Gone Medieval - Building Medieval Churches

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

What is a perpendicular church? In this episode, Cat is on location! Invited by expert stonemason Andrew Ziminski to a spectacular perpendicular church in Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire, Andrew takes us on a guided tour. From honky punks to secret libraries. We learn all about what makes this perpendicular church unique and stonemasonry as a medieval trade, showing us how Britain's buildings offer unexpected and special insights into our history.Andrew Ziminski, author of 'The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain', published by John Murray in 2020.if you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and today I've left my little DIY recording studio at home because I've been invited to visit a very special medieval church. It's in a place you've probably never heard of, a small village called Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire.

But it's a church that's been described as one of the finest perpendicular church. churches in the country. I'll get back to what a perpendicular church is in a moment. But it really is quite extraordinary. And it's also home to some of my favorite things, a group of medieval hunky punks. And if you don't know what they are, you'll find out very soon. I'm here because I've been invited by expert stone mason, Andrew Ziminski, not just to learn about the church, but also to find out what a medieval stone mason actually did. Because Andrew is the author of the book The Stone Mason, A History of Building Britain, drawing on his own career over 30 years working on some of the country's most incredible

historic buildings, from Neolithic monoliths and Roman Bath to medieval cathedrals and mills of the Industrial Revolution. He's one of the very few people to really know the ins and out of buildings like this. So I'm here now today because Andrew is actually working on this church and he's invited me to see some of the really quite unique aspects of its history. Right, so here we are, Andrew. Thank you so much for inviting me along. It's really brilliant to be here. Thanks for taking part in the podcast.

Well, Kat, thank you ever so much for coming up to see us, to Steeper Lashden in Wiltshire. So we're just standing outside the church right now, and it really is quite spectacular. I mean, I saw the pictures of it, but driving up here through just beautiful, sort of middle of nowhere, countryside, you come to a lovely little village, and then you got this, which really, I mean, it's been described as one of the finest perpendicular churches

in the country. Can you first of all just explain what a perpendicular church is? Well, the perpendicular is the end of one of the sort of three orders of Gothic architecture, which, you could argue, starts with the Normans, in the Romanesque era, and then it goes to the early English, the decorated period, and the perpendicular. So that came around as a consequence of the black death that so many people had died that there was huge amounts of cash sloshing round. Money was bequeathed to build churches and this is typical of that sort of church. So this was thrown up in the 1480s. So you can imagine news of the Battle of Bosworth, you know, coming here as the builders were building this place that we can see now. And this would of course

been a very busy place. There would have been stow masons working. They would have been carpenters. They would have been casting bells. You know, this would have been a massive construction site, as were many parishes all over Britain at that time. And this part, let's see Pallashton, on this part of the country, was actually quite wealthy for various reasons, as well, wasn't it in the Middle Ages?

It wasn't just the fact that you had this money coming in after the Black Death, but before that as well, what was the wealth coming from here in the middle of nowhere? Well, that's a really great question. So, you know, we're in prime pasture land here. sort of plain rises just over there and that would have been absolutely

chock full of sheep so it's well-to-do merchants that paid for this and as we walk around the interior of the church you can see some of their merchants marks so they commissioned the works so this is a sort of new middle-class gentry that was paying for this you know it wasn't just the landed gentry

you know it's the middle class whatever middle class meant in the middle ages of course yeah so very much a sort of wool and textile industry that's kicking this off by suppose. Exactly, yeah, exactly. So let's have another look at the church then, and later on we are going to talk about these things I'm looking at right now, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to come here, apart from obviously the interesting story of the whole church, which are these hunky punks that we are going to talk about about later on. But let's go and have a look inside

the church. Great. Oh, wow. Oh yes, it's a lovely church. We've not ventured beyond this point, have we? Let's go and have a look. Yeah, this really is not what you're expecting in the middle of a village like this. Tell me what we're looking at. Okay, so as we've already said, this is a strictly perpendicular church. It's one of the most important perpendicular churches around in southern England, I would say. I mean, to have a vaulted ceiling of this quality in a rural parish like this is really, really unusual.

