Many books over many years have gone into the making of this book. Sometimes something as small as a word or a phrase has caught my imagination; at other times whole books have been filleted for facts in areas which lay far beyond my own compass. In the process, much scholarly information has been hijacked in an imaginative retelling that few of the authors would recognise, still less wish to own up to. But my debts are immense, and I would like to acknowledge them here. If I have inadvertently omitted any fellow traveller on what was, inevitably, a long and winding road, I offer my apologies.
Roger S. Wieck’s Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (George Braziller, 1988) was the source of much information both liturgical and iconographical. I am indebted to Prof. Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570 (Yale University Press, 2006) for placing the Hours in their personal and historical context, and to Dom David Steindl-Rast’s The Music of Silence: Entering the Sacred Space of Monastic Experience (Harper San Francisco, 1995) for adding to my perception of their spiritual dimension. Ronald Hutton’s The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (Phoenix House, 1958) were never far from my side. The work of Richard Mabey, and in particular his monumental Flora Britannica (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), has always been, and continues to be, an inspiration.
Information about herbs, their histories and their uses, was in the main taken from Mrs M. Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (Jonathan Cape, 1931), and information about the stars and constellations from the various editions of Ian Ridpath and Will Trion’s The Monthly Sky Guide (Cambridge University Press). Quotations from the liturgy of the Hours are from my mother’s copy of the Dominican Prayer Book (4th revised edition, 1962); quotations from the Rule of St Benedict are from Timothy Fry (ed.), The Rule of St Benedict in English (Liturgical Press, 1982). Other references to saints, figures of classical mythology and various matters relating to the calendar are from the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd edition, 1970) and the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2nd edition, 1974).
For the early history of Morville I am indebted to W. Watkins-Pitchford, ‘The History of Morville’ (reprinted from the Bridgnorth Journal, 23 and 30 June, 1934); D. S. Cranage, An Architectural Account of the Churches of Shropshire, parts1–10 (1894–1912); Francis Leach, County Seats of Shropshire (1891); and R. W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols (1854–60), all to various degrees revised and augmented by the various volumes of the Victoria County History of Shropshire. Where I have followed a new line of enquiry of my own, I have given references to original manuscript sources and archive collections at the appropriate places below. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for access to microfilm of and printed images from MS Auct. D. inf. 2.11 (the Hours of the Fastolf Master) and MS Gough Liturg.7 (the Earl of Shrewsbury’s prayer book). The Shepherds Great Calendar was last printed for the year 1931 as The Kalendar and Compost of Shepherds, ed. G. C. Heseltine (Peter Davies, 1930).
For information on local place names I am indebted to Dr Margaret Gelling’s Place-Names of Shropshire (English Place-Name Society, vol. LXII/LXIII, Part One, 1990), and for their wider interpretation to her Place-Names in the Landscape (Dent, 1984). For the geology of Morville and the surrounding district I have drawn principally upon vols 166 and 167 of the Geological Survey of Great Britain (Geology of the Country around Church Stretton, Craven Arms, Wenlock Edge and Brown Clee (HMSO, 1968) and Dudley and Bridgnorth (HMSO, 1947), respectively). Information about soils came from vol. 166 of the Soil Survey of Great Britain: The Soils of the Church Stretton District of Shropshire (Agricultural Research Council, 1966). Brian S. John’s The Ice Age, Past and Present (Collins, 1977) was a revelation about the workings of ice. I met the Shropshire mammoth in person: in 1999 an exhibition was mounted at Condover by the Shropshire Museum Service to welcome back the conserved bodies of the group of four mammoths discovered in 1986; their remains are now housed in Ludlow Museum. My account of prehistoric man in Shropshire draws principally upon S. C. Stanford’s The Archaeology of the Welsh Marches (2nd revised edition, 1991), with additional information about local sites from the Shropshire Sites and Monuments Record (available on http://ads.ahds.ac.uk), though their interpretation in connection with the settlement of the village is my own. Margaret Gelling’s The West Midlands in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester University Press, 1992) and Brendan Lehane’s Early Celtic Christianity (Constable, 1994) both provided valuable insights on the Anglo-Saxon period.
