A Home for All Seasons

Gavin Plumley

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838954789
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838954796
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Social Sciences

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being...until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House - a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire - on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw the picture of a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England.

X.

The Scent of Hawthorn

WHEN SPRING PROPER COMES to Herefordshire, it comes in riot. Along the county’s lanes, the campions, bluebells and cow parsley provide gossamer embroidery against the hedgerows’ generous baize. A velvety blue hangs in the sky and for a brief moment the orchards bloom. There is, on the breeze, the softest scent of apple and pear blossom – pink, blushing equivalents of their blowsier citric cousins of the south. Nature’s rush is reflected in the rush of human love, ‘when merry lads are playing’, as Orazio Vecchi’s text for Thomas Morley’s 1595 Maytime madrigal puts it. And May was when two other lads, my husband and I, got married.

The fifth month of the year has long been associated with love and fecundity, in both the pagan and the Christian worlds. The latter is evinced by the gloriously affected coronation of statues of the Virgin Mary in churches and cathedrals, especially prior to the Reformation, though still at Belmont Abbey, south of Hereford. And there are the similar crownings of May Queens at village fetes, with Pembridge’s Cowslip Fair, at one time seeing the county’s largest hiring of labourers for the impending harvest, marking the true beginning of spring in the village. The need for such a public platform for temporary contracting may have ceased, with the attendant celebrations and competitions now moved to July, but the superstitions surrounding the Cowslip Fair endure.

Alastair learned that directly when he was planting vegetables in our allotment at the western end of the village. The allotments fill an old farmer’s field, with £35 per year guaranteeing us a half plot. It reminded me of common-land policies, before the village’s fields were enclosed, or more immediately of the 16th-century rent rolls and glebe terriers detailing the system of burgages and tenements and rent thereon. Regardless of the system in question, however, there was still a hierarchy of expertise and seniority in evidence, even to this day.

Planting our seedling potatoes, peas and beans one afternoon, while I was writing at home, Alastair was chided for his apparent folly by one of the allotment elders.

‘You can’t plant runner beans before Pembridge Fair,’ Rod shouted across two of the plots. Looking at his already burgeoning patch, Alastair realized he was dealing with an expert.

‘But the weather’s wonderful,’ my husband responded, in typically optimistic terms, looking at a sky filled with swallows.

Rod’s response didn’t even reach the level of a monosyllable. Alastair had been warned and forty-eight hours later, after a stunning, star-spangled night over the village, the spring’s final but most vicious frost descended. It burned all the new growth on the box bushes in the garden and, of course, claimed the runner beans in the allotment. It was the morning of 13 May, when our forebears would have begun putting out their bottle stalls and nine-pin quoits to celebrate the Cowslip Fair and what I thought must have been the delightful, A. E. Housman-style task of picking the best lads for the harvest.

Although the burnt and subsequently blanched leaves of the box made me fret about a more rapacious disease claiming our hedges, the clean air of a clear night had boosted all the colour in the garden. It had also encouraged more of spring’s arrivals, with the smallest birds fighting against the larger crows and pigeons for supremacy. Fat balls in the feeders were devoured as quickly as they were put out and the ground beneath was strewn with husks of peanuts. The feeding rarely abated. At first light, there was scratching in the eaves, our residents having squeezed under the barge boards and trusses to create their vernal homes for breeding and rearing and first flight. The gap next to the bathroom extractor fan provided a particularly capacious ingress. And beyond the house, out in the orchards and the village’s plantation of poplars, which looked more like Imperial Russia than Elizabethan England, there was the dull marimba of a woodpecker, tapping its way to the main business of sunrise. It was all so gloriously inevitable, this sudden rush of life. But during the year in question, nature’s giddiness above went entirely against what was emerging below.

WHEN THE insurance salesman’s question first triggered this foray into the lives of those who built our Herefordshire home, when I began to meet those who had worked in the fields around the village or who had first sat in the back bar of The New Inn, over four hundred years before, I could never have imagined that I would have been afforded a spring in which one of the major experiences of the age would be replicated, to some extent, in my own. As the tulips and alliums erupted from the soil and the delicacy of forget-me-nots and snake’s-head fritillaries laughed in the breeze, we were commanded to break all springtime revelry and keep a global disease at bay. It was the plague of the age and had coincided with profusions of hawthorn at the edges of the woods and fields, the scent of which was said to remind many of the smell of pestilence during the 16th century.