I mean, Steve Lashen is quite a small place. now but 16 years after it was built the village burned to the ground and that completely affected the nature of trade and settlement within the village so everything was rebuilt but all the merchants moved to nearby Bradford upon Avon. Curiously Bradford upon Avon is where all the stone came from that built this place so it's about 10, 12 miles away but you can identify particular quarries as you walk around. I mean outside you may have seen the stones rather sort of marbled and vainy, but look around in here.

Look at these beautiful piers of this arcade. It's wonderfully smooth, well-bedded stone. So they're selecting their stone for different aesthetic and technical purposes, really. And so how much of what we're looking at now is original? So I noticed this has got a, what is it, oak ceiling here? It's not a stone vaulted ceiling here. Completely unusual. So this is a Leon vault.

and it's unusual because the church that we're looking at is all stone apart from the springing point of the arch. You just see where these columns rise up and between the clear street windows, the stonework splayes out and then it transitions into oak. And I think the reasoning for that is that they ran out of money. I couldn't afford a stone vault. And that is often, you know, it's often the case

when we're working on a parish church now, we get to a certain stage and we'll have a sudden the parish said, look, we're just clean out of cash. So oak was a cheaper option. Originally, it would have been highly decorated. So I think that this whole church would have been highly decorated, and it wouldn't have been able to distinguish between what was oak and what was stone. Oh, that's an interesting point. But really, I mean, you do get the sense that this must have been incredibly expensive to build. Oh, my goodness me, yeah. It would have taken a vast proportion of the merchant's income to pay for this. The merchants paid for the aisles, which we can see to the left and the right of us,

and the parish paid for the nave, so you're more working people, you know, but they would have paid not necessarily in cash, they would have paid in labour. So to construct this, there would have been a skilled team of Mastercrafts people, a few labourers, and then the village would have provided the grunt, simple as that. So, you know, getting stone up is no easy task, but if everyone in the village is coming together, job done, isn't it? So with the Chancellor, that would have been paid for by the historic landed gentry. So the development of this church is that there was probably a Saxon church here. There's no evidence of it.

And the first recorded mentioning of the church here is in the 1230s. But there's nothing here of that church left. Apart from when we go up the stair tower, we'll see bits of old stone that have been reincorporated in, which I find quite exciting. So the only early part of the church that would have been left is the Chancellor, which would have been 13th century. This is a Victorian replacement of what was there before.

And the tower would have been constructed before the nave and the aisles that we can see now. So there would have been a period where there'd been this whopping great tower standing on its own, or this would have been a construction site and the Chancellor would have been used for services. It'd probably been a temporary structure, temporary roof, a thatcher roof over here, to keep services going for the locals.

So that I suppose explains really well, you know, how they're getting this wealth. And I love this idea that. It's sort of almost a community effort with all the different levels, well, not all, but many different levels of society actually contributing to it. But I mean, this is an unfair question, but why? That's the other question. Why are you spending all that money here? Is it to sort of show off the wealth?

Yeah, exactly. It's to outdo the next parish, you know, so these new merchant millionaires could say, to their neighbours, oh look, we've, you know, as oligarchs do today, you know, when they're investing in museums or what have you. And they've done it really well, haven't they? And of course, to the glory of God, most important. Well, of course, yes, there's that too. Fantastic. Perfect. That was a key in the door. Okay, well, show me a bit more of this church, then what else is here? Okay, well, it's absolutely chock full of items of interest, but I'm going to take you to my

favourite part which not many people know about and it's a place that many parishes would have had up until the time of the reformation oh my goodness so we've just come to this tiny little door in the side the big iron key and it says Samuel hay library yeah so it's a little staircase going up it smells nice it does it's old yeah old musty manuscripts oak wow This is incredible. So this winding staircase, stone staircase. Another door. Another door.

