Clavering Castle

 

 

An archaeological investigation in the summer of 2025 has transformed our understanding of Clavering’s castle. Led by Simon Coxall, the dig involved just two trenches. The information that those holes in the ground revealed was enough to rewrite our understanding of the rise – and fall – of what must have been one of the most prestigious buildings in the local area.

 

Clavering’s castle stood on a moated site to the west of the parish church. Talking to Newport’s local history group in March, Simon explained how the present church was built adjacent to an earlier chapel dedicated to St John the Evangelist. The chapel marked the miraculous event said to have occurred when Edward the Confessor gave a valuable ring to a beggar, who turned out to be none other than St John the Evangelist. We know that the site was visited by Henry III in 1251.

 

Clavering was clearly an important medieval manor. Simon summarised the descent of the aristocratic families that had occupied the site. The castle was built by Robert Fitzwymarc, one of the few aristocrats from before the Conquest to survive and prosper after 1066. ‘Robert’s castle’ was constructed on a platform created by 30,000 square metres of soil thrown up from the excavation of the moat and from the adjoining fields in Clavering. The labour involved must have been immense – an indication of Fitzwymarc’s power.

 

The moat involved the re-engineering of part of the river Stort, which continues to flow through the village. Through close analysis of hydrological data, Simon showed that the current position of the ford in Middle Street had shifted from where it would have been prior to the castle being built.

 

Fitzwymarc’s property passed to the de Clavering family (after Henry of Essex was defeated in a trial by combat). From the de Claverings it passed in the 14^th century to the powerful Neville family, owners of huge estates in the north of England.

 

The castle’s final owner was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of the Duke of Clarence (the unlucky brother of Edward IV and Richard III, who met his fate in 1478). Margaret was in turn executed by Henry VIII in 1541 as part of his attempt to annihilate all traces of the Plantagenet family line. Margaret’s execution was followed by the systematic razing of the castle at Clavering.

 

Any archaeological dig involves significant amounts of work both before, and after, the point at which any spade hits the ground. Driven by the Clavering Landscape History Group the investigation  began with geophysical readings taken in 2020/21, revealing the lines of earlier buildings on the site. This evidence was assessed to inform the placing of two trenches, one across the entranceway to what appeared to be one of the courtyards constructed on the castle platform, and the other in a spot less likely to have been disturbed by later periods of construction at the site.

 

Scheduled monument consent was required before any digging could commence. Investigation could not be carried out on the site of what would have been the castle’s main hall, since this part of the castle platform has now been colonized by a sett of badgers. Much of the dig involved disentangling evidence of the castle from the detritus left by the phase of its eventual demolition.

 

The dig, in the blazing heat of June 2025, produced almost no finds dating to later than 1550, demonstrating the complete erasure of the castle from the landscape at the time of its destruction. Equally, there was not a great deal of material from before c.1000 AD. Such early pottery as was found such as one fragment of a Romano-British mortarium had been brought to the site within the material used to construct the mound. A part of a human mandible (jaw bone) found in the gatehouse trench was likely to have ended up there as a consequence of an animal digging it up from the nearby churchyard.

 

The trenches produced more than two and a half thousand pieces of animal bone, and a great many medieval nails and roof tiles used in the construction of the (wooden) castle buildings (the castle probably resembled the still-standing Stokesay Castle in Shropshire). Oyster shells were found in significant quantities, being the medieval equivalents of builders’ packets of crisps. Trench one revealed the surface of the roadway leading into the castle, as well as part of the wall of the gatehouse.

 

The post-dig analysis has involved careful assessment of the stratification of the finds. This has enabled the reconstruction of the likely history of the castle. Augmented over time by a gatehouse and a double courtyard, the complex was then ordered to be destroyed. The demolition was swift and brutal, and involved the covering-over of whatever remnants of the building couldn’t otherwise be removed and reused. A metre’s depth of archaeology reflects 500 years of occupation. Since c.1550, when this act of destruction took place, a thin layer (c16cm) of top soil has accumulated over the platform, which otherwise reveals no immediately visible clues to its past.

