More Medieval Tiles

It was suggested to me that I might write another post on medieval tiles, since I have so many photographs of them, so here it is. I’ve limited myself to tiles from Byland and Rievaulx Abbeys in Yorkshire, which I visited in April.

Tiles at Rievaulx Abbey

When I visited the abbeys, I expected that any tiles I saw would be behind glass, as these are, but that’s not the case. Fortunately, there are still tiles where they were originally laid in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of them are in the forms of mosaics, as you can see below, but there are also a few, very damaged, inlaid tiles.

The tiles above, under glass, are inlaid. They become very fragile when their glaze wears off, which is why there aren’t many of them in what is now the open air.

Tiles in the day room at Rievaulx Abbey

These tiles look rather good for having been exposed to the elements for several hundred years. They’re in the monks’ day room at Rievaulx. It had two fireplaces and the monks worked there during the winter rather than in the cloisters, which would have offered little protection against wind, rain and snow.

The colours have faded, but they still give a good idea of what the floor would have looked like when the monks were sitting in the room copying books.

Tiles in the nave of Rievaulx Abbey

The remaining tiles are in the nave of the abbey church. They’re relatively sheltered by bits of walls and pillars.

Tiles in the nave of Rievaulx Abbey

Tiles in the nave of Rievaulx Abbey

It’s a wonder to me that so many tiles have survived, but Rievaulx has almost nothing compared to Byland Abbey, which is about 15 minutes away by car.

Byland’s tiles are also mostly used to form mosaics.

Tiles, Byland Abbey

These tiles on the risers of these steps are still colourful, since no one has trodden on them. Their designs are much clearer than those on surfaces that have been walked on for hundreds of years.

Tiles, Byland Abbey

This pretty pattern of interlocking circles must have been very colourful when it was first laid.

Tiles, Byland Castle

As you can see, the tiles are exposed both to the elements and to the feet of visitors. Sadly, many of the tiles have suffered as a result.

Tiles, Byland Abbey

These tiles have almost completely lost their patterns and the tiles themselves are disintegrating. It’s a shame, because the patterns were obviously fairly complex.

Sources:
Rievaulx Abbey by Peter Fergusson, Glyn Coppack, Stuart Harrison and Michael Carter
Medieval Tiles  by Hans Van Lemmen

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Wanderings of Medieval Saints

A short discussion with C J Hyslop (Fraggle) on her post about a visit to a church which claims to have been been one of the resting places of the body of St Cuthbert during his post-mortem peregrination around the north of England and the south of Scotland has made me think again about the importance of relics in the Middle Ages.

St Cuthbert’s body was moved to keep it out of the hands of the Vikings, who were not known for their respect for religious artefacts. The coffin containing his body was taken to various places before it came to rest in Durham.

To our minds, it seems odd that people would put their own lives at risk to carry the body of a man long dead to safety. St Cuthbert died in about 687 and set off on his long journey after the destruction of Lindisfarne by the Vikings in 875. It’s a little under 80 miles from Lindisfarne to Durham, but St Cuthbert’s journey there took more than 100 years. That’s a lot of people over several generations who were willing to risk everything for what should have been a heap of bones, but was said to have been an uncorrupted body.

Being close to a saint’s body was considered the same as being close to the saint himself (or herself). This was the reason why pilgrims travelled long distances. It wasn’t to visit churches or cathedrals because they were important in themselves, but because of the relics of the saints they contained and the miracles they expected to see performed because of the saint’s presence.

Saints’ bodies were often moved from one place to another and rarely with the altruism shown by the people who carried St Cuthbert from place to place.

A church was nothing if it didn’t have some kind of relic. Even a piece of bone could be placed in a shrine for pilgrims to visit. Some churches went to extraordinary lengths to obtain even a sliver of bone. There are stories of respected churchmen surreptitiously tearing off a finger when allowed access to a saint’s remains or, in more than one case, biting one off whilst giving the appearance of kissing the saint’s hand. It’s no wonder that saints’ relics were kept safely hidden in reliquaries and shrines. When a relic was displayed publicly, it was a big occasion.

