A Visit to Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall lies on the edge of The Savernake Forest and was the familial home of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife. This location does not actually enter into my novel The Woman in the Shadows. My novel is about Elizabeth, Thomas Cromwell's wife and it, in fact, ends in 1528 before Cromwell becomes a courtier. None the less, The Woman in the Shadows explores Cromwell's early career and his marriage, closing just on the cusp of Thomas Cromwell's entry into Henry's world and the King's marital troubles. My novel was inspired by Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I was curious about Cromwell's family life so my book aims to fill in the 'what could have been' concerning Thomas Cromwell's domestic life and to tell a story. It is Historical Fiction, albeit thoroughly researched. In time, there will be another novel set in this period in which Wolf Hall does make an appearance.

The Tudor back view of Wolf Hall

I always thought the actual manor house of Wolf Hall had completely vanished, a bit like Henry's palace of Nonesuch. I knew the original manor house was closely situated to the later property of Wolf Hall, the manor house I visited yesterday. I received a surprise as I discovered there was the serious possibility that the later property known as Wolf Hall was pretty likely to always have been part of the original Tudor Wolf Hall.

Medieval beams are elm

Wolf Hall belongs to four descendants of the Seymours. It seems it is indeed part of the original site of the country manor that grew into the mansion that was Wolf Hall during the sixteenth century. The original site is often considered to be around The Laundry House across the fields. That building is within spitting distance of the Hall but at a lower level. To the back of the Wolf Hall Manor, I visited yesterday, there is clearly a Tudor build and evidence of the medieval manor house. Although not as grand as the Wolf Hall King Henry visited, it is undoubtedly Tudor.

Excavated paving

An enterprising group that includes conservationists, local historians and a band of archaeologists have begun to investigate Wolf Hall further with the blessing of the four owners, Dominic, Orlando, Theo and Genevieve who are all young and enthusiastic. These delightful young people inherited their family home after their mother's death a few years ago. They would like, if all comes well, the current hall restored (especially the Tudor part) and the footprint of the vanished part of Wolf Hall clearly unveiled. They aim to provide events and have the public visit restored gardens. This result would be some way off as the garden currently contains trenches.  Even so, they have come far in a year, impressively far. There is still much work to be done. It is a major restoration project. The location of Wolf Hall is beautiful, stunningly so and because it is such an important manor house with a fabulous history, Wolf Hall is well worth preserving.

Excavation to the left side of the Tudor House

A trench to the left of the Tudor part of Wolf Hall.

Now for excavation in the garden

You can easily imagine living there as it was in the day. You can visualize the colour and pageantry associated with the infamous visits made to Wolf Hall by King Henry who hunted in the forest. The family possesses records of the visits. The banquets must have been fabulous.  The Seymours hailed from a prominent gentry family, descendants of an Anglo-Norman family. Sir John Seymour married Margery Wentworth who was descended from Edward III through Henry Hotspur. Amongst other offices, Sir John was Sheriff of Wiltshire on many occasions. He held the wardenship of Savernake Forest. By 1532 he was Groom of the Bedchamber! Sir John who died in December 1536 was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Seymour family was indeed up and coming, and apparently wealthy enough by 1530s to extend their country house into a residence fit to entertain the King. The girls of his and Margery's issue who survived were Jane, Margery, who died in 1528, Elizabeth who like Thomas, Edward and Jane was a courtier and Dorothy who married well. Two boys died young but  Edward and Thomas Seymour survived during King Henry's reign and were close to the King. Another male survivor kept a low profile.

Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset

Thomas Seymour

Jane Seymour

Of particular archaeological interest are the trenches in the garden. They are as fascinating and fruitful as any I have seen Time Team dig up. Possibly more so. I saw evidence of Tudor flooring and brickwork and wondered if the trenches I examined indicate the rest of the Tudor kitchen which would have been larger than what is there today. Lots of oyster shells! Today's kitchen is Tudor. The support beams prove this. It is a beginning to a superb project, a very sound beginning. I hope the archaeology extends out further to the side of the current building and behind to find evidence of courtyards, stables. I imagine that could also indicate the great country house residence Wolf Hall was supposed to have become by the 1530s.

medieval brickwork

Tudor/medieval beam in the current kitchen

The roof is being worked on as I write thus the scaffolding around the Hall. Preserving the roof, in itself, has been a major project.

It will be wonderful when archaeology can reveal further foundations of walls and kitchens. There is fabulous written information associated with Wolf Hall. The inventories and menus associated with the Tudor period show fine dining. The conservation group, The Friends of Real Wolf Hall, are currently holding Open Days and it is possible to visit and participate if interested. We had a discussion about possible literary activities. I hope some of these get underway soon.

