Lewes : chimney pots

One of the benefits of climbing a lot of steps to the top level of Lewes castle (well, almost – I couldn’t face the screaming, poorly behaved kids racing round madly on the top floor of the last turret) is the view, both of the surrounding landscape and over the nearby buildings of the town itself. As the castle sits high on a hilltop, you can’t see much of those buildings, except their rooves ... and their chimney pots.

And what wonderful chimney pots! Mostly terracotta, mostly quite plain, but some nicely decorated with swirling curves. And they are not all simply chimney pots – in the process of writing this blog post, I’ve discovered a range of names for the various parts of these structures for moving smoke away from a chimney. There are cowls and caps, flues and terminal bonnets, to prevent drafts, encourage airflow, exclude inclement weather, and to discourage birds from nesting.

Lewes : Anne of Cleves House

As I’m sure most of you know, Anne of Cleves was the fourth  (and probably the luckiest) wife of England’s King Henry VIII ... but not for long. It seems that the woman who arrived in England in December 1539 was not as attractive to Henry as he had expected from Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait and, although the marriage did go ahead, it was not consummated and was annulled after just 6 months, in July 1540.

Anne was the daughter of a German duke and couldn’t just be sent packing, so Henry was obliged to bestow upon her a generous settlement of money and property. As well as Richmond Palace and Hever Castle, Anne was also gifted a house in Lewes, East Sussex and, though it’s believed she never even visited the house, let alone lived there, the property is now a museum named Anne of Cleves House.

Despite Anne’s absence from the house, it is actually a fascinating place to visit as it’s an excellent example of a grand Wealden hall house, a 15th-century timber-framed construction, built upon the remains of a 13th-century structure.

As a signboard in the house explains:

Wealden hall houses were expensive both in style and technique to build. Built of locally available materials the house is timber framed with a tile and stone roof. The existing original front elevation is also of stone and flint.
Hall houses had a large central hall with first floor rooms that jetted over the front of the building. At each end of the hall were bays or rooms. These bays included service and store rooms at one end and a parlour at the other. ...
Anne of Cleves House was built on a grander scale than a typical hall house and was designed to impress. The house was set within large gardens and orchard and had stables, farm buildings and a malthouse.

The large, open first-floor room is furnished as it would have been in Anne’s time, with beautifully carved furnishings, including chests and a four-poster bed. And you can easily see how the building was constructed, with wattle and daub walls and massive wooden beams.

Though it’s possible the kitchen would originally have been in a separate building to guard against accidental fires, a room on a lower level has been furnished as a kitchen would have been in the 15th century.

The property is managed by the Sussex Archaeological Society, which has made use of additional space in the basement to house an exhibition about the Wealden iron-making industry, and an upper room houses interesting items and artefacts from Lewes’s more recent past. Why there’s even a cafe for tea, coffee and rather scrumptious cakes!

Lewes : Gutter hoppers

I discovered the joys of gutter hoppers (also known as rainwater hoppers or hopper heads) during a visit to Britain back in 2014 and blogged about the history of guttering (including some of my hopper and gargoyle finds) in a post to celebrate Britain’s National Gutters Day that November (by which time I was living in Cheshire). 

Gutter hoppers, their designs and dates have continued to fascinate me – as well as the overall architecture of a building, I like to look at the smaller, more intricate details of its construction. So, when I spent a day in Lewes, in East Sussex, last week, I couldn’t help but photograph the many attractive hoppers I spotted as we walked the twists, turns and twitterns of that lovely historic town.

The oldest hopper I discovered was lying on the floor at the Anne of Cleves House and Museum. I didn’t spot a sign to explain its presence – although the museum building dates from the 15th century, perhaps this hopper was a later addition that has since been replaced.

This beautiful object is in Southover Grange Gardens, a peaceful and lovely haven adjacent to the 16th-century grange, which now houses the Lewes Register Office, a cafe and a gallery shop. This is now a water pump above a well but I can’t help wondering if it was once a gutter hopper.

Although parts of this building date back to the 16th century, Pelham House was enlarged in the mid-18th century and again in the early 19th century, so I imagine the stunning lion-embossed gutter hoppers were added during one of those later constructions.

Lewes Crown Court was built of Portland stone in the early 1800s so this hopper, dated MCMXXX (1930), is obviously a more modern addition. It’s proof, though, that modern doesn’t have to be boring!

It’s a sign: Lewes, 1

Judging by the number of signs on its buildings, I think it’s fair to say that the small East Sussex town of Lewes must have had more famous people per capita living within its boundaries over the centuries than any other town in Britain. And what an interesting assortment of people they have been.

First off, Albion Russell (1821-1888), who opened a boot and shoe shop in Lewes in 1861. He was joined by George Bromley in 1873 after Bromley married Russell’s daughter Elizabeth, and, if you know your shoe brands, then you’ll know the rest. Together they formed the now-famous and still highly successful high-end footwear-manufacturing partnership of Russell and Bromley.