I live in the diocese of Winchester and the cathedral’s patron is St Swithun. His body did not fare as well as that of St Cuthbert. He was the bishop of Winchester when Wessex became the most important of the Saxon kingdoms. He died in 862 and was buried, at his request, in the cemetery of the cathedral.  In 971 his relics were moved inside the cathedral. There was heavy rainfall on the day and this was interpreted as showing his displeasure at being moved. It’s still said that if it rains on St Swithun’s day (15th July) it will rain for the following 40 days. If it doesn’t rain, the weather will be fine for the next 40 days.

This resting place lasted only three years before St Swithun’s body was broken up and placed in two separate shrines within the cathedral. In the early eleventh century his head was taken to Canterbury by Alphege when he left Winchester to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As I said above, even respectable churchmen were not above stealing a relic.

After the Conquest, the Normans built a new cathedral in Winchester and what was left of St Swithun was taken there in 1093, where his shrine continued to be visited by pilgrims until it was destroyed in the Reformation.

Sources:

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints – David Hugh Farmer

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Medieval Textile Tools

This week we’re back at City Museum in Winchester, but looking at things from a slightly different angle. Earlier this year I wrote a series of posts about how some textiles were produced in the Middle Ages. You can find the first one here. While I was researching the series, I read about the processes and looked at pictures of the tools used, but there’s a world of difference between looking at a picture and seeing the real thing. City Museum houses some textile tools from the Middle Ages.

In numerical order they are:
17 A whorl for a spindle
19 A tenterhook
20 A harbick
21 Shears
22 A thimble
23 A needle
24 A couching needle

The uses of some of the objects are fairly obvious.  The whorl sat on a spindle to balance it when yarn was spun. Spindles were made of wood, so tend not to survive. Whorls were usually made of stone or clay, but this one is lead.

The sewing needle (slightly bent as the description card points out helpfully) was used in the same way that a needle would be used today. It’s thicker than I would like to use, but I suspect it wasn’t meant for fine needlework. Someone using it would have need of the beautiful little thimble.

The shears (21) were probably used for cutting fabric or thread. They look too small to have been used for removing the nap on cloth, although they look too large to snip sewing thread. I don’t suppose the needlewomen of the Middle Ages had a large collection of scissors of different sizes as I do.

According to its card, the harbick (20) was used to secure cloth to a board when the nap was shorn. It’s not an object I’ve come across before in my reading and I can’t find out any more than the museum card told me.

It was the tenterhook (19) that first caught my eye in the display. Tenterhooks were used to stretch fabric on a tenterframe after it had been fulled. I had no idea the hooks were so tiny, but I suppose they would have damaged the fabric had they been much larger. It’s not every day you get to see something that is only remembered through an idiomatic saying, which is why I was quite excited to see it.

I have to confess to being more than a little worried about the couching needle (24). Everything I’ve read or seen about couching indicates that an ordinary needle is used. Couching is an embroidery technique in which a thread is placed on the fabric and held in place by small stitches along its length. In the Middle Ages couching was mostly used to secure gold thread, which was considered too valuable to be wasted on the back of an embroidered piece.  Gold thread was made with gold leaf, so was very expensive. I suppose this needle could be a laying tool, used for keeping threads flat and controlled while the needle is pulling them through the fabric, but I don’t know. If anyone recognises it and understands its purpose in couching, I’d be grateful if you’d leave a comment below.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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A Visit to City Museum, Winchester

The last time I was in Winchester, someone recommended the City Museum to me. There wasn’t quite enough time to go in on that day, so I was pleased when the necessity of going to Winchester arose this week and I had the opportunity to see what delights it holds.

It’s a small museum, but I found a great deal there to enjoy. This post is really a random collection of things there that caught my eye, and I hope they’ll appeal to you as much as they appeal to me. I’m sorry about the quality of some of the photographs. It was a sunny day and all the things that interested me are under glass.

Winchester was an important town under the Romans, and the whole of the top floor of the museum is dedicated to some amazing finds both from the town and nearby villas. There are coins there that are 2,000 years old and a mosaic that’s about five foot square and complete, save where a tree root grew into part of it. What I loved, though, were these fragments of a wall from a house where there’s now a shopping centre.

