Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
0019 - HHC2016 - James Wright
103 Plays9 years ago
“Cultural anxieties and ritual protection in early modern high status houses”
James is a Senior Buildings Archaeologist and Historic Stone Specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology. He has worked on building recording projects at the Tower of London, Palace of Westmimster, Southwark Cathedral, Knole and the largest, yet least known, Mediaeval royal palace at Kings Clipstone in Sherwood Forest. James is a self-confessed historic graffiti nerd and conducts surveys, teaches workshops and writes about the hopes, fears and desires of the people of the past hidden in plain sight on the walls of our buildings.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:21
Speaker
Ladies
Who is James Wright?
00:00:22
Speaker
and gentlemen, it's James Wright and he's going to talk about medieval graffiti. Thank you very much. My name is James Wright. I'm a senior archaeologist at the Museum of London Archaeology and a former Dorset resident. It's my first time back in Dorset since I moved away six years ago. So thank you very much for making me welcome today. I'm going to talk about actually not medieval graffiti as such. I'm going to talk about
00:00:50
Speaker
ritual
Ritual Protection in Historic Buildings
00:00:51
Speaker
protection in the early modern period, the Renaissance, the 16th and 17th centuries in England. I'm going to talk about two buildings in particular. I'm going to talk about the Queen's House, which is at the Tower of London, and also Knoll in Kent, 25 miles to the southeast.
00:01:09
Speaker
The Queen's House was rebuilt in 1539-40. It is the house of the lieutenants of the tower, the Queen's representative or the King's representative at the tower in the past.
00:01:27
Speaker
It is built in the tradition spanning the medieval into early modern constructional style. So you see a bit of both in that it's a timber frame building and it's in fact the only timber frame building left in the city of London. I'm also going to talk about one particular structure at Knoll.
00:01:44
Speaker
which is the King's Tower, which was again a medieval structure, a tower, which was remodeled in the early 17th century. So I'm
What are Ritual Protection Marks?
00:01:54
Speaker
going to talk about these two buildings in particular and how methods were taken to protect them by the either construction workers, tradesmen, or the occupants to protect the buildings and the people within them against witchcraft, against demons, and against the evil spirits.
00:02:14
Speaker
So to take the Queen's House to begin with.
00:02:17
Speaker
It is an L-shaped building that sits in the southwest corner of the inner courtyard of the Tower of London. You can see it there. It has a 12th century tower in one corner, which is kind of behind the scaffolding here. And as you can see, it's timber framed. This range, south range, slightly earlier than the west range, but to all intents and purposes, built in the same campaign of construction. As you can see from this rather,
00:02:45
Speaker
mesal pimple distribution map. We have an enormous amount of ritual protection marks which have been identified during
00:02:55
Speaker
a standing building survey as part of construction and conservation program on the building itself. There were 59 marks identified in total, which were put on the building to protect them against the evil spirits. This all may sound a little bit kooky, a little bit occult. It's perfectly normal practice. You have to remember in the 16th, 17th centuries, the belief in the power of witchcraft and the evil incarnate of Satan and hell
00:03:25
Speaker
was considered
Placement of Ritual Marks for Protection
00:03:26
Speaker
to be across the board, perfectly normal, evil spirits round every corner. So this was a general fear that was felt by the entire population as a whole during this period.
00:03:41
Speaker
Of those marks, we have 54 of them are burn marks, which look like this tear-shaped mark here. In fact, can we have the lights down? I'm not sure some of these slides are showing as well, as they might do. There you go. So you can see this tear-shaped burn mark here. Most of the marks I'm going to talk about at the Tower of London look like this. They are not accidental. It has been criticized in the past.
00:04:06
Speaker
that these may in fact be unattended lamps, candles which have been left to burn and they've scorched the timber work. If you actually leave lights unattended, they do not create this classic tear-shaped design. They will either burn
00:04:21
Speaker
in a linear fashion straight down like this unattended taper here or they will leave a very amorphous scorching. So if it is left unattended you're not going to get that classic tear shape. In order to create that you have to hold a taper or a candle for 15 to 30 minutes in precisely one location
00:04:42
Speaker
at a 45 degree angle for a significant period of time. There is an investment of time as part of this ritual. It cannot be created accidentally. Now, where are we finding these marks? Well, James I gives us a bit of a hint in his book Demonology, which came out in 1597, reprinted 1603. He says that there was fears of witches' familiars entering buildings through wherever the air passed. So your doors.