Oh my word, look at this. There's no lighting in here. We've got an air conditioning in again just to preserve the books. So Samuel Hay, whose image you can see on the back there, was a vicar here in the 19th century. He was a great collector of books. And there was a collection of books from the late 16th century that he was given. and he kept them at the rectory but when he retired he presented

a summer money to the parish to pay for this charming library that we've got here lovely I just have described it's just a tidiest little room with a sort of timber-themed ceiling and there's a cabinet along one wall just filled with old books

and what are they? Well, like I say there's no lighting here so I'm putting my torch phone on let's take a random the smaller ones are the best what's this so this is like a paperback

size book does that say thursa smith Anna somebody is that yeah astronomy is the science of looking up

incredible I like that you love that it's true yeah and the book is natural philosophy in which the elements

of that science are familiarly can you say that explained 1829 so this is one of the more recent books they've got I mean when I come up here I just pick up her a random book and have a little thumb through just to you know there always inscriptions from the original owners there was a book I was looking at the other day and it says Mary Wells her mark her book and it's just a cross in that nice old copper

plate writing that the vicar has written for her fantastic so I mean so this really shows that the link between the church and also about knowledge and books and reading and these aren't just religious places, but there's actually people here who are very much seeking knowledge as well of the natural world, which I think that book especially demonstrates. Yeah, well, it just indicates what a hub of the community the church was. It's not just for prayer and thoughts.

You know, these are marketplaces, these are where contracts were exchanged. These are where, you know, books are borrowed and read, and, you know, places of learning. This was a schoolroom. You get married here, you get dispatched here. You know, it's like it's absolutely everything of the community. And the community here in St Mary's are, you know, very much like that. They've been very supportive to us in our works, and they even bring us cakes.

Perfect. What else do you need? Yeah. Tiny library up at a staircase and cake. This space is also known as a parvace, which is where parish meetings were conducted. So to have a surviving library is rather unusual. But this is where all the parish affairs were conducted. But I rather like the idea, you know, that window has been there since the 1480s. You know, the archway beneath us into the body of the church is a Tudor arch.

So, you know, like I say, news of the Battle of Bosworth, you know, you could have been sat here and seen that news brought to us through those windows. It's really absolutely amazing. It's just proper history, proper part of history, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Brilliant. I never tire of these places. No, no, absolutely.

and you get some special privilege. We're going to talk about your work in a moment because you're very fortunate to get access to some places that people would never normally see. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't earn any money, really. I just end up doing it for love. We do bridges, we do medieval bridges and churches.

We always earn a little bit more money on bridges and that helps us to pay for the churches. So I'm writing a second book and I've written a large proportion of it right here. Oh, in this room? Yeah, yeah, Rosemary, the church warden. who we met earlier. She said, yeah, that's fine. Just use it when you want. So, yeah, I've been churning out the words. Fantastic. I can't think of a better place to write a book. Couldn't be more atmospheric,

could it? We should start writing retreats up here. Oh, I'll let you go first. Okay. So back down the winding staircase. So shall we go onto the roof now and have a look at the hunky punks and some of the work we've been doing and the medieval clock? That sounds awesome. Yes, please. So it's another doorway. I've just unlocked this one. So say one key fits all here. Love these. And how all are these doors? Are they quite ancient too? I think this is a Victorian replacement or a copy of what was there before. But the main church doors through the porch are original, tremendously exciting.

So original, as in 15th century? Yeah, yeah, 15th century woodwork. Amazing. Yeah, so that means the mechard work for 15th century. So these steps going up here are tiny. Okay, and look out for the, what some people refer to as witch marks for trapping witches coming down this spiral staircase. Okay, yeah.

There are colonies of lady birds up there, hibernating over the winter. And as I say, tiny, tiny steps. And it's going to be quite lowy up the top. Oh, my one thing is, more and more narrow, doesn't it? Hold on your socks. Well, the things I do for this podcast. Right, another doorway. There's a really loose stone right above our head.

I've got a fix. I've got a little bit. You see that big one there, the daylight for it? Oh, yeah, okay. I don't want that on my head. Oh wow. So we're up on the roof of the Baptist tree, but we'll go onto the South Isle roof.

We've got to climb under our scaffolding, clamber up this awkward step. onto the lead. Ont to the lead roof. Oh wow, look at this. So you're going to have to just tell me, why are you here? What are you actually doing here?