But it was not only sickness itself that took us back in time; the parallel insistence on distance – from friends, family and, to a lesser extent, neighbours – also replicated the experience of how life would have been four hundred years ago. We based ourselves in Pembridge, with all institutions closed and my freelance work largely cancelled, and came to know the village better than ever before. We found new paths and bridleways, desperate not to repeat walks, and thereby discovered hamlets more or less untouched by time. Without the endless revving of cars, despite continuing farm work, the buildings, both functional and domestic, seemed frozen in the past. And although the fields saw an energetic profusion of rapeseed, that more modern presence, we were encountering vistas that hadn’t changed at all.

We had always appreciated the interconnectedness, as well as the distance, between Pembridge and its outlying hamlets – Bearwood, Broxwood, Hardwick, Luntley, Marston and Weston – but walking between them with Toby allowed us to know more intensely the sense of isolation that the Elizabethans must have felt. And yet the separation also stimulated a more or less complete reliance on the village. Since we’d arrived in Pembridge, we had tried to buy our food from nearby farmers and growers, which the immediate field-to-table exchange of a lockdown only intensified, returning us to a moment when the market in the village was much more crucial than those further afield. Going to Leominster or Hereford for a major shop became a rarity, like a 1500s villager’s trip to one of those larger centres, long before ready convenience – and ready waste. It was also possible to see that the localism and dependency enforced by isolation were all too subject to shortage and, more mundanely, fatigue. Recalling one of the lutenist John Dowland’s most popular songs, published in 1603 and sung beautifully by our friend Ed on a recent album (one of our lockdown tracks), we were reminded how ‘time stands still’, seeing the end of one Elizabethan era through another.

The pandemic that had caused this moment of pause was, luckily, something of a rarity thanks to advances in medical science – though they may yet become more common. The 16th century, on the other hand, was a veritable age of illness. The death rate from influenza alone was normally 2.5 per cent and could easily swell to 7.2 per cent, thereby claiming an average of 5 per cent of the population every year. In relation to current numbers in the UK, that would result in over three million annual deaths from influenza. As opposed to now, however, the Elizabethan flu was basically untreatable, though cures such as smashed baby swallows mixed with parts of lavender, strawberry, thyme and rosemary abounded. Herbs and, where they could be found, spices were generally key to treatment, though any knowledge of the causes, to say nothing of lasting remedies, was scant; mortality was a significant part of daily life.

Sanitation was likewise appalling, with bodily filth a major source of ill health. Typhus and plague were often carried and spread among the starving poor of Elizabethan society. Then, as now, deprivation was the engine room of death. Public and personal hygiene was worse in cities – the pervasiveness of our pandemic has revealed similar centres – and it was not uncommon for the two-storey shaft of a household privy, where there was one, to contain up to two hundred gallons of piss and shit at any one time. If such smells, indicative of more problematic filth, were common to urban centres, the countryside was not without its displeasures. In his 1558–9 treatise, A newe booke entituled the Gouernement of Healthe, the priest and doctor William Bullein railed against ‘plain people in the country [. . .] carters, threshers, colliers and ploughmen, [who] seldom wash their hands, as appeareth by their filthiness, and very few times comb their heads, as is seen by flocks, nits, grease, feathers, straw and such like, which hang in their hairs’. The self-righteousness of Bullein the cleric is perhaps more apparent in his account than any study as a physician, but there is no doubt that Elizabethan England was a generally unsanitary place, hence the almost constant household fires on which old piss-stained floor rushes were burned, alongside more pleasant scents such as lavender and garden herbs.

In this environment, the Elizabethans were doubtless less shocked by outbreaks of illness, particularly influenza and malaria (known as the ague or fever), than the modern world has proved. In an era of violence and regular public executions, the sacrality of life was, arguably (and somewhat ironically), less defended than in our own, increasingly secular age. Yet, even for the Elizabethans, the impact of pestilence was profound. Various approximations are given for the number of plague deaths in England and, taken together, they average an eye-watering quarter of a million victims over the course of Gloriana’s reign.