00:05:12
Speaker
your windows and your chimneys is where the air is flowing. And we are finding at the Tower of London that these points which were creating tension and anxiety for the occupants and owners of the building are where we're finding the majority of these ritual protection marks. So you can see in the furthest east roof here, which we call roof A,
00:05:35
Speaker
You can see that here's the distribution here. You can see a group of burn marks here, right underneath the window. A stood right underneath the window, so classic position. Another group of burn marks on a Queen Post truss, right by a door out onto the lens. So again, you see that distribution, windows and doors, where they thought that the air was passing and spirits were able to enter into the building. We're
Symbols of Ritual Protection: Triscoli and VV
00:06:01
Speaker
also finding scribed symbols. There's not very many of these.
00:06:04
Speaker
You can see here a Triscoli design, a series of endless lines, which they believed would literally pin demons to the wall. There was this belief at the time that demons, not the smartest characters in the world, if they found a line, they wanted to get to the end of it. If you create an endless line, you create a demon trap, demons there forever. That's the pseudo-theology behind this belief. And as you can see here, we've got this Triscoli here on a common rafter,
00:06:34
Speaker
equidistant between a window and a door. And then a carved design, a VV mark, which is a marion mark, standing for Virgo Virgina, invoking the protection of Mary the Mother of God. And that overhangs again on a common rafter, a loft hatch, so a portal, a liminal portal between two parts of the roof.
00:06:55
Speaker
and we're seeing that area marked up and protected as well. Next door, in the roof adjacent, we're seeing another one of these kind of endless line designs. It's a mesh pattern, it's simply not a doodle before anybody points that out. We've seen lots and lots of these, as you'll see again at Knoll in the second part of the talk.
00:07:13
Speaker
and you can see this again on a queen post right opposite a door so a classic location for that one as well now there's some really really dense distribution in this roof as well you can see lots of groupings of burn marks on mainly on a queen post collar some on a purlin they are right next to another door out onto the lead so you could explain it one way however this queen post truss which you can see here
00:07:42
Speaker
is also adjacent to a part of the roof which was removed. All of the common rafters were removed sometime in the 18th century, and what was originally a gabled roof here became a hit roof. So obviously that necessitated taking the common rafters and the tiles off, air passing into the building. And it's at that point that we're seeing the densest distribution of these burn marks, again, to protect the owners and the occupants of the building.
00:08:10
Speaker
So, who is doing this? Well, we know in some cases, for example, this VV mark that we saw earlier, it's been done by carpenters. It's done with a very, very distinctive tool, which is a raised knife, which has a curved semicircular profile. You can see one of them here.
00:08:28
Speaker
And only carpenters use these and this mark has actually been put on by a carpenter. So I think this was done during remodeling work when a floor was actually inserted in that part of the building. So this is not 16th century, this is probably later 17th century. Some carpenters are working there, again probably some latent fears and anxiety.
00:08:51
Speaker
about air flowing into the building during that remodeling. However, the majority of these marks seem to have been put on by the occupants. So what
Who Placed the Protection Marks?
00:09:00
Speaker
we're seeing here is very, very liminal areas of the building. They're very, very low status areas. They're up in the attics. They are boarded over. They're accessible.
00:09:10
Speaker
You can see some of the original 16th century floorboards here, but they are not being used as dwellings. So you can see on the common rafters here, there's no evidence whatsoever of lime bloom or nail holes from lap and plaster on the timber there. So they're probably using these areas merely for storage.
00:09:31
Speaker
However, people are going up there, it's dark, it's spooky, there's air flowing through, they're concerned about witches, demons and the like. It's probably the servants that are doing this. So tradesmen and servants in these examples. There were, in the early 16th, 17th century rather, there were six servants living in the Queen's House, and we even know the names of some of them.
00:09:53
Speaker
Now there are some of these marks which don't appear to be in any way related to windows, doors, and chimneys. There's a group here, again on Queen Post trusses, but they're right in the middle of the room. They're not near any of those portals to the room. And I think something else is going on here. And I think that we should never be didactic with any form of historic graffiti. There are multiple explanations possible. And I think what we might be seeing here
00:10:21
Speaker
is marks being put on as a result of healing rituals, possibly down to individual prayers, possible purification rituals of the spaces, and maybe even a little bit of latent Catholicism as well in candle mass rituals. So there may be differing explanations particularly for these marks which are away from the portals. The marks themselves at a later period seem to have given people the willies
00:10:48
Speaker
So later on, they've tried to actually block this up using a little bit of lime render there. They've actually filled one of the marks in. And here on the queen post, you can see they've actually tried to chop them away. This might be down to the fact that people actually understood that these were in some way relating.
