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Dovecotes survive all over Britain. Klara Spandl explains what can still be seen
Go to many villages in Britain and
behind at least one garden wall or
within a field or farmyard there will
be a small round, square or rectangular building which can be identified as a dovecote.
Today dovecotes form picturesque
buildings in the landscape, but once they
served a practical function, providing
housing for an important part of the household diet. Young doves or pigeons (squabs)
supplied fresh meat throughout the year,
while older birds were mainly used to lay
eggs, with some culling occurring before
winter. The birds were also bred for their
manure, and in the 16th and 17th centuries
for saltpetre - a component of dung -
which was used to make gunpowder.
The earliest use of dovecotes in Britain
may have been in the Roman period -
although no certain examples are known of
that date. It is known that the Romans kept
doves and not only do recipes survive (in
the work of Apicius) but also recommendations (in Varro) that the squabs' legs
should be broken to restrict movement in
their nests and make them even more
tender to eat.
The traditional view, however, is that
dovecotes were introduced by the Normans. The earliest known examples of
dove-keeping occur in Norman castles of
the 12th century (for example, at Rochester Castle, Kent, where nest-holes can be
seen in the keep), and documentary references also begin in the 12th century. The
earliest surviving, definitely-dated free-standing dovecote in this country was built
in 1326 at Garway in Herefordshire (there
is a date-stone), although others exist
where an earlier date has been claimed.
During the medieval period large dovecotes were built on manors, at castles and
monasteries. The right to build a dovecote
was traditionally reserved to the lord of the
manor, and was presumably much resented
by tenant farmers as the lord's doves could
eat their weight in corn every day.
By the 17th century, however, dovecotes became more widespread. Probably
the greatest number of dovecotes were
built between 1650 and the late 18th century, when corn was relatively cheap and
abundant, and an Act of 1761-2 permitted
any tenant to build their own dovecote
with the landlord's permission.
The decline of the dovecote has been
linked with the 18th century introduction
of the turnip, which enabled more animals
to be kept over winter for a supply of fresh
meat. Dovemeat may also simply have
become less fashionable. The decline may
be connected as well to the parliamentary
enclosures of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries, which introduced a new type of
tenant with a greater individual investment
in his land, less prepared to tolerate the
damage that pigeons and doves did to their
crops. Birds were often still kept in small
numbers in this period, but they tended to
be housed in the gable ends of buildings or
in lofts above farm buildings. Some dovecotes continued to be built, mainly for
decorative reasons in the grounds of big
houses or in parkland.
Dovecotes can be found all over the
country in various locations. It is
thought that some later dovecotes
were deliberately sited away from trees and
noise, such as the opening of a mill sluice,
in positions sheltered from the cold wind,
and near to a fish pond so that the doves
could bathe. Early dovecotes were often
built near the manor or monastery or associated farm, presumably at least partially on
security grounds. An exception can be seen
on Clifton Green in Nottinghamshire
where the manorial dovecote was built on
the village green. Some dovecotes now
stand in isolation, being the only building
remaining of an earlier farm, but some
were built on purpose away from the main
habitation, usually in the later period, as
prominent and picturesque features of the
landscape within country estates or to keep
the doves away from corn stores. During
the 18th century they were often built as
central decorative buildings in architect-designed farm courtyards. Most commonly
dovecotes were built near or within the
farmyard, orchard or house.
Before 1400, three quarters of known
dovecotes were circular in plan and were
usually built of stone. These earlier dovecotes can be characterised by their massive
construction. Medieval rectangular and
square dovecotes are also quite common,
some having an enormous capacity - the
dovecote at Culham in Oxfordshire, for
example, has nest boxes for 3000 birds -
and can at first glance be mistaken for a
small house, until one notices the absence
of windows. Early forms of dovecote follow the patterns of normal vernacular
architecture in their use of local building
materials, but with the introduction of
brick in about the 16th century, more
uniformity appears in the different regions
of the country. Circular dovecotes remained the norm, but brick dovecotes
were built in all shapes and sizes and many
polygonal dovecotes survive. Brick was in
some cases used to disguise earlier dovecotes built of local material.
