Author: Triskele Heritage

The Power of Graffiti: Ancient and Modern

The people of Nottingham have reacted with a tangible sense of excitement to the news that, the world-renowned graffiti street artist, Banksy has chosen a brick wall in the suburb of Lenton to place a new installation.

My adopted hometown has had a fair bit of bad press recently given the collapse of INTU mid-way through their redevelopment of the Broadmarsh shopping centre and the spike in covid-19 cases which has led to Tier 2 restrictions. So, it has been a real pleasure to see the city brought into the light through this artwork on the corner of Illkeston Road and Rothesay Avenue.

The new installation features a stencilled spray-painted little girl, aged maybe 7 or 8, arms outstretched in balance as she hoola-hoops a bike tyre. Adjacent to her is a bicycle padlocked to a street sign with a mangled front wheel and a missing back tyre.

In these grim days, it is incredible to see such a diverse number of people getting excited by art. And I do mean diverse – when I was down at the site there were around one hundred (socially distanced) folk queueing up to take photos and they accurately represented Nottingham’s vibrant multi-racial and multi-cultural community.

So, why might an archaeologist be interested in such a modern phenomenon?

Firstly, it is important to state that archaeology is a subject as big as humanity itself. Whatever you are interested in there will be a historical material culture which can be studied archaeologically. I happen to be a buildings archaeologist and part of my job is looking at graffiti which adorns those buildings. It’s true that I can more usually be found squinting at mediaeval graffiti by the light of a torch in a parish church, but there are some deep-seated connections between the work of Banksy and that of mostly unknown folk from the past.

Historic graffiti is a very important window onto the past and offers us a dynamic social document as important as anything which could be found in an archive or museum. Prior to the more widespread adoption of literacy during the seventeenth century, graffiti tended to be pictorial. It was created by people of all social backgrounds and is a vital piece of evidence for understanding the everyday lives of ordinary people, many of whom would not leave us any traces of their lives without their graffiti. By learning to “read” those inscriptions we can learn something of their psychologies and emotions… and mostly they speak of their hopes and fears.

Hope might be represented by the carving of a beautiful ship onto the walls of Norwich Cathedral (Norfolk) – perhaps a prayer in stone by a merchant or sailor wishing for their ship to dock safely. Fear can be seen in the ritual protection marks recorded at the Tower of London which were intended to drive away the threat of evil from the building and its occupants. I have recorded graffiti in buildings all over the country from tiny cottages up to the largest cathedrals. What is apparent is that people used the walls as venues to speak of their concerns in life – the graffiti acts as a representation of what was important to them in and of the specific moment of their creation.

Banksy’s graffiti in Lenton does just this and is a very playful and thought-provoking piece. It is located near to the former factories owned by Raleigh, which manufactured bikes locally from 1886 until closure in 2002. The surrounding streets were once home to many of the factory workers. Famously, the principal character in Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton, lived, worked, drank and loved in these streets. Nowadays the area is popular with students as an ideal place to live midway between town and the University of Nottingham. The graffiti speaks of the former workers at the bike factory – notably the bike in the piece is as broken as the economy after the factories closed. The work also reflects the tenacious families who continue to cling to the area despite its grim realities and the hoola-hoop tyre seems to point to an improvised make-and-mend attitude to just keep-on-keeping on. The idea of play is also a burlesque on the later reality of Lenton as a bit of a party town for students. I’m not sure that the subject matter would really work if it were presented anywhere other than these streets.

Nottingham City Council are certainly aware of the cultural cache which Banksy potentially brings to an area. Even before the artist formally acknowledged the piece via his Instagram, the local authority had installed a plastic screen to protect it. A security guard is also diligently watching over the piece. After all, Banksy’s street installations can fetch extremely high prices – in 2014 his iconic Kissing Coppers (originally from Trafalgar Street in Brighton) went for $575,000 (£345,000) at auction. The screen in Lenton may have been extremely foresighted as not long after it was fitted the wall was tagged by another graffiti artist. It was later cleaned by local residents.