Well, the hunky punks, so we're standing on the aisle roof and this is as got got got flying buttresses here. We've got big clear street windows to allow the maximum amount of light in, the divine light. But you'll notice here,

you see the flying buttress at the other end, but there were three missing. It looked like they had just been sort of chopped off. Yeah, exactly. So there are two schools of thought. Either they weren't finished or they were taken down. I don't know which one is correct,

but I know that the original roof structure of the nave would have been stone slates, which would have been really heavy. And that's been replaced with lead, which even though lead is heavy, it's actually a lot lighter than stone slates. So I think once they relieve the stresses and outward pressure on the walls, by replacing it of lead,

these flying buttches would have actually started to push the wall in, so I think they actually took them down to stop the wall between... I mean, this wall is all glass, really, isn't it? It really is. I mean, these are lovely big windows.

And at the top of each window, you'll see the hunky punks that you're keen on. Yes, I love this. Now, you are going to have to explain to our listeners exactly what hunky punks are. Okay, so Hunky Punk is Somerset dialect for a grotesque,

or a gargoyle. So a gargoyle is a method of removing water through holes in the edge of the lead like that. It comes from the French for throat to gargle. So the gargoyles move water efficiently down to the ground. But grotesques and hunky punks are there for a non-practical reason. They are apotrophatic and they are turn away evil. So we all know about this these days.

So it's no coincidence that they are of such a big scale and they are over such a big window. So the bigger the beast, turn away the spirits, the spirits with evil intent, that higher their likely success rate. So these look pretty successful to me. I mean, they're kind of enormous. They're really interesting, aren't they?

What are they meant to be? Are they actual animals? I mean, they're not literally like dogs? Are they just sort of fantasy animals? They're fantasy animals, aren't they? They're Muppets. And what's so interesting about them is the whole race. of them you know that one there's rather got rather sort of moving like head

it does like huge big eyes and a tongue sticking out yeah its neighbour is rather similar but it's a neighbour on the other side I know all these very well because we've been working on them over the summer because they're in the wrong bedding plane so a bedding plane is where the sediment within the stone's been led down horizontally and when it's quarried out it should be led down in the same way but these are edge bedded so they've lifted the stone out of the quarry carved the grotesque and put it in at 90 degrees so that immediately exposes the stone as a weakness and the stone starts to come apart like a opening book so we've put loads of

stainless steel pins and filled all the fractures we've not put any new carved work in here at all this is all pure lime-based conservation but this character here it's like a mother it's eating its offspring like a ghastly Frankenstein dog and you can see the offspring in mother's mouth see its hind legs

it's in its mother's eye yeah and this is kind of fighting back isn't it? Because we've got these huge big teeth of the mother and there's a little baby just going no but before we managed to conserve and repair these

these were all completely covered in black solvation it's like burnt bacon all over and we had to paltice that off and take it away and now you can actually see the detail up close. I mean the characters who made these were absolute geniuses I think. I mean it's so creative. I don't think they were making like a clay macket.

They were just cracking on and carving and probably carving in situ. I see so they're literally made up there on some sort of slightly more rickety scaffolding than yours probably. But I mean these, you can sort of see them from the ground up here but they're not really meant so much for looking up. Is it that sort of belief in what they were doing? That's some main reason or? They always say with grotesques and goggles.

It was to scare the local population into, you know, believing the good book. But, I mean, we come up here. We're not exactly scared, are we? We just want to laugh at them. No, they're cute. They're gorgeous. So I think they had some other purpose. And I think it's no coincidence that the grotesques on the lower order of windows on the aisle are arranged as a Trinity.

So there's the big one on the apex of the arch. And then either side you've got two smaller ones. So I think, I don't know, personally I think that's just symbolic. I just noticed something I hadn't seen before, actually. So, you know, we were talking about these missing flying buttresses. Yeah. Well, I hadn't noticed this lime, this package of lime mortar here that's been led over. Actually, that does suggest that they're hadn't been a stone fixed into here.

