a cat, and how they're very, very independently minded. Clearly we're ruled in our house by Pippin, who's even sat on a book called Tyrant. He is very much the boss of the house. So cats enter into this folkloric tradition as well, in a very liminal sense themselves.
00:26:35
Speaker
are they actually working for good or working for evil in a sense because they can be accused of being witches familiars and in the 1645 Matthew Hopkins witch trials in Suffolk and in Essex we definitely see one of the witches who is interrogated tortured and effectively telling Hopkins what he wants to hear
00:26:59
Speaker
she is telling him that one of her familiars is actually a white kitten called Holt and it's even represented in the publication there's the kitten Holt being spoken to by the witch so there's a direct link with them on the side of evil however
00:27:18
Speaker
By their nature, cats are really good ratters and mouses, so they're useful to have around the place. And we can see them therefore as being, in a sense, both good and bad in medieval and early modern mythologies.
00:27:37
Speaker
So this is the bit where we get a rather unpleasant slide, unfortunately, of two very, very, very deceased cats which have been recovered from buildings, historic buildings. These are 18th, 19th century cats, so it's quite a long-lived tradition again as well.
00:27:55
Speaker
And there seems to be the idea that these cats have been buried or deposited within the buildings absolutely deliberately. They've not crawled in and died. They've not been put in whilst they were alive. They've been put in dead and they've been walled into, in the case of Kellum, into a roof space and an ace coffee. I can't quite remember where that one came from. But these are deliberately interred animals and they are enormously common finds.
00:28:22
Speaker
The idea again being is that the cat is no longer alive so is fighting for you on a different plane of existence.
00:28:31
Speaker
Of course, although the cat itself can be accused of being a witch is familiar, we mustn't look for consistency here. The cat hunts mice and rats and frogs and toads who are also considered to be familiar too. In fact, probably more so than cats. So if the cat is dead and it is in your building, it is fighting for you in a different plane of existence.
00:28:59
Speaker
The other sort of common ritual protection artefact that we can see in these buildings are the witch bottles. Now these are again very very common and they are becoming increasingly commonly found by archaeologists excavating these buildings too. Here fortunately we have some documentary to go with so we understand what's going on. Interestingly here we have a doctor, a physician,
00:29:26
Speaker
telling us how these things work and this is of course in the 17th century which is the perfect period really where science and magic is considered to be almost exactly the same thing and they're not differentiated between Isaac Newton of course as being a brilliant mathematician is also an alchemist so those opposing ideas in our 21st century brains can be held in the same great head in the 17th century and Joseph Blaygrave tells us
00:29:56
Speaker
that if you've got a problem and you've been hexed effectively, you take a bottle, you fill it with urine, you put loads of sharp broken pins in it, you heat it, you stopper it, you heat it up and that repels the hex and it turns that magic back on the person who's hexed you. This is in a medical tract in 1671.
00:30:16
Speaker
However, for those of you familiar with school boy girl physics, you'll be aware that if you heat up a stopper bottle, it's going to go pop. So 10 years later, Joseph Glanville comes along and remedies the problem. He says, if that doesn't work, because effectively the bottle's gone pop, then this is what you do next. You take the bottle, you put all the stuff back into it and you bury it under your hearth or under your threshold, and that will deal with the problem.
00:30:46
Speaker
And he's absolutely convinced of this, but of course this is the sort of thing that we as archaeologists can then go and excavate. And here's a really good example of a late 17th century witch bottle which was excavated on the site of the theatre playhouse, Shakespeare's great playhouse, the first purpose-built playhouse.
00:31:08
Speaker
in the country, which after it was demolished, there was houses built on top of it in the 18th century and this was found in the foundations of one of those houses. And it was, well, we've all been on site and we've all had an accident with the mattock, but you can see a fresh break here.
00:31:27
Speaker
And when the archaeologists looked into it, they actually found the contents of one of these bottles. So exactly as Blaygrave and Glanville had described it, including the pins, which you'll notice have all been bent. So just like those Iron Age and Roman swords as well. So it's sending the pin into a different plane of existence, just like the dead cat and just like the worn out boot.