There is an irony here. Firstly, it is a very widely acknowledged cultural observation that graffiti begets other graffiti. The presence of a piece of graffiti seems to act as a magnet for other pieces to be added around and over older inscriptions. This is the case both with historic graffiti and with its modern counterparts. It has already taken place in Lenton, not only with the tag, but also through the work of one wit whom has thought to make a comment on Banksy’s stencil technique by placing the phrase “MASS PRODUCED” in orange letters adjacent to the installation.

Secondly, graffiti is, by nature, a fleeting and temporary form of art. It seems unlikely that those who scribed on the walls of mediaeval buildings thought that they were creating something that would intrigue later generations or be studied by archaeologists such as myself. Instead, graffiti speaks of the contemporary moment within the mind of an individual in a particular location. Protecting or removing the piece for posterity has the potential to culturally devalue it.

Thirdly, Nottingham has gone wild for this piece (and quite rightly so). There was a real festival atmosphere on Illkeston Road. What would otherwise be a perfectly ordinary suburban arterial road has been briefly transformed into a cultural destination that is really drawing in the (socially distanced) crowds. The line of folk was slightly reminiscent of the queues to see world famous pieces of historic art such as the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and I’ve seldom seen queues of people waiting to interact with art at Nottingham Contemporary or Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. This installation by Banksy has really brought a much-needed joy, zest and conversation to Nottingham’s streets.

Given that I have spent many years studying graffiti I’m both happy to see the Nottingham Banksy getting so much attention and not entirely surprised. I’ve witnessed the compulsive power that graffiti can have on people. That power takes many forms. Humour greeted the discovery of phalluses carved on Hadrian’s Wall by Romans trying to engender good luck. A sense of enigmatic mystique was created by the ritual protection marks at Knole (Kent) which were left by carpenters trying to defend James I from evil after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Meanwhile, there was amazement at the survival of graffiti left by the Sex Pistols in the 1970s which led to a building on Denmark Street in Soho being protected from demolition.

Graffiti is a tremendously important cultural asset in both the historic and modern eras – but there is definitely a dialogue to be had over how and why we protect it.

If this blog has perhaps piqued your interest in historic graffiti, then please do consider watching my talk on the subject…

About the author

James Wright is an award-winning buildings archaeologist. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.

He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.

With us all unable to poke around inside normally private houses as part of Heritage Open Days 2020, many organisations have opted for digital content this year. Our own modest offering is a short documentary for Inspire on a house at Kelham, near Newark, Nottinghamshire. We surveyed the property as part of the Kelham Revealed project alongside our friends and colleagues at MB Archaeology in 2019. Conventionally dated to the seventeenth century, but containing all manner of mediaeval surprises within…

I’m attempting to bring a little positivity to our collective self-isolation by recalling some of my site visits over the last 20+ years as an archaeologist.

I’ll be uploading a post every single day to the Triskele Heritage website and also Tweeting from @jpwarchaeology using #VirtualSiteVisit– come join me on the ride…

Day 59: Thursday 14 May 2020
Historic Graffiti from England
An alternative to the usual picture for today’s #VirtualSiteVisit – instead it is a link to the audio slideshow of the introduction to historic graffiti talk that was mentioned yesterday. This covers sites from the length and breadth of the country – enjoy!

by James Wright FSA

Introduction

In 2016 the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded a collaborative doctoral award researching Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire, which has been run by the University of Nottingham and the site’s landowners – the National Trust. The castle doubled its visitor numbers to 59, 741 between 2008 and 2018 (Visit England 2018) and a reassessment of the site is anticipated to underpin future strategic decisions on presentation of the site to the public. Although Tattershall has featured widely in castle studies (Goodall 2011, 354-6; Emery 2000, 308-16; Johnson 2002, 55-62), with particular regard to great houses in the late mediaeval period, there has been no substantive new research on the site since the 1920s (Curzon & Tipping 1929). Consequently, a need arose to reconsider the castle using the multidisciplinary approach of modern buildings archaeology.

