Chester Castle Chapel re-envisioned

Chester Castle has seen many changes and many rebuildings over the centuries whilst still retaining significant historic features. One such is the thirteenth century chapel of St Mary de Castro in the Agricola Tower. Built about 1210 as part of the gatehouse to the inner ward it contained the chapel, which was painted in the latest style in the 1240s. This was presumably part of a series of alterations to extend the residential accommodation in the inner ward and involved blocking the gateway in the Agricola Tower.

The Earldom of Chester, which included the castle, escheated to the Crown in 1237, and in 1241 King Henry III compensated surviving claimants from the late Earl’s family with land elsewhere. Finally in 1246 the Earldom was annexed to the Crown, subsequently being bestowed on the reigning monarch’s eldest son, as it still is.

The decorative scheme of the chapel would appear to reflect the court culture of King Henry III, so well documented in his surviving archives, but of which tragically little survives in situ. The chapel at Chester does at least give us a building and traces of paintwork to begin to imagine what it once looked like.

Work in recent years has exposed the fragmentary remains of the decorative scheme and this has now been studied and a reconstruction created. I first came upon this on the Substack site of The Fake History Hunter which stresses the importance of colour in medieval life, and it can be accessed at The Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunter)

The English Heritage website to which it links, and which discusses the remaining artwork and seeks to reconstruct it, can be found at The Chester Castle Chapel Wall Paintings

The reconstruction of the original scheme in the chapel 

Image: English Heritage 

The effect created in the reconstruction is not dissimilar to that made by the Arena or Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto in 1303-05. Wikipedia has a detailed account of that masterwork at Scrovegni Chapel

Wikipedia has an illustrated history of Chester Castle and its buildings which can be viewed at Chester Castle

Medieval Gardening

Recently I came upon a video from Medieval Way  based upon Jon Gardener’s 1440s The Feate of Gardening, the earliest surviving guide written in English to the practicalities of gardening.

Beyobd his text nothing else is known about Gardener. What can be gleaned from his poem can be seen summarised in Jon Gardener | Encyclopedia.com

JSTOR has a link, if you subscribe or have access, to an article from Garden History vol 13, pt 2, 1985 by the distinguished architectural historian John H. Harvey entitled ‘The First English Garden Book: Mayster Jon  Gardener’s Treatise and its Background’

  

Creating a medieval garden

1470-75

Bibliotèque de l’Arsenal

Image : Medieval Histories

 

The fatal impact of a trebuchet?

A shote while ago I shared a link to the analysis and apparent identification of an English soldier from the 1340s Anglo-Scottish conflict, whose skeleton had been found in the remains of the medieval chapel of Stirling Castle. That article can be accessed at Reconstruction of a medieval male skeleton from Stirling Castle.

 Now there is news on Live Science of another study of a skeleton from the same chapel but from the time of King Edward I’s siege of the castle at Stirling in 1304 during the earlier war. In this case the skeleton was that of, presumably, a Scottish soldier who had died in his twenties from traumatic injuries. The theory advanced is that he was struck from behind by a stone lobbed by one of the English trebuchets and that his, mercifully, instantaneous death resembled a modern car accident.

The article about the study can be seen at Skeleton with 167 fractures discovered at Scottish castle may have been first victim of Edward I's 'War Wolf' trebuchet

 

Historic Environment Scotland has a good account of the siege engines and the actual siege of Stirling at The War Wolf at Stirling Castle  

  

A trebuchet in action from the Maciejowski Bible of circa 1240

Pierpont Morgan Library

Image: World History Encyclopaedia 

 Wikipedia has a quite detailed account of these mighty siege engines at Trebuchet

Medievalists.net has another, short, article at The Engineering Beauty of the Trebuchet

  

 

A modern reconstruction of the Stirling ‘War Wolf’

Image: Wikimedia 

Devotion to King Henry VI

Readers will, hopefully, recall that I have shared in the past the link to articles I have had published in Mass of Ages, the magazine of the Latin Mass Society. The latest issue has another of my articles, and that will,I hope, be of interest to readers of this blog

“A prayerful, humble life” looks at the development ofdevrion to King Henry VI following his murder in 1471 and the subsequent development of a cultus, and serious attempts to get him canonised. 

 

The article is on page 8 and the autumn edition can be accessed here 

    

It is clear that King Henry was encouraged into a life of prayer and piety from his earliest years:

    

  

King Henry VI is presented by St Katherine, his mother’s patron saint, to the Virgin and Child

From the Psalter of King Henry VI, in the Royal MSS circa 1428-30 in the British Library  

The image clearly recalls the iconography of the Wilton Diptych commissioned by King Richard II a generation earlier

Image:Print Collector  

 

The Assumption of Our Lady

The Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Bl. Fra. Angelico  

Dated to 1424-34 and originally an altarpiece in the Basilica of San Marco in Florence, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Image:anastpaul.com

To mark this weekend’s great feast, and to remind readers of the traditional observances around the celebration of Our Lady’s entry into Heaven, the website OnePeterFive has a linked set of articles about the customs of past generations and centuries, and indeed encourages, their revival, which can be accessed at The Forgotten Customs of Assumption Day

A joyful and splendid celebration of the Assumption of Our Lady to all my readers

Eclipses - past, present, and future

Yesterday’s almost total eclipse here in the UK, and the total eclipse in Iceland, parts of Ireland and in Spain caught the imagination of very many of us. In my case it sent me on a quick internet search for recorded eclipses in the past.