00:31:51
Speaker
They are very, very common in Lowland, Eastern England. They're being imported from the continent. Some of them are tremendously beautiful artefacts. They're now worth quite a lot of money as well. Several hundred, possibly into the early thousands because they're quite prized. They were being brought in empty and then were used for holding oil or wine or beer.
00:32:14
Speaker
I would argue that there is a strong possibility that a lot of these things are being brought in specifically for the witch economy and that they're actually being brought over because again here we see this rosette, this daisy wheel design on this thing. They're quite anthropomorphic too and as a result of the bearded faces they've often been called Bellamine jars supposedly as a satire or a burlesque on Cardinal Robert Bellamine who was apparently very anti-drink.
00:32:44
Speaker
So we'll all have a toast to Robert Bellamy.
00:32:51
Speaker
It doesn't really work out actually because the earliest examples of these are actually being manufactured before Bellamy himself is even born. They're more properly called freckenware or Bartman jugs, but we can see them. They're initially imported, they're German stone wares, and by the later 17th century, the English at Fulham pottery have worked out how to make these things, but they're tremendously common.
00:33:19
Speaker
Okay, so let's talk about burn marks then. Haddon Hall, not too far from here. Lots have you been?
00:33:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, good. So if you go into the kitchens, you'll find a huge number of burn marks on the timbers, which are not showing up precisely on this particular slide. Little tear-shaped taper burn marks. If I move on to show you a clearer view of some examples from Gainsborough Hall, you can see that they're long, they're thin, they've got a bellied out bottom to them. It used to be thought that these were
00:33:53
Speaker
essentially unattended candles, and it was just an accident that these things were burnt onto the properties. Some pretty good experimental archaeology was done by English Heritage a number of years ago, which I replicated about a year ago. Here's my example of these things.
00:34:10
Speaker
It was shown effectively that you can't accidentally create this tear-shaped burn. The only way you can replicate it is by holding a taper at a 45 degree angle to the piece of timber and you have to hold it there for between, well...
00:34:26
Speaker
5 minutes and 15 minutes. So it's a long-lived action. It's not something you can do accidentally. If you just leave a candle unattended up against a piece of timber, it will not leave one of these shaped marks. So they are all deliberately created.
00:34:46
Speaker
And we can find them all over our historic buildings.
Protection Symbols in Historical Buildings
00:34:49
Speaker
There's me and another pub finding them on a lintel of a fireplace with a pint in hand, which is how I like to do archaeology. And again, returning to the Wealden down the museum, here's one of those early fireplaces from the early 17th century. And there above the fireplace are these ritual protection marks. So again, we're finding these burn marks in association with the portals into rooms.
00:35:12
Speaker
and we can see here an example we've just seen fireplaces we can see them here in association with a door for example at Helmsley in North Yorkshire. Not always the case here at Gainsborough again which we've just been looking at there's a really
00:35:27
Speaker
dense distribution of these things on four timber studs and a principal post of the sewage room on the first floor of this late medieval great house and they're not really close to the to the door the window or the fireplace so it may be the case that other ritual behaviours going on as well as protection and we might be seeing healing rituals or purification possibly prayer as well there's a number of ways of looking at these
00:35:55
Speaker
The one that I'd rather like is that they're, again, slightly burning the building, i.e. killing the timber and sending it into a different plane of existence, in a kind of an early version of inoculation, so that we don't end up with another great fire of London. If you burn your building a little bit, then it doesn't go up, effectively.
00:36:14
Speaker
And they were concerned about witches setting fire. There's some really good illustrations in the period showing witches attempting to set fire to thatched roofs, for example, which is a slide I might use when I talk about this on another occasion.
00:36:29
Speaker
So a couple of case studies before we finish then, just to sort of back up and give you the archaeological context of some of these finds. Did some work in 2015 at the Tower of London in the Queen's House, which sits just here on the corner of Tower Green to orientate. That's where Anne Boleyn was executed.