Once the completed thesis is available online a link will be placed to it on this webpage.

Tattershall Castle

The castle is located in a remote area of Lincolnshire, approximately 21 miles south-east of Lincoln and 15 miles north-west of Boston. In the mediaeval period the site was well-connected to the fenland and coastal environments via the River Witham. A stone polygonal enclosure castle, studded with round towers, was first built for the regionally important baron, Robert de Tateshale, in the 1230s (Goodall 2011, 183). The model for this building is likely to have been at Bolingbroke, approximately 10 miles to the north-east, which was built in the 1220s for Earl Ranulph de Blondeville – itself inspired by innovative architecture emanating from France and the Holy Land (Soden 2009, 124-5).

Tattershall passed through the Driby and Bernack families until it was inherited, in 1419, by Ralph 3^rd Lord Cromwell. The Cromwells were socially rising landowners at a time of great political turbulence initially caused by the minority of Henry VI and, later, his inability to establish strong governance (Johnson 2019, 555-9). Cromwell was appointed as Lord Treasurer of England, in 1433, and by the following year had begun an ambitious programme of remodelling at Tattershall which lasted until c 1450 (Simpson 1960).

The building accounts of the great brick and stone castle partially survive and give a vibrant impression of the construction process (Simpson 1960). Building materials were brought in, by land and river, from Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire to be worked by labourers and craftsmen including dikers, masons, carpenters, plumbers and smiths. Whilst the name of the master mason is unknown, Cromwell’s principle brickmaker, Baldwin Docheman, was probably a continental specialist brought over to work the clay on nearby Edlington Moor (Simpson 1960, 46, 56, 73). By 1446 the project was well-advanced and work was underway on the great tower. Analysis of the underlying geometry has revealed that the tower’s ground plan was based on a 3 x 4 grid of 20 foot (approximately 6.09m) squares and that the principle western elevation conformed to the common mediaeval proportional ratio of 1:1.73 (Hislop 2012, 19-20).

Cromwell’s builders added two L-shaped wards to the older enclosure complete with brick moat revetments. Each of the three wards had its own gatehouse which allowed a processional access through the castle similar to those at Caister and Kenilworth (Johnson 2002, 50-1; Creighton 2002 76). The Outer and Middle Ward contained well-appointed lodging ranges including the “Guardhouse” – a two-storey retainers lodging with garderobes and fireplaces. The floor and roof structure were recently found to be constructed from timbers felled between 1446 and 1451 (Robert Howard, Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory, pers. comm. 07/2/2017).

Antiquarian illustrations (Society of Antiquaries) and archaeological excavations (Curzon & Tipping 1929, 169-173) have revealed that the Inner Ward once contained a chapel, great hall, two-storey pentice, services, solar, and gatehouses which permitted access to gardens to the south and services to the west. The castle is dominated by the 33.5 metre high great tower which plunges directly into the moat on three sides. The rectangular structure has projecting octagonal corner turrets, which rise above the parapet and were once crowned with lead spirelets (Emery 2000, 309-10). Brick diaperwork helps to offset the rather austere window tracery and a symmetrical show-front is presented on the west elevation. The tower has a unique double-height parapet with a machicolated and arcaded gallery supporting a wall walk complete with heated rooms in the turrets.

The building is accessed from the east via three ground floor doorways. The southern door leads to a spiral stair in the south-eastern turret (with an elaborate recessed handrail carved in stone), the central to a basement and northern to the ground floor chamber. Blocked doors, wall scars and beam slots (associated with a former two-storey pentice that lay beyond the demolished great hall) indicate that more private access was once possible from the former solar block.