Okay, yeah, because we're just looking at one of the sort of cut-off buttresses and there's a big patch of lymies. There's a good bit of archaeology there. There we go. I'm going. You can see it's so perfectly, you know, that's not been worked over with a trail. That's been pressed in with a stone. Yeah.

So there would have been a flying budget here. Oh, that's fantastic. Amazing. So we've actually solved, or you have solved the mystery. Oh, I'm going to have to think about that more. Perfect. I'm just thinking about these stone masons.

So you're a stone mason. In your work, this is what you do and we've been doing for the last 30 years, which is incredible. So you go and you conserve and repair old buildings. You do anything from someone. of the oldest stonework we have in the country really, don't you? And Andy, my business partner, who you met earlier and I, we've worked on so many fantastic

places. I can't believe the career that we've had. And, you know, it's still ongoing. You know, we've worked at the West Kennet-Long Barrow, which is the earliest structure with a postcode in England. It's a Neolithic, isn't that? Yeah, it is, yeah. And that was sealed up when the beaker people came along.

We've worked at the Roman Barthes in Bath. We've worked on literally hundreds of medieval churches. Saxon chapels. We worked at the Saxon Chapel in Bradford-upon-Avon, which is a great thing to get to know. What was really interesting about that was they didn't use any line-based technology to bed the stones. They used clay. And when we've worked on adjacent bridges and canal works, all the stone that's been bedded in the same way. So there was this sort of continuity. You know, you just, if you pull the stone out, you just think it was a load of mud, but it actually smells at the river. And it's still clayy, so it's still doing its job. So when I pulled a stone out of the Saxon Chapel, there I've just knocked up the clay and bedded it back on as with that sort of pad of

mortar that we've just discovered there on the flying buttress and then pointed out with line. So I love that, you know, builders in medieval times would not have gone to a great distance to get their building materials unless it was really high status and they were getting stone materials like perbec marble and alabaster perhaps. But not here. Everything here has come from within 10 miles. So I think that's so fascinating. The fact that the work that you're doing is essentially just carrying on traditions, doing things in exactly the same way, that people have been doing not just for hundreds of years,

but actually thousands of years, really. So, I mean, do you think that your life as a stone mason is very different as the life of a stone mason in, say, the middle ages? Well, I'm more aware of health and safety. That's to be said. I mean, when the spire collapsed here, they just finished rebuilding the spire after it had collapsed for the first time. So the second time it collapsed, it took the two stonemasons with it, and they're buried underneath the north porch in an unmarked grave, of course. But the tools that I use are the same as a tools that would have been used by Roman stonemasons.

In the Ashmolean in Oxford, there's a mason's toolkit from ancient Greece. It's exactly the same as mine. A mallet, a hammer, a selection of chisels, nothing changes. Obviously, we have to use power tools to be efficient. but I can understand the lives of the people who built this place. Even when you look around and you see oyster shells pushed in the joints between the stones, that would have been part of their lunch. And an oyster shell is a very handy piece of packing material, isn't it?

That's such brilliant insights. But you mentioned that those stone mansions were buried in unmarked graves. Is that really the case? Most of the people who worked on this will just be anonymous people that weren't really remembered? Yeah, I mean the masters are vaguely remembered, But, you know, there are so many important buildings that we don't know who actually built them. I mean, we would refer to them as architects these days.

But, you know, architects are very much a modern concept, an 18th century concept. And before that, it would have been down to the master mason to have designed and for their proposals to the client. And, you know, in the same way that an architect does. So that would also, if we go back to the Middle Ages, that would have been quite a high status job, would it? Absolutely, yeah. To become a master mason, you know, there were lots of different grades.

there are images which are carvers who would be creating these. They would be separate from the walling matons who were just squaring off the blocks. They'd be the big chief at the top. And this applied to both men and women in medieval period. So there are records of female master masons, two of whose name escaped me. But after the black death, everyone had to step up. It was all hands to the pump, wasn't it? So there are records of female master masons.

continuing their husband's businesses and being very well respected for it. Fantastic. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast, from the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11. We reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts,

from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a Waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies.