To find out more go to  https://realwolfhall.com/

It is a truly wonderful site.

Do try to support the project by joining Friends of Wolf Hall and by attending any events offered. My day was steeped in the Tudor history I love, and in the company of a delightful group of energetic and enthusiastic conservationists. Dominic from Wolf Hall looks just like his ancestor, Edward Seymour!

Georgian and Victorian front façade

    

Out of the Shadows: Story of the Book Launch in Pictures.

On the 4th August The Woman in the Shadows was published. The launch party was held in Oxford Waterstones on publication day and was attended by over seventy guests. It was a pleasant evening with sunshine pouring in through the long windows of the second floor restaurant. You can see my publisher, Hazel Cushion, in the first picture. She is the lady wearing the green scarf.

Red and white wine flowed, pretty sandwiches were demolished and for me it was not only thrilling to see the publication of my novel about Elizabeth and Thomas Cromwell and their world of Tudor London but to celebrate its outing with family, friends and representatives of the book world including my publisher and publicist, Karen Bultiauw, from Accent Press. It was an opportunity for me to explain why I wrote this novel and a little about its protagonists.
What follows are words extracted from my introduction to the novel. I resisted reading because, frankly, just read it for yourselves.

Historical Fiction is I believe about telling a great story and recreating the details of life lived in a past era. It can also be new angles taken on well-travelled stories. I particularly enjoy exploring a woman's position in History, those women who haunt History's shadows. My novels are about bringing historical women, real and imagined out of the shadows. A part of Elizabeth Cromwell's story is rooted in fact but a part is also about putting flesh on the skeleton and how I imagined this woman who was married to Henry VIII's famous statesman.

Was I brave to write in the shadows of Hilary Mantel? I do not assume my writing to be as praiseworthy or as prizeworthy but I have indeed come at this story from a different angle. I was curious about Thomas Cromwell's domestic life and the possible dramas that lay within it.

The Woman in the Shadows is not a book about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry's court, nor is it about The King's Great Matter, his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The King, Thomas Wolsey Anne Boleyn do not speak in this novel. They dwell in its shadows. It is about a young widow from the merchant class who saw noblemen and noblewomen as potential customers for her finer fabrics. Once she marries Thomas Cromwell her life begins to change. This novel is concerned with him before he became a player in politics. Seen through her eyes he is ambitious, a little secretive, radical in his religious views, and devoted to his family or is he? She is a modest, religious and spirited woman married to a man with a phenomenal memory and a secret or two.

There are not many facts about Elizabeth. I worked with the few I did discover. She was a wealthy widow. Her family were cloth merchants. Like the Cromwells, she lived in Fulham. They married circa 1514, had three children and were upwardly mobile. By 1517 Thomas was working as a steward at York Place for Cardinal Wolsey, a position he got through family connections and his ability. He undertook legal work and as the family became wealthy they moved from a home in Fenchurch Street to a choice neighbourhood by Austin Friary. Their close friends were intellectuals and often Italian merchants.

Around these facts I constructed a possible life for Elizabeth. She loved her garden, her children, fabrics but she could make mistakes. She, like many other merchant wives supported Catherine, the Queen, but Elizabeth, too, guards a secret that sets in motion a series of events which are not fully resolved until the story draws to a close.

To read the book, look for it on amazon via this link.The Woman in the Shadows

The Woman in the Shadows is also available on amazon.com and from all good bookshops.

Finally, my thanks to all who came and made this a fabulous evening and to the Oxford Waterstones Staff who were headed by Holly. They were a delight and they helped make this launch a great celebratory party.

Summer Books by guest author Brenda Brittan

 I welcome Brenda Brittan, Writer from The Greek Mani Writer's Group to share her favoured summer reads.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee

This delightful sequel to Cider With Rosie, is an ideal summer read when one wants to escape the restrictions of everyday life and visit somewhere different.  This is a captivating tale of a curious young man who does this when he decides to leave the security of his village and see more of the world. 

Leaving rural Gloucestershire Laurie Lee begins his ‘walk’ taking the road to Southampton supporting himself by playing his violin.  Encouraged by this ability he heads for London managing to pay rent for a room by working as a wheelbarrow pusher’ on a building site and by playing his violin. When he has to leave his room due to his landlord letting it out to a prostitute and realising the building he is working on is nearing completion he knows he needs to move on and on the basis of knowing the Spanish for ‘Will you please give me a glass of water’ he decides to go to Spain landing in Galicia on the north west coast in July 1935.