The idea of patterning the book around an exploration of the five senses arose from the first words of Benedict’s Rule, ‘Listen … with the ear of your heart.’ (For anyone who’s counting, the extra senses are Anticipation (in ‘Lauds’) and Memory (in ‘Compline’); absence or dullness of sensual experience (as in depression) is a topic explored in ‘None’.) I am grateful to my friend Harriet Strachan for introducing me to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969), and to Sue Whalley of Park Attwood Clinic for drawing my attention to the anthroposophical view of the senses as described by Albert Saesman in Our Twelve Senses: Wellsprings of the Soul (Hawthorn Press, 1990). The reference to the Aislabie family’s ‘respectable pause for anticipation’ is from the chapter on Studley Royal in Mavis Batey and David Lambert’s The English Garden Tour: A View of the Past (John Murray, 1990). I am indebted to Christopher Taylor’s Roads and Tracks of Britain (Dent, 1979) for a more secure historical underpinning to my longstanding fascination with roads. The paraphrases of Tacitus are from the Agricola, translated H. Mattingley, in Tacitus on Britain and Germany (Penguin, 1948). The acccount of Roman Shropshire draws heavily upon Roger White and Philip Barker’s excellent Wroxeter: Life and Death of a Roman City (Tempus, 1998, reprinted 1999). A fuller explanation of Hooper’s Rule for dating hedges will be found in Dr Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995, reprinted 1996), from which I have borrowed the quotation from Caesar’s De bello Gallico, and to which I am also indebted for information about other matters such as coppicing. Information about the history of vine cultivation (and other fruits, passim) is from F. A. Roach, Cultivated Fruits of Britain: Their Origin and History (Blackwell, 1985).
Much of the information about water mills comes from Dr Barrie Trinder’s The Industrial Archaeology of Shropshire (Phillimore, 1996). The quotation from Wassily Kandinsky is taken from Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour by Philip Ball (Penguin, 2002). I am indebted to Laura Mason and Catherine Brown’s Traditional Foods of Britain: An Inventory (compiled for the GEIE/Euroterroirs project, 1999) for information about simnel cake and its local variations, and to Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels through the Paintbox (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002) for information about saffron. The account of Robert de Bellême is based upon that contained in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, Robert’s contemporary and fellow Salopian, edited and translated Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford University Press, 1969–78), vols II, III and VI. Information about marling came principally from Nigel Harvey’s The Industrial Archaeology of Farming in England and Wales (Batsford, 1980). The quotation from Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV, is from the verse translation by C. Day Lewis (Jonathan Cape, 1940; also available as a World’s Classics paperback, 1983). Inspiration for ‘Do moles dream of the wind?’ was provided by Kenneth Mellanby’s monograph The Mole (New Naturalist series, Collins, 1971).
Material about the interpretation and sources of Botticelli’s Primavera came from many sources, of which the most useful was Roberto Marini’s ‘Analisi di Capolavoro: Botticelli’s La Primavera’ (http://www.thais.it, retrieved 8/12/05). The story of John Leland’s madness comes from The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (1907; facsimile reprint, Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). I am indebted to William Fiennes’ The Snow Geese (Picador, 2003) for alerting me to the extraordinary aerial life of swifts, and to, among others, J. Zahradnik’s Bees, Wasps and Ants (Hamlyn, 1991), Karl von Frisch’s Animal Architecture (Hutchinson, 1975), Miroslav Bouchner’s Animal Tracks and Traces (Octopus, 1982), and Michael Chinery’s The Natural History of the Garden (Collins, 1977) for illumination on the lives of the other residents I encountered while making the garden at Morville — bumble bees, ants, dragonflies, harvestmen, birds of every sort, foxes and badgers.
Quite the best book I know about learning to appreciate roses (as distinct from growing them) is Edward A. Bunyard’s Old Garden Roses (Country Life, 1936), and it is to him that I am indebted for the rosebud riddle. The poems of Thomas Traherne are quoted from Alan Bradford’s Penguin edition (1991). ‘The Celestial Stranger’ was printed for the first time in Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose (SPCK, 2002), ed. Denise Inge, and I am grateful to both Denise Inge and Alan Bradford for details of the still-unfolding discovery of Traherne’s manuscripts. Information about prehistoric dragonflies and horsetails comes from W. S. McKerrow’s The Ecology of Fossils (Duckworth, 1978). For the method of ‘setting’ a scythe and the explanation of the use of the ‘strickle’ (as for much else besides) I am indebted to Dorothy Hartley’s Lost Country Life (Pantheon Books, 1979). The account of the eglantine as a symbol of Queen Elizabeth I is based upon Roy Strong’s in The Renaissance Garden in England (Thames and Hudson, 1979).
My account of the purchases of church property made by Roger Smyth in the 1540s and 1550s follows that in the Victoria County History; background information came from Dom David Knowles’ Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge University Press, 1976). Manuscript pedigrees of the Smyth, Cressett, Hopton, Horde and Clench families are in the Shropshire Records and Research Centre, Shrewsbury. The 1562 will of Roger Smyth and 1584 ruling on its validity are in the National Archives at Kew (PROB/11/46/64 and PROB/11/67/184, respectively). Details of the burial of Roger Smyth on 26 June 1562, the birth of his and Frances’s daughter Maria on 2 July, and the subsequent marriage of Frances Smyth to John Hopton on 13 January 1562/3, are from Morville Parish Register (f.1 recto, examined under ultra-violet light).