00:11:04
Speaker
to witchcraft and even though it was anti witchcraft rituals they wanted to try and remove all taint and all trace of these from the building so they've actually tried to cover them and chop them away so the marks themselves were creating anxieties of course the marks came out of anxiety to begin with there are certain areas of the building where we're not seeing any marks at all this is the council chamber this is where the Privy Council of England used to meet
00:11:32
Speaker
It seems to have been off-limits to the servants entirely. Very, very high status area. As you can see, loads of timber from Drava Gala, loads of big windows, but no marks whatsoever. So this is off-limits. And again, it's a little bit of evidence to say that it's the servants and tradesmen rather than the owners and principal occupants of the house that are putting these marks on there.
00:11:54
Speaker
On top of this, we also found what's called a spiritual midden, which is a void next
What is a Spiritual Midden?
00:11:59
Speaker
to a chimney accessed from one of the attics. You can see here, here's the chimney, kitchen chimney, and I'm down the bottom of a void here. Now, down this void, we actually found some 1960s builders' rubbish, and sealed under that was an 18th-century deposit full of 46 butchered animal bones, scraps of leather clothing,
00:12:21
Speaker
There was a broken bladed tool, a bit of a broken spade, and a broken clay pipe which dated 1700 to 1770, which is how we know the date of it. Now you might say, well, it's just a rubbish deposit. Well, it's not particularly normal to take your 46 butchered animal bones up two flights of stairs in the kitchen, squeeze through a loft hatch, which is literally only that big, and then dump it down the side where you've got lath and plaster walls on one side, right next to a warm chimney where it's going to stink in the summer.
00:12:51
Speaker
No, you take it out the back, you bury it in a rubbish pit. That's the normal way of doing things. What they're doing here is another ritual. It's creating a decoy deposit. It's putting elements of humanity, used objects, which have been used to destruction or have been deliberately broken, to actually act as a decoy. So any spirits coming down that portal from the chimney will literally be
00:13:13
Speaker
surprise, and we go, oh, we were going to go into the house, but there's all this lovely stuff down here, stuff down there in the chimney. As far as we know, this is the first time that one of these spirituals has ever been excavated by an archaeologist. I'm dead
Rituals Against Fire and Witchcraft
00:13:26
Speaker
looking to have done that. Normally, it's a contractor or the owner who are ripping things out, and the first time an archaeologist hears about it, they're all piled on the kitchen table out of context. So we got dead lucky with that, really. A lot of this has to do with latent fears about fire.
00:13:43
Speaker
So obviously the great fire of London here, the Queen's House itself partly burnt down in 1604-05, the kitchen itself, which of course is next to that spiritual midden. And there was this belief that witches would actually try and fire set and actually malignantly start these fires. So there was this genuine fear. And what we might be looking at where they are doing ritual protection is that the burn marks are actually inoculating the building. So it's fighting fire with fire.
00:14:10
Speaker
It's sympathetic magic. If you don't believe me, here's a contemporary illustration from 1600 from Germany. There's the witch trying to come down the chimney. There's the mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece is a ritual protection mark, one of those VV marks, and it's been scored through to cancel out the magic so the witch can come down the chimney. There you go, that's 400 years ago.
00:14:32
Speaker
an artistic representation of it. Down at ground floor we also have a very dense distribution of burn marks around this doorway, 15 or 20, quite difficult to count and they're all overlapping with each other. This is a door into a room with no windows, it is probably used as a prison cell.
00:14:49
Speaker
Remember, the Tower of London, very, very grim reputation. Just that's the door there. Further down the corridor is the room where they kept Thomas More. So again, this is probably a prison cell. And they may have been marking it up afterwards, literally, to purify the space from the really grim, awful things that had been happening in the room. This is also the building where Guy Fawkes was imprisoned and interrogated immediately after the gunpowder plot. And of course, his very, very famous signature before and after the torture.
00:15:18
Speaker
There's the Forks Memorial in the building as well. Across the way, they also kept Everard Digby, who was the financier of the Gunpowder Plot, he graffitied his own name, also not particularly good handwriting, they've broken his fingers and thumbs. Another building with, I've got five minutes left, I'm all right, another building with
00:15:41
Speaker
A gunpowder clock connection is, in fact, Knoll. Knoll was originally constructed in the middle 15th century for a 100 years war veteran, bit of a swashbuckler fought at Agincourt. He later had his head cut off, actually, joined Jackade's Rebellion, and his son sold it to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It eventually passed to the Tudors and then passed to the Sackfeld family, who were still there. And they'd been there for over 400 years. It was remodeled, this great,
00:16:10
Speaker
This great medieval palace was remodeled in the early 17th century by Thomas Sackville. He was Lord Treasurer of England, so he was a very, very high man, very, very higher. And one of the areas that were remodeled on his watch was the King's Tower.