At the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities, health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion-dollar wars

or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. Okay, so just looking down now, and just looking out over the churchyard and the cemetery here, and you pointed out, as before we started recording, when it came in,

you pointed out to me that this really is quite a lot higher ground. It's not that many gravestones at the moment, but it's really high ground, and why is that? Well, so this was the mother parish, the mother church of a very large parish. There's a bridge in some fields, a mile or so yonder, which is part of a coffin path, where the parishioners of West Ashton village

would bring their dead to this churchyard. So this churchyard is absolutely vast. It's over an acre, but you see how high it is compared to the surrounding lane and the pathway over there? So that's just because, obviously, the graveyard is chock full of corpses. So this is literally just graves and burials and bones just building up, I mean, we must be at least 1st 1⁄2.

If you think people have been buried here since Anglo-Saxon times, so say 50 people are buried a year over a thousand years. I can't do the maths off the top of my head, but that's a 50,000 people. There are 50,000 bodies in here, which is likely. That's probably a conservative estimate after the Black Death

and the various other plagues that would strike communities like that and snuff them out. And of course, you mentioned that earlier, didn't you, that the Black Death especially had a big impact on the church and the development of it? Oh yeah, absolutely.

If the Black Death wouldn't have happened, the decorated Gothic period, which was the precursor to the... perpendicular. The decorated is all about exuberance, the individual personality of the Mason. I mean, these teams of masons that were carving stone in the decorated period. Like a school of dolphins, they were so free-thinking and free, you know, they could carve in a free hand style. But with the Black Death, everyone died, basically, and the Mason's had to become more efficient. So if, you know, if you look at these windows, it became shopwork. So it was like a

production line to churn out more linear stonework. So if the black death wouldn't have happened, we wouldn't have had these bigger windows, these perpendicular windows, and indeed big towers like this. In the medieval period, churches tended to be renovated and replaced every five generations. You know, taking that off the top of my head. So when the black death came, especially in the West Country, as I say, there was so much money sloshing around that people, they couldn't build or buy a new church because the church was there, so they would stick Western towers on the edge of that church.

So the tower that we can see here is classic West Country church tower. A belfry, it's about 1470 or something like that. So it's about 10 years before this aspect. So the development of this church occurred in stages. And can we go up the tower? Yeah. Do you want to go inside or up our scaffolding? Well, let's let's have a look.

So our next job in the spring is to repair these big clear street windows and you can see how the mullions go up and then where they split towards the top you see how they're just coming apart there so that's going to fall to the ground too and they're all smoke blackened from the chimney fires around here and that smoke blackening has a very detrimental effect to the stonework causes it to blister and pop and fills it full of salts so the salts crystallised just below the surface, cause it to pop off. So we've got a busy spring here.

So I mean, it just really hammers in, doesn't it? No pun intended. How much work it really takes, not just to build them in the first place, but just to make these last for 500 years and more. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty jolly impressive, isn't it? And, you know, I have to say if the Victorians hadn't intervened, the story might have been quite different,

but the architect here was an enlightened Victorian architect. He had a light touch. He didn't scrape all the original wall paintings off the walls. He's kept the stonework pretty much as it was. The new chance that is sympathetic. But lots of Victorian architects were dreadful, and they would just flatten a church and rebuild it in their own image of the Gothic movement. One key for example. Another staircase. So this is up to the tower, is it? Yeah. Bigger stairs now. That's slightly easier.

This is how I can you pick. Yeah, oh my gosh, I'm quite impressed. Good for leg day, this. How high is this tower? 100 foot. 100 foot high, okay. It counters the number of steps. No, by this point I'm bleeding from here, as it.

It does feel quite intense. There we are. It's not being out of breath. It's the recovery time that's important, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. That was a steep. Oh, and that's the church clock. Yes.

Okay, so, up in the tower. Yeah, well, that was quite a climb up the stairwell, wasn't it? So we'd gone past the ringing chamber where the ringers, you know, pulling their ropes. The ropes come through this chamber, which is the clock chamber, and go up to the bell chamber, which is above us. Look at the sides of those pieces of lumber. There's a giant big timber beams in there. Yeah.