The more flamboyant styles usually date
from the 17th-19th centuries and the most
unusual are associated with large houses or
estates. For example, there are dovecotes in
the upper floors of three-storied towers
containing summer houses and prospect
rooms in the lower stories. Those built in
the 18th-19th centuries in landscaped gardens were sometimes disguised as
castellated towers in the Gothic revival
style, or as Grecian temples in classical taste.
Dovecotes have been found on top of
granaries, above piggeries, hen houses (or
above both as at Chatham, Kent), wells,
bee holes, game larders, ice-houses, mortuaries, even privies.
It is the interior of a dovecote, however,
which, if preserved in anything like its
original form (unfortunately rare), offers the most interesting insights into the
function of these buildings. Dovecotes had
to be protected from human, airborne and
animal predators. They also had to be
sealed in order that the birds could be
trapped by their legitimate owners. Features to look out for include shuttered
louvre windows, small flight holes which
enabled the doves to enter but not their
larger predators, and reinforced doors to
keep out intruders. One danger recognised
in the 19th century was that of whole flocks
being stolen for pigeon shoots.
When a new dovecote was established,
a flock of doves was introduced and encouraged to remain not only by the
presence of nesting boxes but also, often,
by white-plastered walls, as doves are attracted by white surfaces. Traces of white
plaster can often still be seen today. Continuous ledges were constructed on the
outsides of the buildings, as well as gables,
to provide numerous areas for perching
and a choice of spots to avoid the prevailing
winds. The ledges are often angled to
provide suitable footing for doves, but to
be impossible for predators to perch on.
Glazed windows were sometimes inserted
in the 18th and 19th centuries, often into
the wall nearest the house so the birds'
`flirtations' could be watched and admired.
The best preserved dovecotes retain
their nest boxes or nest holes, which had to
be dark, private and dry. Medieval nest
holes were often built into the thick stone
walls, but by the 17th and 18th centuries
the nest boxes were built onto the wall,
packed together in rows around the interior. Some boxes are L-shaped to give
room for the sitting bird's tail. At the
thresholds of some
nests a small raised
ledge occasionally survives which would
have stopped the eggs
(or squabs) rolling out.
Alighting ledges can
often be found below
each nest to make access easier to the hole,
and where these don't
exist deep scars can occasionally be seen in
the walls where the
birds have tried to get
in the nesting holes
without a perch.
Several methods
were used to increase
the area of nest boxes,
including partition
walls, projecting piers
and central columns,
all full of extra nest
boxes. Nest boxes
were built of stone,
wood, brick, chalk or
clunch, granite, pantiles, plaster, and occasionally soap stone. Unfortunately many
forms of original nest boxes have been
replaced in later centuries by brick.
The most impressive structure surviving
within a dovecote is the potence. This was
a revolving wooden pole, mounted on a
plinth, with arms onto which ladders could
be attached and suspended a few feet off the
ground, to enable the eggs and squabs to be
collected from the upper tiers of nest boxes.
Potences avoided the inconvenience and
disturbance of continually having to move
a conventional ladder around the wall.
They are most often found in round
buildings, though they can be found in other
shapes, and occasionally a building which is
square externally has had its corners rounded
internally to increase the effectiveness of
the potence. Some of the surviving potences are still in working order, often only
needing the slightest touch to make them
swivel. It is possible that some potences
which survive in medieval dovecotes are
original, though only careful examination
of the carpentry and dendrological dating
can prove their medieval origins.
Klara Spandl works at the Oxford Archaeological Unit. She was project officer for a recent
survey of dovecotes commissioned by English
Heritage as part of the Monuments Protection
Programme.
