Meetings 2001

Tom Beaumont James - Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury: rediscovering a lost palace of the Plantagenets

30 April 2001

Caution: these are my very rough notes from the presentation - john wilkes

Lots of historical significance; now ruined.

• 1164: Thomas a'Becket & Henry I first disagreement - chronicle talks about King+knights in one building, Beckett+bishops debating in another
• assize of Clarendon a few years later
• 13C - Henry III expands it considerably, using same people as were working at Salisbury cathedral
• surrounded by a large park - possibly extending out to include Salisbury! fine collection of medieval hunting arrow-heads
• early 14C Edward II parliament
• Roger of Clarendon - born there 1355-57 (bastard son of Black Prince)
• 1346 Edward III brings his captured "sub-kings" here: David I of Scotland, and John I of France (Poitier 1356)
• 1453 - onset of Henry VI 1st madness

Clarendon park

• huge extent to the east, about 2.5 miles east of Salisbury
• 11mi circumference around the hunting path; ringed by a 3m high wall, plus wooden/stone pail (wall); to keep the fallow deer inside; largest deer park in England
• deer leap to trap incoming deer, but forbid them leaving
• New Sarum didn't exist when Clarendon was founded; originally a Saxon place - "the clover-covered hill"
• palace is at the central point of the park
• even today, the primary economic aspect of the estate is shooting - deer and pheasant
• Charles I imagined he might make some money by turning Clarendon into a red deer breeding ground; map of three portions of the estate: deer lawns, coppiced space (protected from the deer), and rough pasture for the pigs to graze
• - later: a hunting course with a grandstand (betting sport)
• - timbers found from 1537, and under James I rebuilding

1933-39 - major excavations of the site

• Berrenius (Finnish art historian looking for wall paintings);
• John Charleton (a young archeology graduate student of 21 from Univ. Durham) was put in charge of the site
• ended by the onset of war
• 1977 - Tom picked up the baton (partly provoked by letters in the Queen's jubilee year)

Buildings include:

• stables
• kitchen (40' square); fire large enough to roast 2 oxen at a time (later, Henry I had his own, private kitchen built); evidence of very large "treen plates"
  • salcery (place for making sauces, or perhaps where deer were salted for shipment elsewhere)
  • in 13C King's household: 300-350 people travelling around, needing to be fed
  • by 14C King's household: 400+
• great hall (80' long)
• royal apartments (Henry III)
  • gilded lead stars and moon crescents, probably from walls and ceilings, set against blue backgrounds
  • plaster-work fragments, with false ashlar-block boundaruies, and a blue pigment made from crushed lapis lazuli from Afghanistan
  • external walls plastered and whitewashed
  • pigments in pots suggest a scriptorium (supported by documents sealed there)
  • kings chapel, marvelous circular tiled floor, including letter tiles; "Antioch chamber", named after disreputable Old Testament king
• Queens chapel and buildings
  • some fragments similar to old Romanesque work at Old Sarum
  • "Richard and Saladin" tiles - now stolen
• large wine cellar - cut out of the living rock; begun by Henry II, then doubled in length by Henry III in 1252 (Tom showed graphs of wine deliveries over time)
• specialized houses, such as space for the children
• 1723 - ruined by the time of a visit of an antiquary, who drew pictures; landscape very bare as a result of turning the land over to sheep
• extant documents from 1072, 1130, and then many more from 1150s onwards
• courtyard
  • unusual 1240s tile-kiln (only one not from a monastic site) rescued and moved to British Museum - in the tile-pottery room; some of the "wasted" tiles can be matched to ones elsewhere in the palace; very early use of brick in England; tiles decorations include woodland-inspired scenes, such as birds and animals of the chase
  • lots of pottery: from a local kiln at Lavestock (93 shelves in Salisbury museum!)
  • lots and lots of roof tiles; which led to suggestion of tall, steep roofs (in one morning, 17,500 pieces of tile!)
  • - glazed tiles
  • - coxcomb roofline
  • - much lead, in small pieces from when palace burned
• Original appearance? perhaps similar to Sainte Chapelle in Paris (Henry III had seen this)
• Later: the Earls of Clarendon helped put Charles II back on the throne; they built a new mansion house in the south east of the park (in ~1715); some architectural similarities with their palace in London

More recently/currently

• removing 1930s spoil heaps, sampling 25% of them in the process
• capping/repairing/burying walls
• using animals to graze vegetation down
• site of annual undergraduate field trips
• specialized analysis (e.g., tree ring dendochronology, access analysis)
• seeking out medieval lodges (which were centrally placed in the woods in this time, to do useful work, rather than their later position near the edges - to help keep people out)
• Roman villa sites found recently
• now getting English Heritage funding