His wanderings with only his violin to pay his way and the optimism and freshness of an idealistic young man take him from Vigo in the north down to the southern coast crossing a county where signs of an impending civil war were in evidence.  He befriended locals who more often than not gave him shelter and food.

His travels were stopped at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War however in 1937 he returned to Spain to enlist for the International Brigade to fight against Franco.  Despite suffering epileptic fits his officer described his conduct as ‘excellent’.

The Glassblower of Murano – Marina Fiorato

 ‘Murano is a series of islands in the Venetian Lagoon linked by bridges and is famous for its glass making. It was once an independent commune, but is now a frazione of the comune of Venice.’

The story begins in 1681 with thirty-year-old Corradinio Manin looking on the lights of San Marco, Venice for the last time.  He is being hunted but there is one last thing he has to do before his hunters catch up with him. He hears footsteps behind him, at last he reaches the Calle della Morte – appropriately named the street of death – he stops, as do the footsteps.  His last words are ‘Will Leonora be safe?’  The last words he hears are ‘Yes, you have the word of The Ten’.

In Venice in 1681, glassblowing is the lifeblood of the Republic and Venetian mirrors are more treasured than gold.  The Council of Ten will go to any lengths to protect the glassblowers of Murano and their methods, virtually imprisoning them on the island. Corradinio Manin has sold his methods to a person. In their eyes he has betrayed them.

In the present day, Nora Manin, a teacher in ceramics and sculpture wakes at 4am.  Her marriage to a doctor is over, shattered. Today is the day she is going to leave England and begin a new life in Venice as a glassblower

And thus the scene is set for a combination of mystery, historical intrigue and love, written by an English/Venetian author, telling a story of passion, genius and betrayal linking the present and the past.

Lion – A Long Way Back - Saroo Brierley

‘As a five-year old in India, I got lost on a train. Twenty-five years later, I crossed the world to find my way back home.’

In the early 1980’s an Indian man walked out on his family leaving his wife and children in a state of poverty. The wife found work in construction whilst five-year-old Saroo and his older brothers begged at railway stations. One evening Saroo went with his older brother Guddu on a train from Kwanda to Burhanpur.  Saroo collapsed with tiredness and fell asleep on a train.  When he woke Guddu was not there.  Panic set in, he tried to remember which train he should take to get home but without success and eventually he ended up on the streets of Calcutta (Kolkata).

The story follows his life on the streets, an inner sixth sense helping him to survive including escaping from a railway worker who befriended him and then showed him to a friend. Saroo felt something was not right and he ran from the house where he had been ‘invited’ to stay. Eventually a teenager took him to a police station and he was taken in by the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption. The Society tried unsucessfully to locate his family.  What Saroo did not know was that he had been unable to give them enough information for them to trace his hometown and he was officially declared as a lost child.

There was an adoption scheme between the Indian and Australian governments and Saroo was adopted by a family in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the Brierley family.  His new life began in Hobart. 

During the relatively short passage of time from the late 1980’s to the present day, the world wide web became part of everyday lives and following a lead, Saroo realises he may be able to trace his family in India by using the Social Media sites.

The Messenger of Athens – Anne Zaroudi

A light-hearted summer murder mystery read set in Greece. It is set on the fictional island of Thinimos and is the first book in a series based on the Seven Deadly Sins. This being based on ‘Lust’ and features a rather strange detective, Hermes Diaktoros of whom little is known, other than he appears when what is seemingly a straightforward death has occurred. 

Mystery surrounds him. Could he be an ‘avenging angel’ only reporting to a ‘higher authority’ and there to ensure justice is carried out?

His methods of investigation are unorthodox, his trademark a pair of immaculately kept white plimsolls, possibly a modern version of the winged sandals worn by his namesake Hermes, messenger of the Gods. The reader is never told how he gets his information thus adding to his mystique.

In this first book based on ‘Lust’, a young girl’s body has been discovered lying at the bottom of a mountainside.  Her death is shrugged off by the local police as an accident or suicide until Hermes appears on the scene. He is determined that the truth of her death will be told and his investigations depict a darker side of Greek life in a protective community where myths, lies, corruption and tragedy along with a touching love story are revealed.

Despite the fantasy element it is a good mystery story and a must for anyone who loves to read about Greek culture other than the sun, sea and sand holiday aspect.

Thank you, Brenda, for sharing your summer reads.

May I also say that my new novel The Woman in the Shadows about Thomas and Elizabeth Cromwell will be published by Accent Press on 4th August 2017. Pre Order on Amazon.