Portrait of Richard Russell by Benjamin Wilson, in public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Next, there’s Dr Richard Russell F.R.S. (1687-1759) (I wonder if he was related to the bootmaker). In 1750, he was the author of a dissertation that prescribed the drinking of sea water as a cure for diseases of the lymphatic glands, and he further recommended that people should try the waters near Brighton, both for drinking and for bathing. The popularity of his ideas contributed to Brighton becoming a fashionable bathing resort, and there is also a plaque for him in Brighton.

Here’s another famous Lewes-born doctor, Gideon A. Mantell F.R.S. (1790-1852). 

The son of a shoemaker, Mantell was apprenticed to a local doctor in 1805 and was later awarded his diploma as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

In his spare time, Mantell was a keen amateur geologist and he and his wife Mary would take long walks collecting fossils. 

It was on one of these walks that Mantell discovered the fossilised bones of a prehistoric reptile he later named the Iguanodon (though rumour has it that Mary made the actual discovery!).

[Image of Mantell's Maidstone fossil Iguanodon, 1840, via Wikimedia Commons]

Thomas Matthew was a generous man. A Presbyterian and a woollen draper, in his will of 21 December 1688 he bequeathed his house, St Michael’s Court on Keere Hill, for the use and benefit of the poor (chiefly poor widows) of the parish of St Michael-in-Lewes. The local County Court later ordered that the building ‘should be used as a residence for six deserving poor widows or poor single women not less than fifty years of age’, and it continued to function as an almshouse until 1960. Nowadays, this early 18th-century flint building contains two substantial and rather expensive private houses.

At 12 Keere Street, there once lived an author called Eve Garnett (1900-1991). She wrote The Family from One End Street, thought to be based in Lewes, which won the Carnegie Medal for Best Children’s Book in 1938 (beating Tolkein’s The Hobbit) and is still considered a classic. Garnett was also an accomplished artist, illustrating many children’s books, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and exhibiting at The Tate and the Lefevre Gallery. One of her paintings, ‘Lewes Gasworks from South Street’, is in the collections at the Barbican.

And last but most certainly not least – in fact, this last was a man of international fame, the man who wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, the man who has been hailed as the intellectual inspiration behind the American war of independence, the great Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Just to be clear, Paine wasn’t born in Lewes but he did live in a house here, now called Bull House, from 1768 to 1774, at which time he was a plain old tobacconist and exciseman. Paine married Elizabeth Olive, the daughter of the owners of Bull House, in 1771 but then he left her in 1774, moved initially to London and subsequently to America to stir up revolution.

Lewes: the church with a squint

We were wandering along the High Street at Cliffe when we saw this old stone and flint church dedicated to St Thomas à Becket and, as I can never resist an open door, we went in for a look.

The first thing I noticed was the strong musky smell of incense, next was the way the dim light filtering in through the stained-glass windows was creating kaleidoscopic rainbows on the stone floor. Looking up I marvelled at the dark wooden ceiling of the chancel and the huge organ pipes that dominated one side wall.

It was Jill who first noticed the squint, not something I’d heard of or seen before. This architectural feature, also known as a hagioscope, was incorporated into church structures where the view to the main altar was obscured, thus allowing an assistant priest to raise the Host at the same time as the priest at the main altar.

Jill had just finished explaining this to me when an elderly gentleman, with a shock of white hair and looking slightly dishevelled in his dark green robe, came shuffling in through a side door. He explained that this double squint had probably been used to allow lepers to observe the mass. It seems that what is now the chancel of the present church was originally the full extent of the building, a late-12th-century chapel of ease, and it may be that the squint allowed lepers, from a leper hospital built just outside the town walls, to witness the celebration of mass without actually entering the church.

However, the structure of the church has been much altered over the centuries: their website suggests that the church had at least one aisle by the 13th century, that there was major reconstruction work done in the 14th century, that the flint tower is of late-15th-centuy construction and that the whole building was restored in the 19th century, so it’s difficult to be sure how the squint was originally designed to work and it does look to have been cut into the 12th-century wall rather than being an integral part of it.

Unsure of the man's identity I asked our elderly guide if he was the priest and he said ‘Yes’, though he did seem a little uncertain about it. It was only later that I checked the church’s website and discovered we had indeed been chatting to the Reverend George Linnegar who, though now officially retired, continues his 54-year service as a priest. As well as celebrating Holy Communion every day at St Thomas's, it seems Brother George is also Chief Clock Winder and Door fixer ... but that’s another story by another blogger.

Lewes: some street signs

I found much to love about Lewes during the day I spent there on my recent visit to East Sussex, as you will see in this and the blogs that follow.

Church Twitten

Move over road, street and boulevard, in Lewes we have the twitten. As the Oxford Dictionary defines it, a twitten is ‘a narrow path or passage between two walls or hedges’, and the word’s origin may be Low German, from the word tweite meaning lane or alley. If wiktionary and William Douglas Parish (from his 1875 book A dictionary of the Sussex dialect and collection of provincialisms in use in the county of Sussex) are to be believed, this is an exclusively Sussex word that is a corruption of betwixt and between. The word is obviously rather old as Church Twitten, and the many other twittens in Lewes, are the subject of a book by Kim Clark, The Twittens: The Saxon and Norman Lanes of Lewes (Pomegranate Press, 2012).