 

Just two holes in the ground, therefore, and a great deal of effort on the part of Simon and his team of volunteer archaeologists, has thrown new light on Clavering Castle, a building that stood for just 500 years.

 

We were thrilled that Simon came to Newport to tell us the story. Perhaps one day archaeological investigation might solve the mystery of whether Newport ever had a similar castle – said by some to be located on the site of what is now the Joyce Frankland Academy.

 

 

Ben Cowell

Digging Clavering Castle

For the last three weeks, a team of archaeologists has been at work in the village of Clavering in Essex, uncovering new facts about the medieval castle that was once there.

The castle is no more. Instead, the site is a ‘platform’ of earth standing above the line of the river Stort, and above the defensive moat that was constructed when the castle was first established. The platform would once have boasted of two courtyards. Badgers have colonized the portion of the castle platform where the high-status hall may once have stood. The archaeologists have been digging two trenches at the other end of the site, where there was once a gatehouse entrance, to test theories about how the site was built, and then how it was demolished.

The castle has ancient origins, dating back to pre-conquest times, when Robert fitz Wymark is said to have constructed ‘Robert’s Castle’ here in 1052. It makes it one of the earliest castles in England, according to the notice board positioned near the site.

There would have been a bridge from the platform over to the churchyard of what is now Clavering church, where a chapel of extraordinary significance once stood. The chapel was dedicated to St John the Evangelist by Edward the Confessor. Henry III is said to have visited in 1251, drawn by the mystery of the 'miracle of the ring' (when John the Evangelist, dressed as a poor beggar and still walking the earth in human form until the day of Christ's return, received a ring from Edward). 

The chapel, like the castle, can no longer be seen, The castle today is simply a mound of earth, covered by a few inches of material that has accumulated in the 500 years since it was abandoned.

The first pit we were shown (officially Trench 2) was a record of past demolition crews, as they capped off old ditches with a layer of cement-like substance. The archaeology involved here was all about judging the stratigraphy of destruction, as successive pits at the entrance to the castle were filled with abandoned animal parts and detritus and then closed off for use. Other pits and ditches were capped with tiles and with oyster shells (of which the dig found a great many - the equivalent of packets of crisps for the demolition workers).

The first trench said more about the castle’s demolition than its construction. A series of pits and ditches were evidence of previous phases of abandonment and rebuilding, until the final period of demolition which occurred in the mid-16th century when Henry VIII took against Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Being a Neville, and the mother of the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury (Reginald Pole), as well as a true-blooded descendant of England’s Plantagenet royal line, Margaret was out of favour with the new Tudor order. Henry VIII had Pole executed in 1541, and the demolition of Clavering Castle is judged to have followed not long after.

 

The second trench (officially Trench 1) revealed more of the castle itself, in the form of a stretch of wall, or at least its inner core of tightly-packed rubble. The last three weeks’ dig got down to the level of the Tudor driveway that would have led up to the castle building, visibly worn by passing feet and vehicles, and hence sloping gently up to the wall of the castle itself. This would have been the first time in five hundred or more years that anyone had stood on this driveway.

The dig achieved its aims, which were to ascertain that this was indeed a high-status medieval castle site. There was no sign of anything earlier than c.1000AD, and little of any interest dating from after c.1550. For that half a century or so, this would have been one of the high-status manors of the wealthy Neville family, whose other castles famously were in the north of England (eg Raby Castle).

 

It was intriguing that the archaeologists were able to reconstruct so much about the building, but also about its subsequent demolition.  As Simon Coxall, the lead of the dig, said, the site is a time capsule in the true sense of the word: a place that only operated as a ‘castle’ for a fixed period of time , c.1000AD to c.1550AD.

For more information, see Simon's blog with the Castle Studies Trust. We were very grateful to Simon for showing us around on such a hot day, and to the Clavering Local History Group for running such an excellent open day. 

What Was our Heritage?

 Anniversaries are moments to stop and ponder the significance of events. There has been much talk of late of the exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, which opened at the V&A more than 50 years ago, in October 1974, and which then toured regional museums and galleries in 1975.