Wikipedia and NASA both have articles which indicate the not only when they occurred but also which places were more likely to experience them.The articles can be accessed at List of solar eclipses visible from the British Isles and at Solar Eclipses Visible from London, England

The coverage on television from Iceland made the point that the last total eclipse was visible from Reykjavik had been in 1433.

Here in Britain there were no total eclipses between  1485 and 1598, with one annular eclipse in 1547.

More remarkable is the fact that there were no total eclipses visible in Great Britain between 1724 and 1925 ( only visible off shore of the outer Hebrides) and 1927 on the mainland. Putting it another way King George III and his sons, Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone and Newman, and many others besides, had no chance to see a total eclipse whilst at home.

 Mind you next year’s eclipse visible from Sydney in Australia will be the last one visible there for more than the on next eight centuries.

Historically Scotland, especially the far north, is more likely to offer opportunities for eclipse sightings.

  

Live Science has reproduced the first written account of a total eclipse. It was written by Archilochus in the seventh century BC. He lived in the island of Paros and witnessed a total eclipse there on April 6th 648 BC. The account of the author, and his reaction, seen at 'No longer will anything seem impossible or marvellous': How an 'immoral, foul-mouthed and violent man' wrote the first eyewitness account of a total solar eclipse​​

I watched the last near total eclipse in Oxford in 1999. I recall the strange, eerie greyish light as the maximum point approached, the strange quiet that accompanied it. Watching the coverage yesterday evening on the television coverage and looking out from my window it was again, not surprisingly, very much the same, a uniquely distinctive phenomenon. 

 

IMAGE SOURCE,m

An excellent architectural website

Recently whilst searching online for an image to illustrate an article I had written for a magazine I came upon the work of David Bridgwater and his meticulous work on historic buildings at his blog Bath, Art and Architecture

This appears to have begun with studies of the architecture of the city of Bath, but on occasion extends to cover other cities and buildings. I sensed a kindred spirit in his concern to record not only what survives, but also what has been lost, and his sense of place and belonging.

 

Three examples of his work can be seen. Firstly there is his account of the Oxford Arms in the west side of Warwick Lane. Farringdon Within. I had seen photographs of this galleried inn before, but it was good to have more information about the buildings and their history. It is tragic to think that such a remarkable, albeit very decayed, building survived until 1876 - into the childhood of my grandparents - and that no-one saved it. Indeed it is remarkable how many buildings of this era, pre-dating the Great Fire, survived into the late nineteenth century only to be destroyed at the time when there were moves to not just record but to preserve such buildings.

The Oxford Arms

Demolished 1876

Image: Bath, Art and Architecture 

The article can be seen at Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane, Faringdon Within, City of London

The second study concentrates on a fine plaster ceiling rescued in 1961 from the former Feathers Inn in Nottingham city centre. This was a time when city and town centres were being bulldozed with little or no concern for the losses to the local and national heritage. I do not recall seeing the building on my visits as a child to Nottingham in those years, but I may have. I have checked with David and the ceiling is still in store awaiting a new home. 

The article can be seen at Introduction the Wheelergate Nottingham Ceiling.

The third article looks at Cumberland shipbuilding in the eighteenth century and at a series of carved wooden portrait busts.

The article can be accessed at Five Carved Wooden Busts with Cumberland Shipbuilding Connections, Part 1.

This is definitely a blog to keep an eye on and I have added it to the side bar.

David happily agreed m to my original request and to allow reproduction of his photograph, but more of that in another post.

The Stone of Scone

On this day in 1296, 730 years ago, soldiers from the army of King Edward I of England removed the ‘Stone of Destiny’, the Stone of Scone, from inside the abbey church of the Holy Trinity and St Michael at Scone and began the process of taking the traditional seat for Scottish coronations to Westminster, and its eventual inclusion in St Edward’s Chair.

Despite the agreement of the English government to its return in the Treaty of Northampton in 1328, the Stone remained at Westminster. Not until the coronation of King James VI as King James I in 1603 did a King of Scots, in effect, sit on it again. In 1996 the British government returned the Stone to Scotland and it was displayed with the Honours of Scotland in the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle.

In 2023 it returned to Westminster with appropriate ceremony for a temporary return to St Edward’s Chair for the Corination of the present King. It was then returned to the new Museum in Perth, very close to the site of its ancient home at Scone Abbey.

A replica of the Stone of Destiny outside the seventeenth century chapel where King Charles II was crowned in 1651 on the Moot Hill at Scone

Image: Facebook/ Soul of Alba Photography

 

Wikipedia has a detailed account of the Stone, its legends and history at Stone of Scone

The World History Encyclopaedia has more about the legends associated with it at Stone of Scone

The Stone at Edinburgh Castle in 2023 before it was taken to Westminster for the Coronation.

The Duke of Buccleuch KT, Captain General of the Royal Company of Archers, stands behind it flanked by two members of the Court of the Lord Lyon

Image: NBC News

I have long been of the opinion, and said so on this blog  that I would favour the restoration of the Scottish Coronation within the constitution of the United Kingdom. There is however the problem that both the original Sword of State and the Sceptre are now said to be too fragile to be handled. That is very unfortunate but it is good to see the Crown in use at the Lying-in-State of the late Queen and the ceremonial opening of the Scottish Parliament.

  

The Seal of Scone Abbey dating from about 1250 depicting the coronation of a King of Scots

Image: Wikipedia