00:36:49
Speaker
The Queen's House is the only timber frame building surviving in the city of London. It has a much older 12th century tower out the back of it, but the Queen's House was built in timber in the late 1530s early 1540s and it was built for Thomas Cromwell. It was almost certainly the last thing he did before being executed himself.
00:37:11
Speaker
And it was built for the purpose of housing the lieutenant of the tower, the king's representative at the tower, and it's still used for that purpose now. So there's the building, this L-shaped timber frame structure with the two ranges, which are near contemporary with each other, to within a couple of years from the dendrochronology. And the roof structures are absolutely riddled with ritual protection marks.
00:37:37
Speaker
and we can see here some clusters of burn marks which are in close association with windows and doors into those attics. We can also see some scribed graffiti, so there's a compass drawn design there in the form of a triskelly and there's a VV down here at the bottom, again, in association with doors and windows. So this is very much the sorts of things that we've been looking at already.
00:38:01
Speaker
We can find a massively dense distribution here around the principal truss up in this 16th century roof. Huge numbers of burn marks in this particular location and it is sort of close to a door.
00:38:16
Speaker
But there's something far more interesting going on archaeologically in that the end bay of this building, all of these common rafters here, in the 18th century had been reorganized. So they'd literally taken that bay off and then put it back on again. In the 16th century it was shown with a gabled roof.
00:38:35
Speaker
Now it's a hip's roof so they've changed it over effectively and of course when you take the tiles and the rafters off there's a huge ingress of air into the building so that's probably why we find this dense distribution of ritual protection marks on that particular area within the building. It's a building with well the tower as a whole is a building with a very grim reputation and by the 16th century it had become
00:39:03
Speaker
a prison as much as it was a palatial fortress. We can see here lots of these burn marks around a door on the ground floor and they are on the inside of that particular door down there.
00:39:18
Speaker
and that door goes into an unlit room. There's no windows and there's only one way in and it's through that door. Further down the corridor, if you open that door, you come into this area here and that's where Sir Thomas More was in prison before his execution. So almost certainly this space was a prison cell.
00:39:37
Speaker
and we can actually imagine that these might be prayers of the incarcerated or possibly purification after something really awful occurred in there. We know that awful things occurred in this building because on the first floor this is the space where Guy Fawkes was interrogated in
00:39:56
Speaker
in 1605, the council chamber where the Privy Council used to meet. And in fact, that is the Forks Memorial put there two years later. And the Privy Council used to use that psychological terrorism. So if you were a political prisoner, the first thing they would do was drag you into this room, sit you at this table in front of that and let you think about what you've done effectively, because you knew what was coming effectively. So it's a building with a very grim reputation.
00:40:26
Speaker
And we can, of course, muse on the idea of exactly what happened to Fawkes in that place, or shortly after he left that. He was tortured so badly that that was his signature before, and that was afterwards, after they'd basically broken his fingers. So it's a pretty grim place, and these ritual protection marks may be in a sense related to the use of the Queen's House as a prison and torture chamber.
00:40:54
Speaker
There's another building with a direct connection to the Gunpowder Plot and that's 25 miles to the southeast of the Queen's House at Knoll in Kent, which is our second and final case study. Knoll is the largest country house in the United Kingdom. It has a roof space in excess of eight acres in size. It's absolutely vast.
00:41:19
Speaker
It was started in the 15th century as a bishop's palace, well actually it was a Lord Treasurer's palace and then a bishop's palace. And we're interested though in the remodeling of the site in the early 17th century and in particular the remodeling of this medieval tower.
00:41:38
Speaker
which occurred in the very early years of the 17th century. And when we prized up the floorboards in this room as part of a National Trust Conservation Project, we found a rather lovely beam here, a bridging beam, which went most of the way across the tower and was directly in front of this rather fine Renaissance fireplace, which was inserted in the early 17th century.