 

 The Destruction exhibition undoubtedly had an impact far beyond the show itself, which was, after all, simply an exhibition mainly of black and white photographs of mansion properties that had been lost (to fire or to demolition) in the century from 1875. The fact that it is being talked about at all today, half a century on, is testament to the determination of the V&A’s director, Roy Strong, to make an impact with the show.

 

“I feel so strongly that the V&A represents the quintessence of our aesthetic heritage,” Strong wrote to Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, in October 1973, “and that we should be seen to be deeply involved in what has been lost, and what will be lost, if we do not act immediately.” (V&A Archive MA 28/243/1)

 

The context of Strong’s letter, written before he had officially taken up the post, was the turbulent politics of the day. The Labour opposition to Ted Heath’s Conservative government had developed new ideas of capital taxation, in the form of a Wealth Tax to augment the existing estate duties (which were renamed, after Labour came to power in 1974, as capital transfer taxes).

 

As the V&A’s director, Strong was a civil servant (the V&A at the time was a branch of the education department). It is extraordinary now to think that a civil servant could mount a show, which aimed to be “explosive, controversial, exciting and dramatic” (Strong’s words), with the intention of drawing attention to the fiscal policies of the ruling government.

 

Another facet of the Destruction exhibition was its role as a curtain raiser to the festivities that were planned for 1975. The UK joined the European Communities in January 1973, and 1975 had been earmarked as European Architectural Heritage Year. Destruction was designed with this year in mind.

 

The Countess of Dartmouth had been appointed by Heath’s government in 1972 as the chairman [sic] of the organizing committee for the year. I have a copy of the souvenir publication for the year, a paperback with colour and black and white photography called What is our Heritage? and published by the Stationery Office for the Department of the Environment.

 

The book records that Roy Strong served as a member of the UK Council for European Architectural Heritage Year (afterwards EAHY), along with other bastions of the architectural and heritage establishment: Sir Hugh Casson, Sir John Betjeman, Lord (Kenneth) Clark, Lord Kennet. Sandy Glen of the British Tourism Authority chaired a panel on tourism. Earl Spencer chaired a panel on Youth, bringing together youth organisations. Asa Briggs chaired a panel on education.

 

Besides the countess herself, women barely get a mention in the book, except for the countess’s secretary and typist, and the designer of the volume, Dee Smallridge. The design of the book was as imaginative and impactful as the Destruction exhibition had been. The front cover shows a toddler pedaling a tricycle beneath a 15^th century arch on Priory Lane in King’s Lynn. The property was listed in 1951, but the official entry tells us that this range, which was built as part of the Benedictine Priory of St Margaret, was in 1974/75 now divided into six separate dwellings (presumably the list entry had been updated then). The back cover of the book shows us another of the cottages on Priory Lane, its yellow-frocked proprietor stood on the doorstep, perhaps keeping a watchful eye over the toddler. Both pictures were credited to Earl Spencer (‘Johnnie’).

 

The book itself comprises a photographic essay divided into thematic chapters, separated by multicolour papers. ‘Before and After’ shows heritage success stories, mainly urban, where redundancy and decay had been turned around. ‘Details’ celebrates the work of conservation experts, whether their medium was stone, plaster or wood. ‘New uses’ urges that buildings can and should be adapted to new purposes (‘People often prefer working in the special atmosphere of old buildings, provided they have modern services.’) ‘Beauty Restored’ tells of the intrinsic benefits of preservation.  ‘Streets for People’ focuses on urban planning, and leads with a photograph from (where else) Harlow in Essex.

 

Not all the chapters are fully predictable. For ‘Trees, Flowers and Shrubs’ we are in the comfortable territory of the landscape garden, but the chapter also explores the impact of pylons on the landscape. A special chapter is reserved for examples of outdoors floodlighting of historic buildings, a Europe-wide craze of the time. Colour photography is given over to a chapter called ‘Grandeur’, showing cathedrals and country house interiors. We’re back to black and white for ‘Films, Festivals and Fun’, replete with the obligatory Morris dancers.