In the 1520s, England had a population of just 2.4 million, much as it had been at the beginning of the 14th century, stagnating as a result of the intervening Black Death. During the 16th century, however, the population expanded and by 1541, according to various records including parish registers, it had grown to approximately 2.8 million. By 1581, around the time our home was built, England contained 3.6 million people. For 250,000 of that population to have died from plague, even when cast over a long reign, made for a chilling number, though it also prompted many to train as medics, with one practitioner being available for every four hundred citizens in the diocese of Canterbury alone, discounting midwives and wet nurses.

In wider society, outside the era’s growing medical profession, the response was eerily familiar. Social distancing was a prerequisite. In Henry Petowe’s The Country Ague of 1625, an acrostic bids readers, specifically ‘all your Rope-tard Nose-gay-Bearers’, to ‘stand father off’, ending with a warning that only through repentance of sin will the plague end – a caution recently repeated by one ‘official Bible reader’. Towns and cities were worst hit. In 1579–80, Norwich, then the second largest city in England, lost 25 per cent of its population in one extended outbreak – amounting to approximately 7,500 individuals. If the same were applied to the people of Norwich today, there would have been 53,000 deaths.

In Stratford in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, his hometown witnessed the deaths of 13 per cent of the population – 260 mortalities then or 3,500 now. On 11 July, just three months after the bard appeared in the world, Hic incepit pestis (Here begins the plague) was written in the burial register of the church where he had been christened. Leaving Stratford and likely staying in his mother’s farmhouse in nearby Wilmcote, Shakespeare was lucky to survive. Across England, 50 per cent of all children under the age of one died. And had he been born in London, where he later made his name, there is every chance the young boy would have fallen victim, with the capital outstripping all other cities in the number of its deaths. London’s bills of mortality, delivered like evening bulletins, detailed other appalling statistics: 1603 alone brought 32,257 plague deaths in its wake, or 16 per cent. Were the same to be true today, 1.5 million Londoners would have died.

It is little wonder that the disease coloured Shakespeare’s language, with a plague cast on both houses in Romeo and Juliet, Iago pouring ‘pestilence’ into Othello’s ear and Beatrice, albeit more humorously, comparing Benedict’s company to the malady. In 1606, three years after one of the worst plagues witnessed during Shakespeare’s life, the disease returned to London with vicious haste. It is likely that this was when the poet and playwright took the opportunity to focus on new projects, including King Lear. Six months later, once the disease had again abated and the theatres reopened, the play appeared on stage for the first time. Like Ben Jonson’s later drama The Alchemist, set at a time of outbreak, pestilence is mentioned by many characters in the tragedy of the addled king. ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’ Kent rages at Oswald, while Lear describes the ‘plagues that hang in this pendulous air’ and, shouting at his daughter Goneril, references one of the disease’s worst symptoms:

But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;

Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,

Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,

A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,

In my corrupted blood.

Despite the dystopian nature of Lear’s divided kingdom, Shakespeare’s play did not reflect contemporary reality, even during the very worst outbreaks. There was certainly a sense of hiatus, and deaths were reported minute by minute, excepting those among the undocumented starving poor – recent bulletins have been similarly selective – but Elizabethan principles of good neighbourliness were, generally, not lost.

During such times, Shakespeare was just as able to turn to less political, less fractured thoughts. In 1592, when his career was beginning to take off, having written The Comedy of Errors, the three parts of Henry VI and, perhaps, Richard III, the pestilence culled one in every twelve Londoners. Ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prelude – Linenfold
• I. Never a Native
• II. The Unanswered Question
• III. Between Bark and Heart
• IIII. Picturing Arcadia
• V. Safely Gathered In
• VI. Across Miles
• VII. The Dead of Winter
• VIII. Bare Ruin’d Choirs
• VIIII. Unsprung
• X. The Scent of Hawthorn
• XI. Before the Fall
• My and Further Reading
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements