Green and Pleasant Land, Part 7: Last Stop, Hampton Court—and Where I’m Going Next Time

Our final stop on the Doyle Family Tour of Southern England meant leaving Brighton (sigh!) after breakfast and heading for our last stop: we had plans to spend the day at Hampton Court Palace before heading to Heathrow Airport (a short drive away) and back home to Massachusetts.

I had visited Hampton Court on my last visit to England, but had only had time to see a small portion of it. Today we had a good five hours, and we still didn’t see all of it—much less the gardens, which would take a full day just on their own.

Hampton Court has seen centuries of use, from the early sixteenth century through the present day. It was built as a country retreat by Cardinal Wolsey, advisor to King Henry VIII—to whom he gave the palace as a gift when Henry’s favor had turned to Anne Boleyn and her political faction. Henry expanded the palace and did a lot of redecorating for Anne, including putting their entwined initials everywhere...which he had to hastily redo a few years later on divorcing (and beheading) Anne and marry Jane Seymour instead. The area where Henry’s kitchens were located have been restored to their former culinary use, which was pretty awesome to see.

After viewing all the Tudor areas (including his private Chapel and ) we visited the Jacobean and Hanoverian bits as well, viewing portraits and furniture and generally being staggered at the sheer size of this place. George II was really the last English monarch to used Hampton Court as a royal house; George III disliked it intensely, and instead rebuilt Windsor and Buckingham House for his family, and Hampton languished for a while until someone hit on the bright idea of using it as a sort of retirement village for old royal retainers and others who had done some service to the crown or country. It housed hundreds of people through the nineteenth and all the way up to the late twentieth centuries; though apartments stopped being given out in the late 1980s, a few residents linger on.

We had a delightful tea in one of the courtyards before departing for the airport and home...but I’m already plotting my next trip to England. Where will I go?

• London, to visit the places I didn’t get to this time: Sir John Soane’s House, the Burlington Arcade, and Kensington Palace.
• Absolutely back to Dartmoor. This time I might want to stay at Lewtrenchard House, former home of a well-loved clergyman and specialist on Dartmoor history and folklore (and author of the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers”) Sabine Baring-Gould.
• Back to the Jurassic Coast...to Lyme Regis, but also to Sidmouth, which is rife with some awesome Regency architecture.
• The Isle of Wight (and this time we’ll make ferry reservations!) to see Osborne House as well as the well-preserved Roman ruins there.
• And then, north! A brief stop in Cambridge, to revisit where I spent one summer at Christ’s College, and York, which is one of the most delightful cities in England, and finally on to the Lake District to stay on Ullswater and do some more tramping about the countryside.

Thank you for following along on my trip...now, where in England would you like to go?

I'm Baaaaaack!

Well, the Doyles are back from England, laden with tea and books and some pretty cool fossils...and it was a blast! I'll be posting in (historical) detail about the sites we visited, but while I get my photos in order for that, here are a few images I thought you might like:

It being May, we were lucky enough to catch the bluebells in bloom in many locations, but this bluebell copse on Dartmoor in Devon was our favorite:

Along with primroses, which I'm more used to seeing in the garden center, not growing wild!

No, it's not really a snowflake...it's one of the chandeliers in the Assembly Room at Bath!

Is it some primordial monster from the depths of space? Nope, it's a glass sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum:

On the straight and narrow on Dartmoor:

Even the chimneys at Hampton Court are worth photographing:

 

And again, it being May, we saw lambs. A lot of very, very, very cute lambs!

Not to mention cows, source of the copious amounts of clotted cream we consumed.  Here is a new breed photographed in the New Forest, the demi-cow--ideal for smaller farms:

It's great to be home! :)

So Many Smiths!

It will likely come to no surprise to those of you who regularly read or write books about the nineteenth century that the blacksmith was a key figure still.  Various articles of metal, such as horse shoes and hanging bells, still needed to be created, and most were still manufactured by hand.  But I ran across a phrase this week that intrigued me.  A children’s book on English trades segregated blacksmiths, whitesmiths, and brightsmiths.  And that called for some research (lovely, lovely research!).

It turns out that a blacksmith specialized in iron and steel.  Steel was still created in small batches and was very expensive until well into the century.  Often in stories and movies, blacksmiths wield a mighty hammer over their anvils to produce everything from nails to hand-and-a-half broadswords.  Some, however, created finer items like locks and keys.

The whitesmith, on the other hand, might specialize in tin or other lighter-colored metal.  Brightsmiths took the duller metals and created items polished to a high sheen.  While a blacksmith worked on metal heated in a forge, whitesmiths and brightsmiths worked on cold metal.

The trade book I mentioned listed the key tools of the smith as the forge for heating the metal, the anvil and block for holding it, and the hammer, tongs, hole punches, and pinchers for manipulating it.  While I have often seen the trough of water used in movies for cooling the metal, the author insisted that it was used for sprinkling on the coals to make them produce more heat.

To become a smith, a young man would apprentice.  Perhaps he might start with stoking the fire or separating the metals his master would need for the task at hand.  Later, he would move up to shaping the metal himself, simple pieces at first and then more complicated ones as his skill progressed. 

Wrought iron was a very popular material in the early nineteenth century.  It was used inside and outside the house for various decorations.  Hinges, gates, chandeliers, and weather vanes might all be made of wrought iron and were sometimes gilded, like these gates at Hampton Court. 

A smith who caught the fancy of the aristocracy might do quite well for himself.  Be he a blacksmith, whitesmith, or brightsmith.