The Tudor Way of Death

My new novel The Woman in the Shadows opens with the death of Elizabeth Williams' husband's death. She has kept his secret for years but now she is free. She is a widow, ready to take on the management of her cloth trade. Then, she meets Thomas Cromwell who helps her to overcome her father's opposition and that of jealous traders. She marries him. As Thomas Cromwell rises to be a merchant and lawyer during the fifteen twenties we see his ambition through her eyes. We also see what their family life might have been. Look at my website for more about this novel. It is on amazon pre order and is released on August 4th.

If you pre order the paperback let me know via my website email and I shall send you a signed bookplate for your new book.

www.carolcmcgrath.co.uk

In this post, I write briefly on the dark subject of the Tudor way of death. When a person was dying, the Parish bell tolled. It tolled again at the point of burial. This alerted the community to a death and it showed respect for the deceased. The bell also summoned attendants to the graveside. It is at Tom Williams' graveside in St Albans' churchyard that we first encounter Thomas Cromwell, in Chapter 1 of The Woman in the Shadows. Attendants would bring comfort, not only to the living, but to the dead. Mourners were prompted to prayers which helped the soul on its precarious journey to heaven. The bells sanctified the soul in its passing and, for the superstitious, even ward off evil spirits which could molest the soul. After the Reformation in the 1530s and particularly during the Elizabethan Age this tradition was limited.

Heaven after Purgatory

Medieval Stone Church not unlike St Albans Church

Winding and watching was a practical necessity. If necessary, a surgeon would be engaged to open the body first and investigate the organs to establish the cause of death. Infectious bodies were always buried as soon as possible. Watching involved sitting through the night with the dead body. The body might be laid out on a floor or table and covered with a sheet. Candles would be lit above it. This secured another mark of respect to the deceased and his/her family. It also prevented tampering with the corpse. Sometimes watchers saw visions which could be frightening.

Most bodies rested on biers from the time they departed for the church until they were placed in a grave. A bier was a frame with handles designed to transport and support the corpse. Often these were supplied by the Parish and kept at the back of the Church. The Parish might also loan out a mortuary cloth, a pall to cover the bier and companies likewise provided such trappings for company members. The fishmongers had a gorgeous covering done in Opus Anglicanum work, cloth which was used at burials of prestigious members of the Fishmongers Company. A hearse was originally a frame to hold candles that were placed over a body during the funeral service. The meaning changed to include the whole ensemble whether just bier or coffin that transported the corpse to its grave.

The Surgeon Visits

The funeral procession was a very solemn journey. The poor, who expected the distribution of a funeral dole, were sometimes employed to accompany the corpse. Funeral processions in London were traditionally led by members of the poor clad in mourning livery. The journey was usually short, just as far as the nearest Parish Church. Black was the Tudor colour of mourning. The wealthy, who could afford acres of black cloth, which was expensive, provided draperies, covers and mourning gifts. These might be gloves or rings The gifts were for the funeral guests. Mourners who accompanied the body to the church were often be fortified with wine or spirits. Later the guests would enjoy refreshment at a table laden with meat and drink. Funeral meals were semi public occasions and a large company could be expected. Thus vast amounts of food and wine would be consumed at a Tudor funeral.

The Funeral Procession

Rosemary was the herb of remembrance. Mourners would scatter nosegays of rosemary and laurel on the corpse as earth falls on the shrouded body. The sharp smell cut through the putrescent smell emanating from the deceased in his/her shroud.

Watching the Corpse

The Woman in the Shadows is located in London and throughout the story festivals such as Christmas and Easter are described as Elizabeth and Thomas Cromwell live out their daily lives, and the events are revealed that mark his passage from successful Cloth Merchant to canny lawyering for Thomas Wolsey and finally Cromwell's imminent involvement with the Tudor Court. It follows Elizabeth's family life as well as the couple's house moves within the City. There are, described vividly, the dangerous challenges they face in a London where time is marked by trading, processions, birth, marriage, death and a city which is frequently visited by plagues, particularly the disease known as 'The Sweating Sickness'.

Early Tudor London-Wood Street was between St Paul's and St Bartholomew

Medieval Female Embroiderers

Embroidery was equated with luxury in medieval society and culture. It covered religious garments and enhanced secular garments indicating wealth and status. Whilst England was a great producer of wool, the highest status fabrics were silks and by the fourteenth century velvets. Opus Anglicanum means English work, and is used to describe embroidered textiles. The method was a technique of underside couching, attaching threads which might be gold or silver or silk to the support fabric from underneath, providing a texture which would catch the light, and give a sense of flow and texture.

Opus Anglicanum, possibly a purse

Who were the embroiderers of these valued, exquisite works both religious and secular? They were both male and female. However, the medieval church had a misogamist attitude towards women.