 

A penultimate chapter focuses on ‘Youth and the Future’, Earl Spencer’s particular interest, and urges that conservation topics should be taught in schools and colleges. ‘There is no longer any excuse for wanton destruction followed by unacceptable ugliness’, the text asserts. ‘It is the young who will determine the future. I hope that they will learn from our mistakes and make a springboard of our successes.’ An 11^th chapter dwells on the ‘European Connexion’ speaking not of recent political events but of the centuries-long influence that the rest of the continent has had on British architecture.

 

The photographs, assembled by Sue Prideaux, are given detailed credits. Earl Spencer contributed the black and white images on the multicoloured papers separating each of the chapters, as well as some of the images contained within the chapters. Earl Spencer and the Countess of Dartmouth would marry in 1976, following the Countess’s divorce. 

 

How far we have come in fifty years. The book’s absences are glaring. Climate change is not mentioned, this being instead the unbridled ‘nuclear age’ of progress and modernity.  The only non-white face in the book is from the start of the chapter ‘Streets for People’, a blurred image of a shopkeeper in Alexandria, Egypt. Nowhere is Britain’s imperial or colonial legacy mentioned except in the chapter on ‘European Connexion’, where a statue of Queen Victoria (from Windsor) stands as the introductory motif for a celebration of Britain’s contribution to European civilisation.

 

Yet the EAHY in many ways stands as Year Zero for the heritage sector in this country. Many groups emerged at the same time as or just after EAHY – SAVE Britain’s Heritage (1975), the Architectural Heritage Fund (1976), even my own organisation, the HHA (1973 – but not listed in the credits of the book, perhaps because of the listing given to the BTA, our mother organisation). A group of us hope to hold an event in June to mark the half century since the EAHY, and to think about what the sector can learn from the event for the future.  

Gwrych Castle

 

It has just been announced that Gwrych Castle in North Wales is to receive £2.2 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The money will be spent to stabilise the ruins, reinserting new floors and rooms in order to bring a suite of rooms back into use. The money is the latest development in the somewhat chequered history of the house, which has most recently been in the news as the host of the series I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

 

It is often observed that Gwrych Castle is a relatively modern creation: a neo gothic fantasy of the early decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, as I discovered on a recent visit, it has a much longer history. At the heart of the ruins as they are today is a medieval house, called Bronhaul or Y Fron, part of the Lloyd family estate. By the early nineteenth century this house had been damaged by fire, and it became instead the heart of Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh’s fantasy creation of Gwrych Castle. Some of the fire-damaged timbers of this earlier house can still be seen in the ruins of the castle today.

 

Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh, born 1788, was a ‘man of taste’ who set about to honour his family’s ancestry by concocting a picturesque vision of a rambling, medieval castle. He commissioned Charles Augustus Busby (1788-1834) to produce plans in 1813, and was pleased with the results. But within a few years, having inherited the property outright in 1815, Lloyd adapted Busby’s plans. He adapted Busby’s essential idea – of two wings around a central tower – but instead chose to take advantage of the local topography by setting the castle into the hillside. For materials, he quarried limestone and mined lead, and he engaged Thomas Rickman of Liverpool to create a new set of elevations. Work began in 1819 and was mostly finished by 1822. Cast iron was used to create gothic window tracery, encasing stained glass windows. The effect must have been overwhelming.

 

Gwrych remained a lived-in family home for another century or so. Lloyd’s granddaughter, Winifred, became Countess of Dundonald on marriage. She continued to make changes to the house, engaging Detmar Blow to make several significant interventions including a grand marble staircase. Winifred died in 1924, leaving the house to the Prince of Wales, who declined it such that the Church of Wales became the owner. The Earl of Dundonald bought it back, claiming his wife had gone mad. But no member of the family lived there ever again.