Further reading: Doves and Dovecotes and A
Dovecote Heritage, Jean and Peter Hansell
(Millstream Press, 1988 and 1992); An
historical inquiry into the design and use of
dovecotes, John McCann (Transactions of
the Ancient Monuments Society, 1991).
National Trust:
English Heritage:
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Change outweighed continuity in the English landscape after 1066, claims Trevor
Rowley
The impact of the Norman Conquest on
Anglo-Saxon England
has long been a topic of energetic debate. One school has
argued that after 1066 there was
a complete transformation of
most aspects of English life, while another
has pointed to the essential continuity between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman
England. Amongst historians, the latter view
currently prevails. Nevertheless, evidence
from the 11th and 12th century landscape
points to a rather different interpretation.
The impact of the Norman Conquest
on towns has long been appreciated. In the
generation or so following the Conquest
many towns such as Norwich, Canterbury
and the Saxon capital, Winchester, were
virtually redesigned with the establishment of
cathedrals, castles and palaces at their centres. Most shire capitals, too, felt the imposition of Norman rule with the building of
large castles, often resulting in the clearance
of extensive areas of Saxon buildings, as at
Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Oxford.
Less obvious has been the consequence
of the Conquest on the countryside. Virtually every country-dweller would have had
a new landlord, as witnessed in the relentless catalogue of transfer of land from Saxon
to Norman in the Domesday Book, and
new feudal manors were created within a
framework of Norman estates. But it is
now also clear from a variety of sources that
in the century following the Battle of
Hastings, significant physical changes
took place in the English countryside.
The most immediate was the impact of
the Norman armies on the territory they
crossed both before and after the Battle of
Hastings. To a large extent such armies
`lived off the land', but such a benign
phrase hides trails of savagery and destruction, recorded in the dry statistics of the
Domesday Book compiled some 20 years
later. Lines of villages in southern England
are recorded as being of less value than they
should have been because of the Norman
armies who had seized grain, livestock and
fuel and in many cases physically destroyed
the settlements on their route. In a scene in
the Bayeaux Tapestry, Norman soldiers are
portrayed setting light to a substantial Anglo-Saxon house, while a woman leaves the
burning building pulling a child after her.
This, together with the depiction of troops
requisitioning farm animals in earlier sections of the Tapestry, clearly reflects the
conduct of the Norman army.
Nevertheless, the scale of such destruction pales into insignificance compared to
William's response to uprisings in the North
a few years later, commonly known as the
`Harrying of the North'. The devastation
of Yorkshire and County Durham is recorded in the Domesday
Book by repeated use of the
term `waste'. One contemporary chronicler, Hugh the
Chanter, claimed that the city of
York `and the whole district
around it was destroyed by the French,
famine and flames', while another claimed
that there was no village left between York
and Durham and that the land remained
uncultivated for nine years. The impact of
the Harrying extended into Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and even Staffordshire,
but it was the North that bore the brunt.
Consequent to the Harrying there
seems to have been a sustained
effort at re-establishment of rural
settlements in the 12th and 13th centuries,
and regular village settlements around greens
of various shapes are a significant feature of
the North-East. It has been estimated that
in Yorkshire, about 370 places were first
recorded between 1067 and 1349. Thus,
one in six Yorkshire villages came into
existence in the post-Conquest period.
The village of Wheldrake, for example,
outside York, appears to have been laid out
between 1066 and 1086 consisting of 16
crofts, eight on each side of the village
street. As many as 66 per cent of villages in
County Durham have regular plans, pointing to a massive programme of village
creation and design. Some may have come
into being as a result of new land being
brought into cultivation, but many are on
the sites or close to settlements which had
been destroyed in c 1070.
In the Welsh Marches, similar regulated
villages came into being, many within the
control of new castles such as Castle Pulverbach, Cheney Longville and More in
Shropshire. In these settlements, domestic
houses often occupied an extended enclosure or `bailey' of a castle. Just as in towns,
castles were inserted into hundreds of rural
settlements, at first made of timber, but
later a significant minority in stone.
