A Discovery Like No Other

St. Mary’s House in Bramber exists today as the surviving east wing of a Medieval courtyard inn. When it was first built in the 1470s by William Waynflete (the founder of Magdalen College Oxford) it would have been one of the grandest structures in the area. Waynflete’s wealth was paraded through his choice of close studded framing, which uses copious amounts of timber, an expensive commodity. Today only a handful of the courtyard inn’s dorms survive at first floor level, whilst the once open-plan ground floor has been divided into a series of rooms and corridors.

The King's Room at St. Mary's was one of the original Medieval Inn Dorms

The house was transformed into a luxurious domestic dwelling in the late-16th century which means many of the original features of the inn have been lost or covered over (more on this transformation can be read in my article ‘An Inn, A Restoration, and A 17th Century Wheeler Dealer’). Over the centuries the house passed through many hands, including Sir Harry Gough, and Algernon Bourke, until it eventually settled into the hands of the current owners, Peter Thorogood and Roger Linton. Through the hard work and determination or Roger and Peter the house was painstakingly restored to its former splendour, and a number of exciting discovering were made along the way.

An Unexpected Uncovering

One day in 1985 when Roger and Peter were working in the ‘King’s Room’ a piece of plaster fell from high up on the timber framed walls. What lay beneath was one of the finest discoveries to ever be made at St. Mary’s house…

…Beneath the plaster lay the remains of a beautiful painted scheme, a series of 5-petal flowers painted in deep red pigment, onto the primary timber tie beam. Could this have been the original painted scheme of the medieval inn's rooms?

The painting is a floral scheme, with red 5 petal flowers painted onto a black background. The flowers have been eroded by over-painting and light damage in some areas, but about 5 can still be identified clearly. The wall painting is a 'plain scheme', which is classified by its use of two simple colours.

The fragile nature of the painting means it must not be exposed to light, which makes photography something of an issue...But the paintings can be seen in their full glory on any visit to St. Mary's House, which our room guides are more than happy to point out.

A Question of Dates

The dating of the wall painting is difficult based on such fragmentary evidence, and a true date can only be determined through paint analysis (a step we hope to take this year with grant money form the Culture Recovery Fund!). It had been thought that the wall painting might be an original feature of the c.1470 inn, so I contacted wall painting specialist Andrea Kirkham to see what her views were. Andrea pointed out that flowers don't seem to match the general form expected of medieval painted flowers, and after looking at other examples I soon realised this too:

These medieval schemes from the Llanwennog Church in Ceredigion, the Parish Church of St. Laurence, Ludlow, and St Mary’s Church, North Leigh, Oxfordshire all show flowers with a central roundel, surrounded by 5 or 6 rounded petals. They contrast greatly to the geometric, angular flowers of St. Mary's, which may suggest that the flowers of St. Mary's are not in fact Medieval. Interestingly, St. Mary's was still operating as an inn in the 16th century, and in this period repeating geometric patterns became fashionable. Similarly it became popular in the 16th century to paint schemes directly onto the internal walls, dividing them into sections. One section that was often decorated with geometric or foliate designs in this period was the tie beam or wall plate, the same beam that is painted on at St. Mary's with the foliate pattern - so perhaps we are looking at a 16th century design?

Why were the paintings made?

It is also worth exploring why painted schemes were done in the first place. Wall paintings are mostly found in churches, and as such their reading has often been simplified to a 'painted storybook' for an illiterate population. However, this idea is too simplistic, in order to understand a painted story do we not first have to have some knowledge of the story itself? And what of the non-illustrative paintings? The flowers, the painted imitation bricks, and the rope patterns? These surely do not fall into a 'picture book' reading. Roger Rosewell has written widely on painted schemes and he proposes a variety of reasons why paintings would be fabricated in a domestic setting (Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings, 2014). One reason being that they often brightened the dark rooms of medieval and early modern houses, they offered ornament (much like our paintings and prints do today), and they also lent an air of status to upwardly aspiring families - displaying their wealth to nosy neighbours and visiting guests. Some of these reasons may be applied to St. Mary's, but, we must not forget that St. Mary's was not a typical domestic dwelling...it was an inn.

Academic writing on wall paintings in inns is extant, but it is also fragmentary, and no large studies have been done, which makes piecing together theories and patterns difficult and laborious (just in case anyone was looking for a dissertation topic). One reason for painting inn accommodation is outlined excellently in Janet Pennington's study of Sussex Inns (The inns and taverns of Western Sussex, 1550-1700, Pennington, 2003). Pennington notes that paintings often served a descriptive function in inns, although many of the paintings don't survive, probate inventories (an inventory of a building and it's contents taken shortly after the owner's death) often list room names within the inn. Names such as Rose, Bell, and Angel are found in Sussex inventories, and Pennington states that these rooms may have been decorated with patterns corresponding to these names. So paintings in inns not only serve as a status symbol or decorative feature, but also act as a descriptive device in order to differentiate rooms within the inn.

Conservation

At present the only part of the scheme that has been uncovered is on the tie beam, but as mentioned before these paintings were often divided into sections, and it may be that further painting lies hidden beneath the remaining plaster. Keeping the painting covered by plaster is often the safest option for the conservation of these beautiful but fragile pieces of art, and as such non-invasive methods using infrared or ultraviolet light are often the best methods for detecting hidden schemes.

On the 2nd of October 2020 we were incredibly excited to find out that St Mary's had been given a grant of £47,500 from the Government's Culture Recovery Fund. With this funding we hope to have essential conservation and analysis of the wall paintings carried out, and are hopeful that many of the mysteries surrounding its dating, full extent, and original purpose may be revealed.