In the roof above us. What's interesting? about these beams that they in turn support. The clock commander pointed out to me the other day is that the great tenor bell that's above us is bigger than that aperture there. So how do they get it up? How do they get it through there? Well, it came through this trapdoor.

You see how this trap door was bigger than that? Oh, God, the thing we were just standing on. Yeah. And then he said, look, they're on wedges. So these two beams are on a beam that's built into the wall at, at either end and they're wedged up so you just knock the wedges out and then you can just hammer the beams out of the way to drop or take up a bell i think that's fantastic that's really really brilliant our hila seamed 1795 so quite a modern roof structure but yeah that's got to support

many tons of bells this is the name that's carved into the huge beam above us now yeah and then what we here in the background is the ticking of the church clock. I think this is my favourite space in the whole church. When we take on a new church to repair, I always come and see what the clock is like. And there's a mention of a clock at steeple Ashton in the church tower in the 1540s. Oh, that's quite early for church clock. So I think that this frame, there's a big square frame, big rectangular frame, sorry. It's all blacksmith made. You see the lovely curls on there.

Even the bolts that are bolting it all together and the mortis and tenon joint here. This is all blacksmith made. So I think this is the medieval frame and the inside part of the clock is a bit later, maybe mid-17th century. But that is replacing most likely a medieval church clock.

That's quite extraordinary. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of the cogs are medieval, you know. They do look it, don't they? Some of them are absolutely not new. And so how unusual will that be in the middle ages, in a rural location like this, to have a church clock? Yeah. Well, today, one of the jobs that we're doing is regilding the clock externally, the clock face. We've redecorated it and conserved all the numbers. And there's a shaft that runs from here that drives the hands that tell the time. But originally, this would have been a bell-only clock. It would have just chime the hours, chime the quarter hours, so the workers in the field. You knew when to come to church or when to go home,

or, you know, just one extraordinary scientific instrument to have, probably made by one of the foremost blacksmiths in the region. They had a scientific understanding. Yeah, and I think that point that we were making earlier on when we were looking through that library, that this wasn't just a religious institution, but it was also a gathering point for lots of people with scientific interest and knowledge. and sort of sharing that knowledge presumably as well.

Yes, exactly so. Exactly so. What I like about this is that it's all powered by this. See that massive lump of lead? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, you know, it's the same idea as a grandfather clock. Yeah.

We've got the lead weights that are pulling down. But these are lead weights of a different order, aren't they? Yeah, that's really quite enormous. Yeah. So the speed of the pull directs how fast that continues to rock. So the clock. The clockmaker was telling me that the lead weight might be a little bit too heavy, so that makes the clock a bit too fast.

So I said, what, do you have to shave bits of lead off the weight? He said no. He's got other adjustments he can make. Fantastic. Isn't it wonderful? It's beautiful. And this lovely cabinet that's seen as well. Oh, right, okay, so it's squeezing into a tiny space.

So we're right at the top of the church tower. These are the bells. These are the bells. Look at this beautiful timber. a bell frame. It's a real work of art, isn't it? It was incredible. Yeah. It smells good as well. It does. It smells. I mean, this smells ancient.

But these bells are not medieval. They are quite... No, these bells have been recast. They were recast in London in the 1930s. Yeah, so they're finally... But they took a copy of what was there before. So they are a very good likeness. A little bit there. It's an enigmatic space with the wind blowing through. Yeah, even here this, the sound is just that the wind is going. Oh my right.

See, that resonance. Isn't it wonderful? Absolutely lovely. Yeah, so we're right at the top of the tower and you can see the openings. So they're flat pieces of stone placed into the window and they are to let the sound out but also to keep the elements out as well. And that's Somerset Tracery. So we're in Wiltshire, so we're right in the edge of Somerset church tower design.

And the church towers of Somerset are the best in the country, in my opinion. But then I am biased. But if you look just to the right of the windows, you see these arches built into the corner. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so this is a design called a squinch, and that suggests that this was once supporting a spire, which it was because it's Stephen Lashden, you know. So the spire has come down on two occasions, both lightning strikes. But this squinch was designed to support the eight-sided plan of the underside of the spire.

So what I find so interesting is that this is a purely Islamic design. So I'd say these are known as squinches. And this is how Islamic engineers and architects designed the top of an octagon to support their domes. So no dome architecture of Islam, no spire architecture of Gothic England. And you can see that, you know, the design of those Somerset tracery window openings. You know, they've got an Islamic touch about them. They really do, don't they? That's absolutely the sort of feeling you get from being in space.

That's incredible. Yeah, and everywhere I see, I can see the hand of Islam of work. And that makes me very, you know, everything's come from somewhere, isn't it? Even in rural, this is as English as you get here. Because this is outside on top of the tower. We've climbed right to the top. We're looking at the wind, and you can really see how rural this is. Yeah, isn't it extraordinary?

And you can see, look how massive source of plain is. You know, it's just a big ridge and plateau that just stretches away, and that would have just been full of sheep. So this church is how we're standing on now was paid for from the wall that came from the backs of those sheep. And yeah, it's nice the flagpole twitching around in the wind up there. Yeah, absolutely. But you can really get a sense of that, all the...

or the wealth in the rural medieval economy and this is just I mean there's no better place I think to just demonstrate how that worked exactly exactly I mean you can see the West Ashton is that village over there so you can see how big this parish was you know we're going just beyond that and you see those two hedges that zigzag across oh yeah that's the coffin path that stretches all the way to West Ashton right so that's where they would come with all the burials to come to the church so When the parish was reduced in size, there was obviously going to be resistance because the incumbent was deriving a fair income from all the outlying villages, bringing their dead for burial and charging an appropriate fee for that. So there's lots of business.

This place isn't just making money on the backs of agriculture commerce, it's making money on the backs of their parishioners as well, literally on their backs, so they're carried in. What I like especially, this is very personal to me. See the airfield there? That's Kievel Airfield and that was a Polish resettlement camp just after the war. That's where my father came. Oh is that right?

So it's your personal family connection to the place. So like to get this job, we worked at Keeval Church which is just on the other side as well. So yeah. So your father a stonemason as well? Well he was a stonemason for a time yeah because he was working as a minor. Too many of his friends were being killed after the war. Oh right. So he was working with Irish Highman.

Irish Highland Scots fellow Poles Czechs Russians but they were blast in tunnels and people were dying around him and he didn't like that so he started life as a granite Mason and we used to go on holiday to Scotland where he was working on these hydroelectric schemes yeah and he'd say look at that son I built that it'll last a million years and you know what because it's granite you'd probably last 10 million years yeah that's going nowhere so I like the permanency of that yeah that's a lovely thought but working granite compared to this bathstone is a different Yeah, I can imagine this is quite a...

Yeah, my life's easy compared to this. Yeah, I can imagine. Andrew, this has been absolutely amazing and I have to say I do envy you being able to spend all your time in places like this. But, you know, you've been writing about it, so your one book is out already and is out in paperback, I think, as well.

Yeah, yeah, it came out in paperback. It came out the week before lockdown, so, you know, have sympathy for me and buy my book. because it's really good. It is really good. I have it myself and absolutely recommend it because you take people through really the history of stone buildings in this country and from that personal perspective as a stone mason.

Yeah, well, hopefully I managed to tell a new way of telling the history of southern Britain. No, absolutely, highly recommended. Andrew, thank you so much for taking part in Gone Medieval. It's been an absolute pleasure to be here. Great. Thanks ever so much for coming, Kat. Really nice to meet you. So thank you so much to Andrew Szyminski, author of The Stone Mason, A History of Building Britain. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit.

Don't forget that if you want more medieval information in your life, you should subscribe to our new newsletter, Medieval Mondays. Just follow the episode notes in the app where you're getting this podcast from, and you can find out how to do that. Thank you all so much for listening. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and join us again for. for the next episode.