As in the town, these castles formed the
basis for strategic, administrative and judicial control, acting as the headquarters for
the lord of the manor and his entourage.
Although in the years immediately after the
Conquest they may have had a military
role, they rapidly became fortified manorial
homesteads, often located next to that
other symbol of Norman seigneurial
power, the church.
The century and a half following the
Conquest was characterised by a massive
programme of building and rebuilding of
parish churches, almost everywhere in
stone. Many were clearly built by Saxon
craftsmen in the first half-century of Norman rule. Quite a few, such as St
Margaret's, Marton, in Lincolnshire, show
an intriguing mix of Saxon and Norman
styles which is appropriately named Anglo-Norman. The scale of work on parish
churches by the Normans was not repeated
until the Victorian era.
Along with the new parish churches
came new ecclesiastical orders, new monasteries and nunneries. This movement
started off as a form of French ecclesiastical
colonialism, but later blended with the
mainstream movement of new monastic
foundations throughout western Europe.
Immediately after the Conquest, new
Cluniac monasteries were established in
places such as Lewes, Sussex (1078-81),
Much Wenlock (c 1080) and Deptford
(1107). Following the Cluniacs there was a
monastic invasion which continued
through the next century and a half. The
greatest impact was made by the Cistercians. Their early foundations were at
Waverley, Surrey (1128) and Rievaulx,
Yorkshire (1132). From then onwards the
movement spread with phenomenal speed
over England and Wales. Normally, their
foundations were in remote and uncultivated districts, and in order to facilitate the
tasks of clearing the forest, draining
marshes and overseeing flocks and crops,
the Cistercians recruited labourers on an
unprecedented scale from the peasantry.
Great Cistercian foundations in northern England were also involved in
resettling the landscape following the Harrying. There is some evidence to suggest
that new Cistercian granges were often
established in previously devastated territory. It is estimated that 44 per cent of all
known 12th century granges, mainly Cistercian, were built on land that had been
completely or largely `waste' in 1086.
Another significant innovation was
the introduction of the royal forest.
`Forest' was a legal term applied to
land governed by forest laws designed for
the protection of deer and where only the
monarch could hunt. The creation of royal
forest, particularly the New Forest, made a
deep impression on contemporaries.
John of Worcester alleged that William
I had depopulated a fruitful and prosperous
countryside and had destroyed houses and
churches to make way for the deer, and
popular rumour declared that the death of
William Rufus, while hunting in the New
Forest, was an act of divine retribution for
the impious act of his father. But modern
scholarship suggests that Norman kings
tended to impose the forest laws mainly
upon districts where clearing and cultivation had made relatively slow progress in
areas of agriculturally unfavourable terrain.
For the most part, royal forests were not
physically demarcated on the ground but
features such as rivers and hills were used as
boundaries, and only occasionally linear
banks and ditches were dug to mark the
forest edge. By the middle of the 12th
century it is estimated that as much as a
third of England was under forest law, but
this was the height of the royal forest
movement and there followed many centuries during which the forests and their
laws were gradually disbanded.
On a lesser scale, medieval parks were
established by the nobility and clergy. At
Devizes in Wiltshire for example, Roger of
Salisbury created a park adjacent to his new
castle and castle town, and created a classic
Norman seigneurial landscape in the form
of a large egg-shaped park aligned to the
west which mirrored exactly the shape of
the town and castle to the east. Thus, parks
represented another demonstration of
Norman domination of the landscape.
In a multitude of other areas the coming
of the Normans brought about changes in
town and countryside; in language and
place-names; in book illustration, gold-smiths' work, ivory carving and wooden
sculpture; in military dress and the conduct
of warfare; in church dedications and liturgy. It is only in the humdrum of everyday rural life, in house shapes, agricultural
implements, cooking vessels, in fact those
objects with which the archaeologist is
most commonly confronted, that there was
little change and little to mark 1066 as an
historical watershed. Continuity at this
level may well have deceived us about the
true nature and extent of the Norman
impact on Anglo-Saxon England.