I was attracted to them by the bright colours. It’s easy for us to believe that people in the past lived in a monochrome world. The artefacts we have from those times have mostly lost their paint, but these bits of wall are a reminder that the Romans, just like the people of the Middle Ages,  lived with and liked vibrant colours.

The museum was recommended to me on the strength of its medieval exhibits, but in Winchester medieval means Anglo-Saxon. It was Alfred the Great’s capital and there are many interesting things in the museum from his time.

My favourite Saxon object is this tiny piece of a house-shaped shrine. It’s a gable of the roof, so not desperately important, but it’s exquisite. To give you an idea of the craftsman’s skill, it’s about 2 1/2 inches tall.

It’s from the end of the tenth century and is made of walrus ivory. At the top, there’s an acanthus spray, which is, according to its card, typical of the Winchester style.

Another religious object is this shell. If you look closely, you can see the holes drilled into it so that it could be sewn onto a pilgrim’s hat. It would have been worn to show that the person wearing it had been to Santiago de Compostela, the third most important destination for medieval pilgrims.

There were also tiles. I love tiles, but I’ll spare you all the pictures I took of them and show you just two that I thought were particularly interesting.

I’ve written about how tiles were made here.

I’ve saved the best till last. This is a fourteenth-century toilet seat. It’s not quite as big as it seems. Those are combs on the left and the fipple flutes on the right are tiny. The toilet seat came from a house belonging to John de Tytynge. Fortunately, other items were found on the site. I’m not sure I’d want my name to be remembered only because the excavation of my latrine pit gave up a toilet seat.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Medieval Conservation

Image by RitaE from Pixabay

After last week’s post about otter hunting, there was some discussion in the comments about hunting animals to extinction during the Middle Ages. For the most part, however, this is a fairly recent phenomenon.

The exception in medieval England was the wolf.  They were apparently very numerous during the times of the Romans and the Saxons and very dangerous. People were rewarded for killing them, partly because of the threat they posed to livestock, but also because of the value of their skins. They became increasingly rare and, depending on whom you ask, the last wolf in England was killed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century.

Other beasts perceived to be dangerous to animals kept to feed people, such as foxes, however, are still plentiful. English Otters, though, didn’t fare so well. During the last century they were hunted almost to extinction and the population is only starting to recover now.

Animals that medieval aristocrats liked to hunt were protected to some extent. All animals that were hunted, even foxes and otters, had a close season, although it might not have been observed meticulously. There were a variety of reasons for close seasons.

The most obvious was that a close season around the time the young were being born preserved the stock for future hunting. This was applied rigorously to deer, the most noble of the beasts hunted in England. Even during the open season, hunters were not indiscriminate. Harts and bucks had to be a certain age before they were worth hunting, thus allowing them time to breed. Medieval aristocrats saw the dangers of over-hunting and avoided them.

Another reason for a close season for ‘lesser’ animals, was that they would be hunted only during the part of the year when they were most worth catching. For some animals this would be when they were judged to be at their peak for eating; for others it would be when the skin or the fat for which they were hunted were at their best.

Aristocratic hunters also restrained themselves out of respect for the animals they hunted, although this was, again, mainly limited to deer.

Whilst aristocratic hunters could afford to think about preserving stock for the future, peasants could not. It’s extremely unlikely that they observed close seasons on anything. If you were going to break the law by poaching a deer, it wouldn’t matter whether you did it in August or January. They also didn’t possess the means to hunt on horseback, but tended to trap animals, which was an indiscriminate method of hunting.

Sources:

Medieval Hunting by Richard Almond

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Medieval Otter Hunters

Modern Otter Hounds

I’m reading about hunting at the moment, because there’s not just a hunting scene in my current work in progress, but there’s also a lot of talking about hunting.

It’s very interesting to read about the noble and dangerous beasts that were hunted in the fourteenth century, but one animal I hadn’t even considered as worth being an object of the chase is the otter. After a few paragraphs of explanation in the book I was reading, however, I understood.