Opus work for a book binding

The following words were written in The Decretum, the systematisation of church law set down in the twelfth century- 'Women's authority is nil; let her in all things be subject to the rule of men. And neither can she teach, nor be witness, nor give guarantee, nor sit in judgement.'

Men often owned the workshops but not exclusively, nor were they always the embroiderers of religious embroidery, nor did men necessarily design these embroideries.

Women were viewed in a dual manner by the church. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the cult of the virgin meant that women were revered as mothers. Often on a cope there would be an embroidery depicting The Coronation of the Virgin, placed high on the cope, lying on the upper part of the priest's back.

Key images placed below The Coronation of the Virgin  would incorporate scenes from the Bible and the saints from The Golden Legend. Women were also regarded as temptresses and as lesser beings than men. This originates in the notion that Eve was created out of Adam's rib and she was tempted by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and tempted Adam so that they were expelled from the garden.

Garden of Love- Women as Temptresses

Yet, women did run embroidery workshops as well as men and they were responsible for much of the Opus Anglicanum work during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when its popularity was at a height and English embroidery both religious and secular was valued throughout Europe.

Female embroiderers who owned workshops or were apprenticed in workshops run by men cut across the notion that the majority of thirteenth and fourteenth religious embroidery work such as copes was worked in convents or monasteries, in Beguine societies or by noble ladies. Embroidery was produced in both secular workshops and in religious houses.

Medieval crafts were, in fact, open to women. There were women chandlers, iron makers, net makers, shoe makers smiths and goldsmiths. There were female embroiderers too. The existence of 'femmes soles' who worked independently is recorded.

Guilds made provision for widows so that women could carry on the family business. The widow would have had to have taken part in the work for at least seven years before succeeding to her husband's business. Children were apprenticed, both sexes, and business women took on apprentices too.

The medieval records for the Embroiderer's Guild were unfortunately destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Interestingly , however, by the fifteenth century, male embroiderers received seven pennies and a farthing to ten and a farthing for a day's work. Women were only paid four pence and a farthing to six pence a day. The wages varied according to the embroiderer's qualifications.

Many embroidery workshops of the thirteenth century were situated around Old St Paul's. The centre of domestic and public life was the workshop. The sale of goods was transacted in the house. The household dwelling place incorporated the workshop. Workers included the whole family and were included within the family eg apprentices.

London in the thirteenth century

I am writing a new trilogy set in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and have been researching female embroiderers as one of my characters will be an embroiderer working for Ailenor of Provence, Henry III's queen.

Whilst researching, I discovered that a widow, named in relation to embroidery during King Henry III's reign was 'Joan, late the wife of John de Winburn who was paid for a cope of 'samite embroidered with the Jesse Tree which the king offered in St Peter's Church at Westminster at St Hillary's.' (the time of year/ saint's festival).

The Jesse Tree was a popular image, tracing the lineage of Christ as royal from The House of David.

Opus Work -Jesse Tree Vignette

Another thirteenth century embroiderer, Mabel of Bury, appears twenty four times in the Liberate Rolls of Henry III between 1239 and 1245. She was apparently a 'femme sole' and not employed by the king's merchant suppliers. She was paid £10 in 1239 for embroidering a chasuble and offertory veil. In 1241 pearls were purchased for her to use on the commissioned chasuble. She also had forty shillings to buy gold.

Opus Anglicanum Cope

The king called in appraisers to assess her fees; London embroiderers to advise him as 'he did not want to offend in this matter or incur to some extent condemnation of himself.' Mabel embroidered a stole, a fanon, an amice, collar and cuffs. Her last work for Henry III was an embroidered standard for the altar at Westminster Abbey which was his life's building work. 

The standard was to show the Virgin and St John. Mabel controlled the design. She then disappears from the historical record until 1256 when King Henry made a pilgrimage to Bury St Edmund and gave Mabel a gift because she had served the king and queen for so long creating ecclesiastical garments. She was given six measures of cloth of her choice and the fur of a rabbit for a robe. A furred robe was a traditional mark of great respect in this period.

So with Opus work, there is a contradiction between the misogynist attitude of the medieval church and that of the actuality of women's independence in the thirteenth century. Men and women were employed in medieval workshops making art for the church as well as secular items and often, like Mabel, they were able to design the work too.

It is why if you look carefully at a cope from the era you can often see little every day life additions such as midwives attending the birth of Jesus, obviously attesting too to the virgin birth, or, for instance, a dog barking at the angel Gabriel who appears to the shepherds during the Nativity, or even animals peering from the leaves in the Tree of Jesse. The art of this period displayed a concern with nature and the every day life of craft workers.

Buy from amazon or good bookshops