Dr Trevor Rowley is Deputy Director of Oxford
University's Department for Continuing Education and author of Norman England
(Batsford, 1997)
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Military and kitchen toys from the past show some
aspects of childhood never change, writes Geoff Egan
The archaeology of medieval and
post-medieval childhood has
tended, in the past, to concentrate
on graves - simply because children can be
identified with most certainty there. The
skeletons of dead children have produced a
mass of evidence about causes of childhood
deaths and about health and illness; but the
life and culture of the living child has
received much less attention.
A range of artefacts, however, are now
being recognised as children's toys, and
these are producing a more rounded picture of childhood in medieval
and early-modern Britain.
These artefacts are mainly
miniatures, representing both
human figures and household
and military objects. Hundreds
have been found over the past
20 years in London alone. We
also know of toys such as
tops, balls, hoops and
kites, either from
excavated or pictorial evidence, but
these survive in
fewer numbers.
There is an immediate appeal in these
early playthings -
not least because
many of them are
strikingly similar to
the toys that anyone over the age of
about 35 today used to play with in their
own childhood.
A hollow-cast, mounted figure, made,
like most of the surviving early toys, of
pewter, and datable from the armour and
the sword to within a decade either side of
1300, stands right at the start of the tradition of that enduring plaything, the toy
knight. These continued, keeping up with
fashions in armour, through the rest of the
Middle Ages, possibly declining when
chivalry itself became less prominent in the
face of the use of gunpowder in battle.
A remarkable bird figure made to pivot
on a horizontal bar on a separate stand has
a rod that passes up through the hollow
body to emerge at the mouth as the tongue.
By rocking the figure to and fro the tongue
would have appeared to go in and out. This
ingenious 14th century plaything has a
claim to be the earliest surviving post-Roman toy with moving parts - though it
must be said that such toys were probably
rare even in Roman times.
The most numerous survivors of early toys are pewter jugs, frequently with relief ornament that reflects slip
decoration (that is, liquid clay
poured into a design) on full-sized vessels. A 14th century
stone mould for producing one
version has been excavated at Hereford. Although the
great majority of the
toy finds are from
towns, the rural child
was not left out, as the
discovery away from
urban areas of a few
playthings, like a
miniature medieval
jug from Sigglesthorne in East Yorkshire, demonstrates.
This particular jug seems
to be paralleled by a London
find, hinting at a wide marketing network for these
items as early as the 14th
century. Possible parallels
between 15th century toy
tableware in England and
some on the Continent
may give the trade an international dimension, although the full extent of any international
trade is unclear at present.
When, in the adult world, jugs lost their
pre-eminance to metal ewers in the late
15th/early 16th centuries, toy jugs were
replaced by toy ewers, and sometimes
including openable lids.
Miniature tripod
cauldrons - the classic late medieval
cooking vessel - and footed drinking bowls
were also in the medieval toy repertoire,
with kitchen equipment, like griddles with
fish on, coming in towards the end of the
period, to be replaced by frying pans with
fish in the 17th or 18th century.
Plates, of which over 200 have been
found in London from the late 15th to
the 18th centuries, are the most frequently encountered category. The
majority feature a rose in the centre,
though this is a very rare decoration
in contemporary full-sized tableware. These toys typically
represented the more expensive and important household
items - we only find toy
plates, for example, at a time
when full-size plates had begun to be made for display.
Previously, when the jug was the
most important item on the table,
bowls and plates were usually
wooden and seem to have been
deemed unworthy of being
turned into a toy.
By the 17th century, war
toys had seemingly shifted away
from knights to small copies in
bone of swords and in copper
alloy of firearms, wielded by the child.