00:42:06
Speaker
And that beam was absolutely riddled with ritual protection marks from bastardized pentagrams to interlocking v's and m's to checkerboards down here. Huge numbers of these things. We're talking almost 20 on this particular beam. When we also looked down there we found some burn marks as well. So those scorch marks and I'll come back to these because they become really important in terms of dating the beam in a moment.
00:42:37
Speaker
But all of the marks were on one side of that beam only. It was the north side, which is the side that faces that fireplace. And the first of the marks, the burn marks, was directly opposite that jam there.
00:42:52
Speaker
So they're basically creating a kind of a force field, a zone of protection. I'm not an artist, as you can tell, but we did mock this up and it sort of shows you what was going on because we know that there was a bed in this location from documentary accounts and we're seeing the bed there with
00:43:10
Speaker
a beam there with the ritual protection marks on, effectively facing the fireplace. And there was a real, real worry about sleep and possession in our period that we're talking about. And you can see the idea of it in the idea of the old hag in the nightmare, pinning down the sleeper, or the idea of
00:43:31
Speaker
the white possessing you when you're asleep. And you can see an example of three witches there about to possess a sleeper. So effectively, these things are probably there to protect whoever's in this bed. And it's the whoever was in the bed which becomes quite significant in a moment. But in terms of how old these things are,
00:43:52
Speaker
The described marks were all cut with a raised knife, which is a rather obscure tool now, but it leaves a very characteristic half round profile and it's only used by carpenters. So we know for a fact that all of those scribe marks were put there by the team of Matthew Banks, the master carpenter. So we even know his name. Equally, those burn marks must have been put there by carpenters because the burns run horizontally.
00:44:22
Speaker
And anybody who's got the briefest grasp of physics knows that flame burns vertically. So the only time that that beam was vertical is when it was in the framing yard prior to construction. So this is pre-planned ritual protection by carpenters as part of the construction process, which is really quite a remarkable thing to consider actually.
00:44:46
Speaker
In terms of when they were active, well, the dendro on that beam showed us that it was felled in the winter of 1605-6, and that we know from documentary accounts that it was laid almost immediately in the spring and summer of 1606. The patron of the house at the time, the landowner, was Thomas Sackville, the Earl of Dorset and the Lord Treasurer of England.
00:45:15
Speaker
He was effectively bessies with James I who we've already encountered as a great witch-hunting king with a reputation for being interested in the supernatural through his couple of publications on the subject. And of course at precisely this time James has just experienced the terrorist threat of the gunpowder plot.
00:45:36
Speaker
in November 1605. And if you want to get any kind of an idea about what it was like to live through those moments, think back to September 2001 and the aftermath of 9-11 and that idea of terror and fear and paranoia that was present. There was a huge amount of state-sponsored propaganda to try and convince the population
00:46:04
Speaker
that this was effectively Catholics in league with Satan trying to bring down the Protestant Church of England and English establishment. And we can get a sense of that through James' own words to Parliament four days after this, when he's using phrases such as thundering sin of fire and brimstone.
00:46:24
Speaker
He's actually using hellish language to describe the plot himself and we can see this rather wonderful illustration that's near contemporary. So we've got God in heaven, we've got the king and parliament and then underneath we've got the plotters and hell itself, you know. It's not subtle stuff this early modern artwork.
00:46:46
Speaker
We can also a year later see Lancelot Andrews at the time the Bishop of Chichester and again he's using devilish language to blame the plot on Catholics in league with the devil too. Macbeth is written in this period. Macbeth is 1606 probably put on in 1606-07 and it's a powder play. It's imbued with the idea of the destruction of a kingdom by the murder of a king. There's all sorts of language within it.
00:47:15
Speaker
And the porter, the drunken porter, that scene, it's very, very clear in the language used that he is actually the porter at the gates of hell. And when the RSC put this on in 2011, they wanted to bring it back to being a powder play, to show people that it was about the gunpowder plot, not about 11th century.