Otters are inedible, so they weren’t hunted for food. Although they’re difficult to hunt, they weren’t pursued because of the excitement of the chase. Kings of England, however, did have both otter huntsmen and otter hounds, but they didn’t go hunting with them. The men and the dogs were sent out to various parts of the country instead. The skins of otters were valuable enough to be used as rent in Ireland in the early fifteenth century, but that wasn’t the only reason they were hunted.

Like foxes and wolves, otters were a nuisance. They ate fish. In a society where about half the days of the year were fast days, fish were important. Otters didn’t limit themselves to eating fish in rivers, but raided the fishponds of monasteries and large manor houses. Fishponds were a way of maintaining a private supply of fish for monks and lords of the manor, and were particularly important during Lent, when every day was a fast day.

Otters were hunted with specially-trained lymers. These were dogs who were trained to follow the scent of an otter and not make a noise when the prey was discovered. Otters don’t stay in one place for long, so the huntsmen had to find its current place of residence before the hunt could begin.

Four men set off with a lymer each, two on each side of the river. Of each pair, one went upriver and one went down. The huntsmen didn’t just rely on the dogs catching the scent; they were also looking for otter prints and droppings. The medieval hunting treatises say that the otter typically went upriver to hunt and then floated back downriver while digesting its meal.

Once the dogs found the place where the otter was living, the huntsmen reported back to the rest of the men gathered for the hunt. They then took up position upriver and downriver of where the otter was. The doges were let loose into the water and the otter tried to get away from them. The waiting huntsmen stood by shallows and fords, so that they could see the otter when it reached them. Their weapons were spears, barbed tridents and two-pronged forks. The idea was to spear the otter as it swam past, pursued by the dogs. If the river was wide, a net might be spread across it and the dogs would drive the otter into it.

Sources:

The Hawk and the Hound: The Art of Medieval Hunting by John Cummins

The Master of Game by Edward of Norwich

Medieval Hunting by Richard Almond

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Medieval Bodies by Jack Hartnell – A Review

Medieval Bodies is not what you might expect from the cover or from the title. Based on a podcast I heard in which Jack Hartnell was interviewed about his book, I was expecting something about medieval medicine and medieval illnesses. I was wrong, but in a good way.

It’s a book that looks at the parts of the body (head, hands, feet, skin etc.) and asks how such things were thought about in the Middle Ages. Each chapter is about a different part of the body, starting with the head and ending with the feet. Within each chapter, there’s a look at what medieval medical science thought about that particular body part and then there’s a consideration of what that part meant to people at the time, both physically and spiritually. The chapter on genitals, for instance, talks about medieval childbirth in reality and in art. I enjoyed the chapter on feet, which talks about some of the odd fashions in footwear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Hartnell doesn’t just cover thoughts about bodies from Europe, but he also includes Jewish and Islamic writings and illustrations. Islamic works were being translated into Latin from the twelfth century, bringing long-forgotten Greek learning and philosophy into countries north of the Mediterranean. This wider knowledge is reflected in a change of ideas about medicine, while the church had to consider whether or not physicians and surgeons should be allowed to follow the teachings of the pagan Greeks.

There are colour illustrations on almost every other page, making this a book to be browsed as well as read. I enjoyed it very much, although it, of necessity, deals with each subject superficially. Any book with ‘medieval’ in its title already has to spread itself thin, since the Middle Ages lasted more than a thousand years. Medieval Bodies compounds the problem by going beyond the bounds of Europe.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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The Medieval Deerhunter

There was a comment from Lydia about last week’s post on huntsmen that brought me up short. She said that, in her experience in North America, venison isn’t a particularly special type of meat and she was surprised that only certain people had the right to hunt it and eat it in the Middle Ages.

In the fourteenth century it wasn’t just a question of having the right equipment and the requisite skill to hunt deer. No matter how many huntsmen, mounted or on foot, you had at your disposal, and no matter how many dogs you had, you could only hunt a hart, or deer of any kind, if you had permission from the king.