 

Gwrych Castle then suffered the fate that so many houses suffered in the second half of the twentieth century: ever-changing and revolving ownership, leading to eventual demise. During the war the house was used by Jewish refugees who came across in 1939 on the Kindertransport. After the war the place was opened as a visitor attraction, offering medieval jousting spectacles – it was ‘Britain’s first theme park’ according to Mark Baker. In the late 1980s the house was sold again to an absentee American businessman. During this time the structure was subject to vandalism and the wilful salvage of timbers, lead and other materials. By the mid 1990s the castle was in a ruinous state, having become a squat for New Age Travellers. Mark Baker, just 11 years old in 1997, set up a Preservation Trust with the help of his family, to raise awareness of the castle’s history. In 2018 the trust was able to purchase a lease of the castle, and begin its work to reverse the years of neglect and bring this magical place back to life.

 

I visited on a busy day in early August 2023: the car park was rammed and visitors were enjoying the experience. A magic potion event was taking place in the castle itself: a theatrical experience, taking full advantage of the Hogwarts-like setting. The holiday accommodation in the castle lodge was fully booked for the season. There were adverts for hiring the castle as an events space: for weddings or private parties. These, along with I’m A Celebrity, of course, are the means by which houses sustain themselves in the early twenty-first century.

 

 

St Mary's Newport, explained

Sir Paul Britton visited Newport, Essex, on Thursday 20 July as part of a fundraiser for the Friends of St Mary’s. Sir Paul, a former senior civil servant who is now a trustee of the National Churches Trust and chair of the Canterbury Diocesan Advisory Committee, entertained and informed us all with a fantastic talk in the church itself as part of an open afternoon.

 

Newport’s church is remarkable, he explained, not necessarily for its fittings and ornamentation – although some of them are indeed special –  but simply for its size. It is rather large for a parish church. From its beginnings it was laid out in its distinctive cruciform shape,  Sir Paul observed. We know this because the archway in the north transept dates from around the 1220s, making it the oldest extant part of the church. Adjacent to it, other large arches were probably from the 1240s – as can be dated from the distinctive nail-head patterning. Given that these large arches are at the centre of the church as we still see it today, Newport’s church looks much the same now as it did in the first half of the thirteenth century.

 

Of course, Sir Paul went on, there would also have been distinct differences between the thirteenth-century church, and the building as it has now evolved. For one thing, the roof would have been completely different. The roofline as we see it today was raised, possibly some time in the fifteenth century. The original roof would have been steeply pitched – possibly thatched. Today's much flatter flat roof over the chancel cuts through the top of the East window – showing how this roof must have been a later innovation.

 

Similarly, the West tower as it is today is a recreation of the 1850s, when the church was restored after many decades of neglect. It remains conjectural whether the eight angels that decorate the roof date from this time, or from the fifteenth century. Sir Paul felt they were probably medieval.

 

The north and south aisles were added at some point between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the roofs of the north and south transepts were replaced. The room over the porch is likely to date from the fifteenth century, as does the vestry.  There remains speculation as to the purpose of the room above the porch, but it is likely to have a relationship to the college for which the church was founded, and to the educational role played by the church alongside the grammar school (which occupied the building on the site of what is now Church House).

 

Sir Paul pointed out the other reasons why Newport church is so special. The chest in the south transept dates from the late thirteenth century, and is the earliest known example in the country of oil painted onto wood. The painting on the lid shows the crucifixion, flanked by the figures of John, Mary, Peter and Paul. The chest is a very special piece, and was loaned to an exhibition in London in the 1980s.

 

Equally, Newport’s font dates from the thirteenth century, while its lid is fifteenth century. The lectern at the front of the church is also a medieval survival, likely to date from the fifteenth century. The rood screen contains some medieval tracery too, though has been heavily restored.

 

Sir Paul observed that the memorials in the chancel were also particularly fine, the earliest dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. Another memorializes Joseph Smith of Shortgrove, who served as private secretary to William Pitt the Younger.

 

Sir Paul’s special subject is stained glass windows. He observed that the windows to the north transept contain medieval glass. Elsewhere, in the chancel, in the north and south transept and in the nave, nineteenth century glasses have been introduced.