00:47:37
Speaker
Scotland and here's Jamie Beamish dolled up as a red demon even his beard is dripping blood and of course he's dressed up as a suicide bomber and they were throwing smoke bombs all over the place and it was it was made very very redolent of the gunpowder plot once more but for me it's this piece of artwork which is most illuminating of what's going on and we can see here Guy Fawkes with
00:48:07
Speaker
his very famous lantern which is now in the Ashmolean Museum and he's about to blow the mine underneath the House of Lords and look behind him there's a demon whispering the plot into his ear but look behind the demon that is the Pope
00:48:27
Speaker
And that is Robert Catesby, the ringleader of the plot, and they're having tea with Satan himself. This is the sort of thing that people were soaking up, effectively. And we can imagine Matthew Banks and his carpenters working at Knoll, working in a chamber that they knew was going to be used by James I, because it was part of the royal suite of accommodation at Knoll.
00:48:49
Speaker
It was supposed to be probably either Prince Henry or Prince Charles' chamber. James himself would have slept directly underneath those ritual protection marks and there is a fireplace in his room too and underneath there are ritual protection marks as well. So they've really gone to town and I suspect because they've been soaking up propaganda like this. So to sort of draw this all to a conclusion then, I'd like to say that
00:49:18
Speaker
Although we're talking very much about the early modern period, these ideas do continue. In that fireplace at Knoll, about 50 or 60 years later, they were obviously still concerned about that portal into the building because they were putting shoes up it as well, because that came out of that same chimney. So it wasn't just the ritual protection marks.
00:49:38
Speaker
And even into the 19th century at Noll in Kent, yes it's a 15th century laundry, but its roof was completely reorganized and refitted in the 19th century. And that actually features burn marks from the 1870s. So these ideas continue for a long time and we're all still doing them.
00:49:58
Speaker
So we've already talked about the stockings over the mantle piece, but we have the term which I said earlier about touching wood when I was having a beer with Kate, and of course throwing salt over the shoulder and horseshoes. They're all for a different sort of lecture entirely, but it shows us that we still have these ideas of bringing luck or averting evil in our buildings, whether they be historic or modern.
Modern Remnants and Legends
00:50:25
Speaker
just as a coder to finish, I'd like to draw your attention to the legend of the black dog who was reputed to have entered a couple of churches in Suffolk in 1577. And this was even written about as being a demonic dog that entered the churches at Bungay and Blytheborough and reputedly killed people. If you go to Blytheborough in Suffolk
00:50:54
Speaker
that there is the legend of the black dog there and on this medieval church door they draw your attention to these scratch marks and where his claws are supposed to have actually ripped into the building of the church. The point being here is that these things are actually ritual protection burn marks and I do wonder if the story has grown up later and that these are much older than 1577 and that they knew there was a link
00:51:23
Speaker
between evil but it had got twisted by this period in time and we can kind of get a sense of how that kind of mythology might work by looking at some of our more recent newspaper stories where people were thinking that a tiny little ginger cat in Essex was actually a lion
00:51:42
Speaker
And this hit all of the newspapers at the time, and the brilliant Essex poet, Luke Wright, wrote a fantastic poem about it all. So you can see how these stories could actually emerge, but what I particularly like about them is how this particular church door and the marks on them, which are redolent of that late medieval tradition of burn marks to ward off evil, have actually entered into our popular culture as well, because there over there are Justin Hawkins nipples.
00:52:10
Speaker
which have been so fated for the entire night. But on the debut album, The Darkness actually wrote about this.
Conclusion
00:52:19
Speaker
And they wrote the song Black Shook. It's track one, album one. That's how important it was to them. And of course we hear about the marks at Blytheborough Church door and it's Black Shook, Black Shook, that dog who doesn't give a... So thank you very much for listening to me. I hope you've enjoyed.
00:52:49
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology in Ale. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Next month, our talk will be on the current excavations happening at Sheffield Castle. See you next time.
00:53:27
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada, at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.