First, we’ll clear up what a hart is.  It caused a bit of confusion last week. There were three types of deer in England in the Middle Ages: red deer, fallow deer and roe deer.  As the largest, red deer were the most important ones for hunters, followed by fallow deer. Roe deer came a poor third. The hart is a red deer stag more than five years old. He was the ideal prey and was hunted on horseback with dogs. Hinds are female red deer and does are female fallow deer. They were very much lesser prey and were hunted for meat rather than sport using the bow and stable method. It was more like a cull than a hunt.

Deer were mostly hunted in forests. Shortly after he became king of England in 1066, William the Conqueror started creating royal forests where he could hunt deer. I live near one of them, the New Forest, which dates from 1079. It’s where William’s much-hated son, William II (more widely known as William Rufus) was killed in 1100, whilst hunting.

At their peak in the first half of the thirteenth century, royal forests covered more than a quarter of England. They were private hunting grounds for the king and his guests, and the people who lived within their boundaries needed permission to fell trees, clear woodland or kill any animals that could be hunted. Forests were hugely unpopular with everyone except those who had the right to hunt in them.

The laws covering the forests were set out in Forest Charters. William I decreed that poaching from a forest was a capital offence. In 1244 Henry III issued a new Forest Charter, which set out that poachers would only be fined. There were poachers from all levels of society, both secular and lay. Bishops and dukes, however, tended to be let off without the fine.

Just as he could invite guests to hunt with him in his own forests, the king could give permission for others to have their own forests (or chases) in which they could hunt deer whenever they wanted. This was an honour very rarely given. It was more usual for an aristocrat to receive permission to have a much smaller deer park. The park was an enclosed area tended by a parker. People without a chase or a park could only hunt foxes, hares, rabbits and pheasant on their own land. Occasionally a minor lord might be invited by a greater lord to hunt deer with him, but that was the only legal way in which he could do it. He might still eat venison, though. It was never sold, but given as a gift to show the generosity of the giver.

Sources:

The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer

A Social History of England 1200 to 1500 ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod

Medieval Hunting by Richard Almond

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Medieval Huntsmen

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to underestimate how important hunting was for people in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t just a sport, although there was a huge element of that for the aristocracy. It was also a means of providing food for the table. If you wanted to eat venison (although only a few were permitted to do so), boars, rabbits and birds, you had to go out and hunt them. There was also the practical aspect of ridding the countryside of dangerous animals, such as wolves and bears, as well as animals that would harm domestic beasts, such as foxes.

If you were a noble, you hunted with a great deal of ritual and a large team of support staff. You needed men to train and work with the dogs. A particular style of hunting required archers and beaters. Another type required falconers. As with everything else in the Middle Ages, hunting was labour-intensive.

The favourite prey of medieval hunters was the hart. The same thing applied to hunting them as it did to eating them; only a few people could do it. As a prey, he was considered to be intelligent, wily and noble. It showed intelligence and skill on the part of the aristocratic hunter to bring one down. In reality, it showed his intelligence in choosing his master huntsman and the men beneath him.

Depending on the type of hunt, different men, dogs and horses were required. Most of the huntsmen employed by the aristocratic hunter hunted on foot. It was the job of the employees to locate and assess the prey and, if it was a noble prey, such as a hart, a boar or a deer, the nobleman would get on his horse and take part.

The huntsmen were specialised, as each type of hunt and each prey required different skills.

The fewterer was one of the men in charge of the greyhounds, the principal hunting dogs. On the hunt, a fewterer had charge of two or three greyhounds. He had to keep them under control until the hart went past, then he released the hounds to follow it.

The berners had general care of the dogs. They were responsible for the kennels and for feeding the dogs. It was their job to reward them after the kill.

As today, beaters were often used to drive the prey into the path of the aristocratic hunter. Usually they were peasants and providing such a service was often one of their feudal obligations in return for the land they farmed.

Technically, the lardener wasn’t a huntsman, as he played no part in the hunt himself. His services were indispensable, however, for he salted the deer carcase ready for transporting to the place where it would be stored, prepared and eaten.

Archers were involved in a style of hunting called bow and stable. In this instance, stable means station or stand. It was most often used when obtaining food, in the form of venison, was the main aim of the hunt. The women in the picture at the top of the post are practising a form of it. The deer were driven by horsemen towards a funnel of beaters and archers: the stable. The aim was to enable the archers to shoot as many deer as possible. Don’t be misled by the picture, though. Women did not hunt in this way. The picture shows Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, and her maidens.