Internally, the tower is deceptively simple in layout. It consists of a five storey stack of large central chambers with intramural passages to the east and chambers in three of the turrets. Each of the storeys above grew in status vertically, becoming steadily larger and more lavish, in a fashion memorably described by John Goodall (2011, 354) as ‘gathering magnificence’:

• Basement: Storage
• Ground floor: Lesser household hall
• First floor: Private dining hall
• Second floor: Great chamber accessed via an elaborately vaulted processional corridor and heated anteroom
• Third floor: Bedchamber

All four principle chambers have garderobes and finely sculpted chimneypieces; whilst the first, second and third floors also have corbels at their high ends which once supported tester frames.

The castle was carefully designed to act as a theatrical backdrop to symbolise the prestige of its patron. Everything about the site demanded respect and awe from visitors and occupants alike. From the circuitous access to the overpowering dominance of the great tower, Tattershall was intended to demonstrate the status of its lord.

A Landscape of Lordship

Beyond the castle gates, Cromwell imposed his power on a wide landscape of lordship. This included a large moated enclosure containing gardens, warrens, fishponds and a mill, alongside the foundation of a collegiate church, school and almshouses provided for in his will. The settlement of Tattershall was reorganised as a proto-town with a substantial marketplace with a stone cross symbolic of Cromwell’s economic power. Beyond this, part of Tattershall Chase was emparked and provided with hunting lodges at Woodhall Spa and Whitwell (Simpson 1960, xiii-xv).

By the mid-1440s Cromwell received vast incomes from over 140 estates (Friedrichs 1988, 217) and had commissioned a substantial new house at South Wingfield (Derbyshire) alongside works to existing manor houses at Collyweston (Northamptonshire), Lambley (Nottinghamshire) and Depham (Middlesex). These lavish building projects, conducted simultaneously with Tattershall, led Anthony Emery (2000, 313) to characterise Cromwell as demonstrating ‘the seeds of megalomania’. This architectural dominance created a unified brand across landscapes that repeatedly emphasised his status in society.

Ralph Cromwell

Ralph Cromwell was born in 1393 into a family of supporters of Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV). By 1407 he had been placed in the household of Thomas, duke of Clarence, the younger son of the king. He was present on Henry V’s campaign of 1415, was probably knighted at Azincourt and served during the later invasion of Normandy. He distinguished himself as an able administrator and diplomat and, by 1420, had caught the attention of the king who entrusted him as a negotiator at the treaty of Troyes. By 1423 Cromwell was named royal councillor and ten years later he was appointed as Lord Treasurer of England – a post that he held until 1443 (Friedrichs 1988, 208, 212).

Cromwell was typical of a group of rising men, active in France, who received royal patronage and invested their wealth in buildings which symbolised and projected their status in society. However, as a new man, he lacked the influence of higher-ranking members on the council such as the rivals Humfrey, duke of Gloucester and Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. Cromwell gravitated towards Beaufort’s circle and was well-rewarded when the latter was ascendant, but that patronage was regularly cut when Gloucester held the upper hand (Friedrichs 1988, 209-12).

The construction of Tattershall Castle began soon after Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Treasurer. It featured repeated lordly symbols such as clustered towers, crenellations, machicolations, prominent chimneys, brick vaults and armorials. Even the choice of the newly fashionable brick as a building material served such purposes – diaperwork patterns of a heraldic shield, Calvary cross and Marian imagery collectively demonstrated the societal demand to be seen as a pious lord (Creighton 2002, 110).

Internally, the architectural detail of the great tower was also geared towards an exposition of how Cromwell wished the world to see him. In particular, the elaborately carved chimneypieces and vaulting bosses are resplendent with family armorials which relate Cromwell’s, often distant, lineage. Significantly, no attempt was made to link himself with the heraldry of contemporary political patrons – potentially due to the uncertainty of his shifting allegiances. Intermingled with the armorials are more statements of lordly piety including carvings relating to the battle between good and evil – St Michael and the dragon and Samson and the lion. Most revealing of all are the repeated carvings of the Treasurer’s purse, signifying the source of wealth and power, which is often found in association with a rebus of the Gromwell plant and Cromwell’s curious motto: ‘Nay je droit’ (Have I not the right?).