Pipe Passage

As well as the twitten, Lewes also has the passage, several of them in fact, leading hither and yon. 

This one had its own plaque explaining that Pipe Passage is ‘named after [a] 19th century clay pipe kiln’ and that the route ‘follows Saxon and Medieval access to [the] town wall defences’. 

I found out a little more:

... formerly Westgate Passage. It follows the line of the old town wall which still remains in this quarter of the town. A little way up Pipe Passage on the left is a small piece of ground between it and the town wall. It was formerly roofed over and was used as a workshop for making clay pipes, and the kiln for firing them still partially remains built into the north wall which owes its survival to the fact that it is a retaining wall for higher ground behind. [From N.E.S. Norris, ‘A Victorian Pipe Kiln in Lewes’, Journal of Post-Medieval Archaeology, Vol.4, Issue 1, 1970]

English’s Passage

What can I say? The story behind English’s Passage has eluded me. 

The alleyway itself is certainly very old as one of the buildings at the High Street end is heritage-listed and dates from the 16th century, and these old lanes and passages are all thought to date from Saxon or Norman times. 

The very picturesque row of cottages shown in my photo at right is not so old – the houses date from the early 19th century. They may perhaps have been built for the managers and overseers who worked at nearby Harvey’s Brewery. 

But the reason why this passage is named English’s will have to remain a mystery for now.

Cockshut Road

England would not be England without its weird, wonderful and sometimes downright rude place names. Just as Stonesfield in Oxfordshire has its Cockshoot Close and West End in Surrey has its Cocknmouth Close, so Lewes has Cockshut Road and, indeed, a Cockshut stream. The word Cockshut is actually pronounced Cock-chute by the locals and is apparently derived from a 13th-century Sussex word to describe a place where woodcocks or geese could be ensnared. The waterway, The Cockshut, is a tributary of the River Ouse and its course has been much altered over the years: back in the 12th century one of its branches flowed through the grounds of Lewes Priory and was used to cleanse the reredorter.

I do enjoy flushing out these fascinating dollops of local history.

East Sussex: Priory Park, Lewes

Mention ‘ruins’ and, in the blink of an eye, my camera bag is packed, and I’m in the car, ready to go! So, when Jill suggested we visit the site of an old priory, I said yes immediately (and, even better, it’s in a public park, so no entrance fee).

This from the signboard at the entrance:

The Priory of St Pancras, founded about 1078, was one of the largest and most powerful monasteries in England. It was of international importance as the first Priory in England linked to the influential Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, France. What you see today are the ruins of this once magnificent establishment. After nearly 500 years most of it was deliberately destroyed in 1538 during the Reformation on the orders of Henry VIII.

As the sign goes on to say, it’s difficult now to imagine how grand and imposing the whole site must have been in its heyday – there were approximately 100 monks living and worshipping here in the 12th and 13th centuries, though there were only 24 at the time of its demise – but the frequent signboards around the site do a good job of helping the visitor imagine how the huge buildings once dominated this landscape (like the image below).

As  well as the enormous Priory church and its cloister, and the lodgings, a huge kitchen and the refectory for the monks, there was also a guesthouse, an infirmary and accompanying physic garden (and there’s still a small herb garden to give you an idea of what the monks used for their herbal remedies) and, of course, a reredorter (I love this fancy word for the toilet block), as well as a water mill and brewhouse, granary and bakery, forge and stables.

Though it is certainly difficult to imagine the grandeur, archaeological evidence shows that the church walls were decorated with frescoes, the floors were clad with fine glazed tiles, and the ceiling soared to grand heights under enormous curved stone arches.

Also on the site is a monument, unveiled on the occasion of the 700th anniversary, to commemorate the Battle of Lewes, fought on 14 May 1264. The English barons, led by Simon de Montfort, were fed up with the extravagance and bad governance of King Henry III, and fought to have England ruled by a council rather than the king – very forward-thinking of them! The barons won the battle and forced the king to sign the Mise of Lewes, a treaty restricting his authority, but, as history shows, royal power was later restored.

Designed by Enzo Plazzotta and perfectly sited to view the Lewes Castle tower through the facial slits, the helmet sculpture is a very impressive and very appropriate artwork, and there is something rather haunting about its empty shell. When engineers were building a new railway line through Lewes in 1845 (sadly, right through the northern part of the site!), they uncovered the burials of hundreds who died in the Battle of Lewes, so it’s fitting that those early pioneers of democracy be remembered here for their courage.

There is a mound near the entrance to the park, which, when climbed, provides wonderful views over the Priory ruins, some of Lewes township and across the surrounding countryside. Though we didn’t have time to explore on this occasion, Lewes itself looked old and interesting so that’s on my list for a future visit to East Sussex.