Women’s involvement in most hunts was limited. They might meet the men going on a hunt for breakfast before they set off and they might catch up with them around the time of the kill, but their own hunting was done with birds. This meant that the women did not have to be involved in the kill or even see it close to.

Men also hunted with birds, which went almost everywhere with them. Hawks were expensive if they could not be caught locally, and training them was a slow and skilled process. Even after training, there was always the risk that a hawk would simply fly away when released for the hunt. As a result, good falconers were highly prized.  Falconers looked after the long-winged birds of prey, such as the peregrine falcon, while the austringer cared for the goshawks and other short-winged birds.

A necessary characteristic of all the huntsmen, regardless of their speciality, was physical bravery.  Many of the animals they chased were capable of killing them.

Sources:

The Hawk and the Hound: The Art of Medieval Hunting by John Cummins

The Master of Game by Edward of Norwich

Medieval Hunting by Richard Almond

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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The Great Hall of Winchester Castle

The Round Table, Great Hall, Winchester

During a recent trip to Winchester I visited what remains of its medieval castle. The castle was built at the highest point of the town, which was also the furthest point from the river. The only remnants of the castle these days are some stumps of walls, some vaults which are closed to the public, and the Great Hall.

You’ve probably come across the Great Hall in photographs, even if you didn’t know what it was. It’s best-known today for housing the Round Table and that’s what tourists pay to see. There’s a bit more to the Great Hall than that, but it’s what we’ll start with.

Edward I had the Round Table built, probably around 1290 for a banquet. He didn’t have it painted with the portrait of King Arthur and the names of the knights, though. The Tudor Rose in the middle of the table is a clue to the identity of the king who did have it painted: Henry VIII. King Arthur’s face was originally that of the young Henry, which must have been a bit confusing for him, since his older brother, who would have been king had he lived, was called Arthur. Over the years, various renovations have changed the features of King Arthur into those of an old man. It was only because X-rays were used during one of the more recent renovations that we have any idea of what King Arthur originally looked like. The Victorians, as is usually the case, were probably the guilty parties here.

The table is massive. It’s 18 feet in diameter and weighs 1 ton 4cwt. It was made of 121 separate pieces of oak and had 12 legs. When it was renovated in the 1970s, the wood was dated by means of dendrochronology and the youngest tree-ring they found was dated to 1219, suggesting that the trees used were felled no later than the second decade of the fourteenth century.

There’s a model of its original construction on display just outside the hall.

Model of the Round Table, Great Hall, Winchester

Model of the Round Table, Great Hall, Winchester

The castle itself was originally built by William the Conqueror at the end of the eleventh century.  Henry III was born there in 1207 and it was he who had the Great Hall built. A fire during the reign of his son, Edward I damaged the royal apartments so badly that they were never repaired and the royal family thereafter stayed in the palace of the Bishop of Winchester whenever they visited.

The Great Hall was used as a courtroom from the reign of Henry III off and on until 1973. Famous trials that took place there included those of the Earl of Kent (a son of Edward I) in 1330 and Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603.

The Great Hall has other delights, not least a herber garden set out in a style that would have been familiar to Edward I’s queen, Eleanor, who brought a number of plants to England from her native Castile.

Queen Eleanor’s Garden, Great Hall, Winchester

The Victorians tried hard with their renovation. This wall, where the Round Table was hung after it was no longer needed for its original purpose, is covered with the names of the parliamentary representatives for Hampshire from 1283 to 1868. For many years, possibly centuries, there was a medieval mappa mundi on this wall.

Great Hall, Winchester

They also made an effort with the windows. Apparently the long walls of the hall were originally painted with heraldic devices. The Victorians put devices of kings, queens, bishops and others important to the history of Hampshire in the windows. Here’s the window with the devices of Edward III, his son Edward of Woodstock, and his great friend William Montacute.

Great Hall, Wincester

The Great Hall is well worth a visit if you’re ever in Winchester.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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