This motto is both truculent and anxious at the same time. It reveals a tension in Cromwell’s architecture which may be symptomatic of his personal characteristics. He was a newly made man that had experienced a meteoric rise, but was still subordinate to more powerful men.  We might consider the repeated heraldic devices as Cromwell over-emphasising the antiquity of his lineage to bolster his position. This was further supported by the repeated carvings of purse rebus and motto which hint at a prickly and jealous pride that was exposed in his political actions.

Cromwell’s latter years were mired in partisan disputes which often spilled over into open hostilities. He resigned the post of Treasurer in 1443 and, after the death of Beaufort in 1447, struggled to maintain a strong profile on the council in the face of the dukes of Suffolk and Somerset. He was beset by the murderous schemes of his neighbour, William Tailboys, and the equally volatile duke of Exeter (Friedrichs 1988, 221-3). As Henry VI slipped into catatonic stupor in 1453 and the country slid towards civil war, Cromwell found himself politically isolated and began to drift into the orbit of the Yorkist faction. He arranged the marriages of his heiresses, Joan and Maud Stanhope, to relatives of the earl of Warwick and duke of York in an attempt to seal new alliances. However, when war broke out in 1455, Cromwell failed to arrive at the battle of St Albans (whether by fate or design) and was vilified in person by Warwick as a primary instigator of the Wars of the Roses.

Cromwell died in January 1456 at Wingfield Manor (Friedrichs 1988, 224-6). He had been a diligent and tenacious member of the council and had weathered the aggressive faction-fighting which marred the middle years of the fifteenth century.

Inspirations and Influences

The design of Tattershall owes a debt to both contemporary European castles and to older English examples. The use of brick became fashionable in eastern England from the late fourteenth century, for example at Thornton Abbey and Boston Guildhall in Lincolnshire, primarily as a result of strong trading connections with the Hanseatic League (Campbell 2003, 103). Sites such as Malbork in Poland and Schloss Kempen in the Lower Rhineland had an electrifying effect on English builders through the use of wide moats, diapered brickwork with stone detailing and a resurgence of the great tower as an architectural focus (Goodall 2011, 356; Simpson 1960, xxiv). The latter was also current in late mediaeval France, where Cromwell’s own experience of castles such as Vincennes may have directly influenced the design of Tattershall (Emery 2016, 252, 330). Finally, Tattershall looked back to Norman great towers including Castle Rising, Dover and Newcastle filtered through later developments at Nunney, Stafford and Wardour (Goodall 2011, 183).

Tattershall subsequently had a remarkable effect on English architecture for over a century. The construction of brick and stone great towers with projecting turrets and featuring recessed stair handrails, false machicolations and diaperwork became essential motifs in elite building. Within Cromwell’s own lifetime members of the Lincolnshire gentry commissioned structures influenced by Tattershall, including the Hussey Tower (Boston) and Ayscoughfee Hall (Spalding). The style was also advanced by his peers at Herstmonceux Castle (East Sussex), Rye House (Hertfordshire) and Middleton Towers (Norfolk). In the late fifteenth century a number of bishop’s houses showed a clear line of thought back to Tattershall, in particular those built by the mason John Cowper for William Waynflete, executor of Cromwell’s will, at Esher and Farnham (Surrey). Other stark examples of the style include Buckden (Cambridgeshire), Oxburgh (Norfolk) and Kirby Muxloe (Leicestershire). During the Tudor period Tattershall’s legacy was cemented at Holme Pierrepont (Nottinghamshire), Layer Marner (Essex) and Hampton Court (Surrey); with its reach even lasting into Elizabeth’s reign at Burghley (Lincolnshire) and Kenilworth (Warwickshire).