 

On the same evening as the talk, Sir Paul gave an illustrated lecture in Church House, about the history and importance of the stained glass tradition. A packed audience came, and were enthralled by over 120 photographs, all of them taken by Sir Paul himself on his travels to churches. The event raised nearly £500 for the church tower restoration. The money will be very well spent indeed.  

 

Sir Paul’s talk inspired me to look into other facts about the church. An interesting article by Daniel Secker draws attention to the fragment of an Anglo-Saxon cross that has been inserted in the outer north wall. This may hint as to the possibility that there was a saxon church on the same site as the present-day church, which itself is built at the highest point in the village.

 

It was also a real privilege to have access to the church tower, and to take the panorama of the village from the top.

Tales from the Commons

 The patch of ground that we call the common in my home village in Essex is a low-lying area of grassland next to the railway station. It is much used by dog walkers as well as for impromptu games of football (when these are allowed). In normal times, it is the venue for the summer fete, featuring a dog show, a bouncy castle, and cake stalls.  

 

Were this land ever to be fenced in and built upon, the loss for my village would be devastating. A vital piece of accessible green space (albeit one that often floods in winter) would be gone forever. But this open land has never been threatened with enclosure. Indeed, it only exists because of enclosure. These few acres were carved out from the village’s pre-enclosure meadows to form a recreation ground under the terms of an Enclosure Act of 1856.

 

Enclosure in this corner of Essex was never more than a tidying-up exercise, bringing order to the tangled skein of rights and obligations that overlay the landscape. The complexity of the pre-enclosure landscape here means that my village was even used as a case study in Oliver Rackham’s monumental history of the English countryside.

 

Recent books have depicted enclosure as something else altogether. Guy Shrubsole in Who Owns England? (2019) describes enclosure as ‘a land grab of criminal proportions.’ It’s a powerful narrative, which fuels the outrage that many feel at the unequal distribution of landownership. It is also almost entirely untrue.

 

The commons were never ‘owned in common’ before enclosure in the way that Shrubsole and others have assumed. After all, it was the very absence in English law of any concept of property that was owned in common that led to the invention of the National Trust in 1895.

 

The underlying ownership of land was never really the issue at stake during enclosure, even if the subsequent consolidation of landholdings was arguably its consequence.  Commons were privately owned places over which certain other people – the commoners – also possessed use rights. Commoners were those members of the parish who had a stake in the open fields – the right to farm strips of land, or to graze livestock. Common rights were themselves forms of property, and enclosure, in its Parliamentary sense, was the legal process by which the commoners were compensated for the loss of their rights when the open fields were divided into individual plots.

 

For the most part, enclosure was a largely bureaucratic exercise. Across many counties in England, enclosure either never happened at all (because land had been held in severalty since time out of mind) or was tolerated with barely a hint of opposition. Examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure protests – such as the famous anti-enclosure riots at Otmoor in Oxfordshire in 1830 – are conspicuous by their relative rarity.

 

Historians have long debated why there appears to have been so little direct opposition to enclosure, even if resistance to it was more frequent than has sometimes been assumed.  Undoubtedly the landowning class had the weight of military and political force behind them. But the fact also remains that enclosure was a legal event, conducted with a degree of transparency and with the tacit if not overt approval of many of those involved.

 

Without question, enclosure in lowland England was damaging for the poorest in society. Those people possessed nothing at all, beyond the informal discretion to occasionally take firewood or a rabbit from the common. Because these rights were purely customary, they were not recognised as common rights during the enclosure process. Once enclosure had taken effect, less open land was available for the landless to eke out a living. The flight to urban centres began.

 

In upland parts, meanwhile, commons served different purposes altogether. Here, great stretches of hillsides had only ever been held for common grazing. Manorial courts resolved squabbles between farmers over the uses and abuses of the commons, and many of these courts survived even into the twentieth century. This did not alter the underlying reality: that common land was privately owned property over which certain other people shared common rights of access or use.