00:16:28
Speaker
which was being remodeled specifically as a royal suite of apartments for James I. Noel was being turned into a progress house to actually attract further power and patronage to the Sackville family. James, of course, a very, very interesting fellow, considered himself quite a scholar. He'd written a book that I mentioned earlier about hunting down witches.
00:16:49
Speaker
He'd actually presided over witch trials himself. So this is a man with a reputation for involvement in the occult. On a beam in the King's Tower we found all of these ritual protection marks. These are not ordinary carpenter's marks. What we're seeing here is a bastardized pentagram, again an endless lion demon trap. We're seeing interlocking V's and W's, the Marian marks.
00:17:13
Speaker
We're seeing mesh patterns a bit like we saw at the Tower of London for again pinning the demon to the wall. We're seeing all sorts of marks and we're also seeing burn marks. The interesting thing about the burn marks on this beam is they're running horizontally. They're running horizontally because they were put on when that beam was upright in the framing yard. It was actually planned by the carpenters.
00:17:36
Speaker
when they actually laid the beam down, it created a distribution. There's the first burn marks and then you've got the scribe marks. They're all on one side of this beam and that side of the beam directly faces that fireplace. So again, we've got a
Ritual Protection at Knoll
00:17:53
Speaker
connection between a chimney, a portal into the room,
00:17:57
Speaker
They're burn marks, directly facing the fireplace. They're only on that side. And then the bed was here. We know that from documentary sources. Sleep, you were considered to be in very grave danger of possession during sleep. You're lying back after loads of sack or meat or cider or whatever, and your mouth's out, you're snoring. The evil spirit comes down the chin, the insy mouth takes possession of you. So they felt the need to protect, especially when people were asleep.
00:18:25
Speaker
We dated the beam. Interestingly, it was dendroped to have been felled during the winter of 1605. So exactly the time of the gunpowder plot. It was laid the following spring and summer during the aftermath of the powder trees and very, very interesting time. I'm more interested in the year afterwards than I am in the lead up to the powder plot itself because you have all these interesting things going on.
00:18:51
Speaker
You've got Salisbury describing the plot as an abominable practice of Roman Satan, again, literally linking the Catholics to hell. Then there's this wonderful illustration of Guy Fawkes with his famous lantern now at the Ashmolean, about to blow the mine under the House of Lords, whispering into his ear, is a demon. Behind the demon
00:19:13
Speaker
is the Pope having tea with Satan this is not subtle stuff whatsoever but this is what people were being literally force fed this was propaganda on a mass scale in the early 17th century James was in parliament giving hellfire and brimstone speeches
00:19:30
Speaker
There were public sermons by people like Lancelot Andrews, the Bishop of Chichester. Plays were being written about this. The Gunpowder Plot is actually what Macbeth is about. Shakespeare, of course, the King's Man, part of the King's Man True. So there's lots and lots of propaganda just being washed out. It's exactly like what happened after 9-11. It's exactly like what happened after 7-7, after the Paris and the Brussels bombings.
00:19:58
Speaker
fear that's just being sent out through the population and I think that the carpenters at Knoll were soaking that up and were actually putting these marks on the building. The marks are not rare at Knoll, they're all over the building.
00:20:12
Speaker
This changes every single time I give this lecture because we keep finding new ones. However, they're different in the King's Tower. The distribution is so dense there that something else was clearly going on. Here we have the spandrel bedroom, another high status room in the building, fireplace, bed in its original location. Under the floor between the two is a beam. On that beam, there is one ritual detection mark, not 13 like at the King's Tower. That was being protected in a very, very special way.
00:20:42
Speaker
Two slides
Legacy of Ritual Practices in Modern Times
00:20:43
Speaker
to finish. That area of Knoll continued to give people the willies. So that 50 or 60 years later, that exact same fireplace, they were thrusting shoes up there again to create one of these spiritual middens. And these were uncovered in the 1960s. So something was clearly giving people the fear in that particular room.
00:21:05
Speaker
And also across the way in the 19th century, in the old laundry, when they re-roofed this medieval building, they were also put in burn marks on the colors as well there. And that's an original 19th century timber. So these are fears that have gone right the way through from the 16th and 17th century all the way through to actually 1878 when this was re-roofed. And you're all still doing these practices today.
00:21:30
Speaker
you've hung stockings on your mantelpiece, that derives from apotropaic ritual protection, using shoes or stockings in conjunction with a chimney. You've also used the expression to touch wood, that's touching the wood of the crops, throwing salt over the left shoulder. It's always the left shoulder because the left shoulder is where Satan sits, to whisper evil things into your ear, and you throw the salt into his face.
00:21:55
Speaker
And I've got one of these above my back window, the horseshoe over the door wall window. These are all things which are still current to this day. Thank you very much for having me on Dorset again. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle.
00:22:17
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.