Hand guns and (possibly a little later) cannon are found very widely. These were
made as fully-working miniatures of adult
weapons - gunpowder, firing mechanisms
and all - and could actually fire a projectile
such as a miniature cannonball. A few have
split barrels from explosions when the missiles got jammed, suggesting that this was
regularly done. Health and safety in play-things were clearly not the issues they are
now.
We have a few contemporary Continental representations of miniature items in
use, and it seems quite clear that the household items were the playthings of girls, the
war toys of boys, as one would expect.
Interestingly, miniatures nearly
always represented
contemporary full-sized items: toy soldiers and weapons,
for example, never
represented warriors
from a romanticised
past or from a significant past war, as was
more common in recent times. Toy
watches followed
the development of
adult watches, as
they changed shape
in the 17th century
from oval to round.
Only miniature display cupboards sometimes represented furniture made half a
century or so earlier, perhaps reflecting the
presence of `antiques' in the home.
Another stock toy, the human figure,
turns up in a series of very detailed
late Tudor hollow pewter men and
women. Some of these seem to have been
intended to walk, aided by strings. There is
also a series of cruder, two-dimensional flat
figures, probably cheaper versions of the
same basic plaything. The latter have usually been found, significantly for the
picture of the early toy market being
built up, in rural areas, whereas the three-dimensional figures
are currently restricted to the capital.
It is reasonable to expect that the more
expensive the toy, the more limited the
distribution; and there may have been
many parts of Britain where manufactured,
marketed toys were never seen at all. However, even in these areas, the concept of a
toy was presumably known, even if toys
there were home-made and no longer
survive.
Finds from Viking and Norman Dublin
show that toy wooden boats must have
been popular very early, as a couple of 9th
century models are known. Although in
the rest of Britain there seem to be no toy
boat survivals from the Middle Ages, a
number of tiny metal anchors found in the
Thames are probably the remains of
wooden boats that were lost in the river
and have otherwise disappeared. Flat pewter toy ships do occasionally turn up from
the 16th and 17th centuries, resplendent
with detail, like the late 16th century trumpeter on the deck of an Elizabethan
warship which has all guns blazing.
From at least the 1640s makers were
marking these products with their initials
and sometimes the year - a sure sign of a
highly competitive market. Successful lines
had rival makers competing for a share in
the trade, sometimes with shameless imitations of original products. This comes over
at its most outrageous among toy watches
from the early 18th century - for which,
coincidentally, details of a court case
brought by one maker against another are
on record. In 1714-15 a Mr Hux, whose
toy timepieces had several components,
including a glass, turnable hands and even
a tick produced by a strut inside the case
being turned against a
series of ridges, took to
court a Mr Beasly,
whom he accused of
plagiarising this presumably lucrative line.
The outcome has not
been traced, but several
toy watches have the
name HUX and one
otherwise virtually
identical has BEEZLEY
instead - a vivid illustration of market forces in
the developing toy industry. Mr Hux was in fact a mainstream
London pewterer, for whom toys were a
sideline, and he may have been typical of
other toy-makers. One manufacturer
known by his stamp as IDQ produced 20
different types of toy, but nothing further
is known about him.
It has taken some
time to establish that
toys were a widely available, mass-produced
commodity, keenly
marketed from at
least 1300 in
this country,
and with an international
trade from at
least the 15th
century. Many
surviving miniature
toys have been
found by metal detectorists - a striking instance of the positive
contribution that this
tool can make to our
understanding of the
past, if it is operated
with appropriate questions in mind.
The range of toys that were manufactured, and in some instances their
sophistication, comes as a revelation. These
finds clearly contradict the traditional
view that in the Middle Ages there was
no childhood in the sense that we understand it today.
Dr Geoff Egan is a finds specialist at the
Museum of London, and author of Playthings
from the Past (Jonathan Horne, 1996)
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1998
Exploring the round houses of doves
All change after the Norman Conquest
Miniature toys of medieval childhood