 

The myths of enclosure are widespread. They get more powerful with every retelling. George Monbiot’s recent report for the Labour Party, Land for the Many, insists (p61) that ‘Common land was where the majority of the population once lived and worked’. As non-sequiturs go, it takes some beating.  Commons after all tended to be those marginal parts of a settlement where the land was of too poor a quality to be incorporated into the open fields. 

 

The idea that enclosure was a criminal land grab sits uncomfortably with the fact that 5,200 acts of Parliament were passed to make it happen. Far from being criminal, enclosure was a thoroughly legal process, conducted in the full gaze of public scrutiny. After an enclosure act had been passed, enclosure commissioners would be appointed to descend on a parish and begin the process of sorting out who got what so that lines could (literally) be drawn on the ground. This process often took several years to resolve, which is why the enclosure award in my village (1861) postdated the enclosure act by five years.  

 

John Clare’s influence runs deep. His melancholy lines remind us of the very real losses that enclosure caused, especially for those customary users of the commons who could claim no legal stake in the process. But Clare was a labourer not a farmer, and enclosure ultimately was about improving the efficiency of agricultural production. Enclosure was not the English equivalent of the Highland Clearances.

 

Progressive thinkers are right to reclaim the idea of the commons as a powerful metaphor for rethinking how our present society might be organised differently in the future. But it is worth bearing in mind that different stories can also be told about the history of the commons and their enclosure.

 

  

The Union Workhouse

Workhouses were once ubiquitous elements of the local landscape. These severe, penal-looking establishments, built in the years following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, replaced the use of cottages and other vernacular buildings as the dispensaries of relief under the Poor Law Act of 1601.  The 1834 Act compelled parishes to group together in Unions, with a single (usually large and imposing) workhouse, able to deal with the increased number of paupers seeking food, lodging and work.

Bill Hardy, an expert on the Bishops Stortford Union Workhouse, came to talk to our local history group recently. As Bill said, workhouses were so common a sight that many families will still have a workhouse story to tell. I am no exception. A close relation of mine was brought up in a workhouse in the early decades of the 20^th century (his own family having been the administrators of such an establishment in a Kent village).

Once you were admitted to a workhouse, it became very difficult to break free. The monotonous daily routine tended to breed a reliance on institutional support and maintenance. All ages were catered for: old and young, able-bodied and infirm. Families would be admitted, but then brutally split up by funnelling the adults into separate men’s and women’s quarters, with boys and girls also grouped separately after they reached the age of seven.

The Bishops Stortford Union workhouse was an imposing brick-built establishment and still stands today. It was built in 1836-37, to a hexagonal design by WT Nash.  (To the north, the Saffron Walden Union had already built a similar-looking workhouse a year earlier, to accommodate 340 inhabitants.) Workhouse residents were required to wear uniforms. Boys’ hair would be cut short, to reduce the risk of infestations. Residents would be sent to work in local fields, or given other mindless tasks to perform, such as walking on treadmills or picking oakum.

Tramps would seek overnight relief here, burying their possessions beneath nearby hedges where they could be retrieved after they were turfed out in the morning (they were not permitted to return within seven days, so would walk to the neighbouring Union for another night’s board and lodging.) Like many such places, the Stortford workhouse eventually became an infirmary (at the turn of the twentieth century). In 1936 it played host to the marchers heading to London on the Jarrow Crusade. Eventually it became a community hospital, until its closure in 2004. It is now divided into residential properties.

Bill was one of a team of local history researchers who delved deep into the public records, in particular the correspondence of the Poor Law Commission, formerly located at Somerset House. Four thousand documents were separately digitised and transcribed by Bill and the rest of the team, ensuring that the names and lives of those associated with the workhouse were properly recorded for posterity. The results of the work can be interrogated on the National Archives website.

You can see the Bishops Stortford Workhouse by looking at the satellite image on Google Maps. The hexagonal design is clear, with three blocks forming the radial spokes at the centre. This provided for six separate yards into which inmates would be sent for exercise. It does all look somewhat like an alien imposition. It might almost be a spaceship dropped onto the landscape, like that satellite image of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, sitting in the yard of a film studios in Surrey.