Post-Mediaeval Tattershall

Following Cromwell’s death, the castle passed to his nieces Maud and Joan Stanhope (and their various husbands) prior to confiscation by the crown. Tattershall was granted to Margaret Beaufort and then Charles Brandon (Curzon & Tipping 1929, 113-4, 121), with the latter possibly constructing a tiltyard in the former gardens. By the later sixteenth century the estate was purchased by Lord Clinton, whose descendants initially held the castle for Parliament during the English Civil War (Curzon & Tipping 1929, 133, 138). Although Tattershall was briefly possessed by the royalists, in 1643, the site saw little action but graffiti from the garrison can be found inscribed upon the walls of the great tower and there are impact scars from musketry on the west elevation of the collegiate church. The castle was probably slighted during 1650 on the orders of Parliament (Thompson 1987, 184).

In 1693 the castle was inherited by the Fortesque family who rented it out as a farm. Early eighteenth century illustrations by Buck and Millicent show the castle in a ruinous state (Society of Antiquaries). The great tower was used as a cattle shed and a dovecote was installed in Cromwell’s own privy chamber during this period! By the nineteenth century the floors of the tower had collapsed, the moats backfilled and much of the foundations of the castle had been robbed to feed lime kilns (Curzon & Tipping 1929, 140-1).

The castle was under threat from acquisition and wholesale removal by an American consortium in 1910, which led to an emergency purchase by Lord Curzon the following year. As a man deeply interested in the conservation of historic buildings, Curzon arranged for the excavation and consolidation of the site under advice from architect William Weir and architectural historian Alexander Hamilton Thompson. The narrowly averted threat to Tattershall led Curzon to successfully lobby Parliament for the Ancient Monuments Consolidation of Amendment Act of 1913 (Waterson 1994, 73).

Tattershall was left to the National Trust under the terms of Curzon’s will and remains in their care and open to the public to the present day.

Conclusions

Tattershall Castle stands as testament to the tremendous power and prestige of Ralph Lord Cromwell. The innovative architecture is firmly rooted in both continental and English building traditions and became the benchmark for English building for many decades to come. The messages imparted in both the overall plan and architectural details speak of a patron who was wealthy, proud and conscious of his status; however, there is also an underlying anxiety and tension inherent to the building which is reflective of a parvenu, who had reached far yet, who was still a lord of the second rank. The site has also been enormously important to the history of the conservation movement, in particular in the sensitive manner of Curzon’s restoration work and the use of the site in attaining legal protection for significant historic buildings.

Bibliography

Campbell, J. W. P., 2003 (2016 edition), Brick: A World History. Thames & Hudson. London.

Creighton, O., 2002, Castles and Landscapes. Equinox. Sheffield.

Curzon, G. & Tipping, H. A., 1929, Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire: A Historical and Descriptive Survey. Jonathan Cape. London.

Emery, A., 2016, Seats of Power in Europe During the Hundred Years War. Oxbow. Oxford.

Emery, Anthony, 2000, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales Vol. 2 East Anglia, Central England and Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friedrichs, R. L., 1988, ‘Ralph, Lord Cromwell and the Politics of Fifteenth Century England’ in Nottingham Medieval Studies Vol. 32

Goodall, J., 2011, The English Castle. Yale University Press.

Hislop, M., 2012, Medieval Masons. Shire Archaeology. Oxford.

Johnson, L., 2019, Shadow King – The Life and Death of Henry VI. Head of Zeus. London.

Johnson, M., 2002, Behind the Castle Gate. Routledge. London.

Simpson, W. D., 1960, The Building Accounts of Tattershall Castle, 1434-72. Lincoln Record Society No. 55.

Soden, I., 2009, Ranulf de Blondeville – The First English Hero. Amberley. Stroud.

Thompson, M. W., 1987, The Decline of the Castle. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Waterson, M., 1994, The National Trust – The First Hundred Years. BBC / National Trust. London.

Historic Illustrations

Society of Antiquaries, Coleraine Collection of British Topography Vol. 2

Websites

Visit England: https://www.visitbritain.org/annual-survey-visits-visitor-attractions-latest-results (Accessed 17/10/2019)