The contemporary gardening manuals on which the account of the design and planting of Elizabethan and Jacobean knots is based include, in addition to Thomas Hill’s The Profitable Art of Gardening and The Gardeners Labyrinth, Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (1613); Maison Rustique, Or, The Country Farme, translated into English by Richard Surfleet (1616), and John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629). The ruminations on pastoral were prompted by Helen Cooper’s scholarly investigation Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (Brewer, 1977).
The Latin text of the Chronicon ex chronicis is printed as Florentii Wigorniensis Monachi Chronicon ex chronicis, ed. B. Thorpe (2 vols, 1848), and was translated into English by Joseph Stevenson as The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester, Church Historians of England II (1853; facsimile reprint, Llanerch Publishers, 1996). Modern historians now customarily attribute authorship, at least in part, to John of Worcester. The accounts of reaping and threshing are based on Hartley, Lost Country Life, and Harvey, Industrial Archaeology of Farming (from whom the details of subsequent mechanisation are also drawn). The tithe maps of Shropshire, transcribed by H.D.G. Foxall, are available at the Shropshire Records and Research Centre, Shrewsbury. I am also indebted to Mr Foxall’s Shropshire Field Names (Shropshire Archaeological Society, 1980) for their interpretation. Iain Sinclair’s The Edge of the Orison (Hamish Hamilton, 2005) provided details of John Clare’s journey from London to Northampton.
George Smyth was buried at Morville on 9 January 1600/01; his will (proved 24 January 1600/01) is in the National Archives, Kew (PROB/11/97/390). His son John was buried in St. Leonard’s, Bridgnorth, on 28 January 1635/6 and his will (proved 27 August 1636, Bridgnorth Peculiar Court) is in Staffordshire County Record Office, Lichfield. The account of the Civil War period in Bridgnorth is based on Clive Simpson’s ‘Bridgnorth and the Civil War’ (typescript, Bridgnorth Library); for the Battle of Edghill see Philip Warner, British Battlefields (Cassell, 2002). It has been suggested (Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, Series 4, vol. 5, p. 54) that George Smyth II disappeared and may have died in Ireland; however, there seems no reason to suppose that the burial at Morville of ‘George Smith Esq.’ on 10 November 1641 (Morville Parish Register) is not his; no will has been traced. For documents suggesting that George Smyth II mortgaged the estate see Worcester County Record Office, Bulk Accession no. 8782, ref. 899: 749, parcel 84 (iii), 7,9 & 11. The will of Arthur Weaver (proved 28 May 1689) is in the National Archives, Kew (PROB/11/394/889).
Sir Thomas Hanmer’s Garden Book, printed with an introduction by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1933), was reissued as a facsimile reprint by Clwyd Library and Information Service in 1991; since Rohde’s transcription the manuscript itself seems to have disappeared. I am grateful to the late Ruth Duthie for corrections to Rohde’s transcript and for sharing her research on the layout of Sir Thomas’s garden (subsequently printed as ‘Planting plans of some 17th-century flower gardens’, in Garden History, vol. 18, no. 2 (1990)), and to Jenny Robinson for her ‘New Light on Sir Thomas Hanmer’, Garden History, vol. 16, no. 1 (1988). For the whole milieu of florists and their flowers see Ruth Duthie’s Florists’ Flowers and Societies (Shire, 1988).
I am indebted to Camilla Stewart for her observation that the medieval window at Morville is composed of fragments from two separate images. I am also grateful to Amanda Harris-Lea and Dr Jeremy Milln for their suggestion that the avenue at Morville is aligned on Aldenham. Sir Whitmore Acton’s estate plans (1721–2) are in the Shropshire Records and Research Centre, Shrewsbury. Thomas Percy’s letter to William Shenstone is printed in The Percy Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & William Shenstone, ed. Cleanth Brooks (Yale University Press, 1977). Among the many books consulted on the geology of Shropshire I am especially indebted to Peter Toghill and Keith Chell’s Shropshire Geology: Stratigraphic and Tectonic History (Field Studies Council, 1984), Richard Fortey’s The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past (Jonathan Cape, 1993) and Ann Scard’s The Building Stones of Shropshire (Swan Hill Press, 1990).
Ruskin first expounded the notion of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Modern Painters, vol. III, part 4 (1856). Quotations from the poems of Herbert, Vaughan and Donne are from the selection edited by Helen Gardner as The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin, 1957). I am indebted to John Stubbs’ biography, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (W. W. Norton, 2007), for the quotation from Donne’s letters, and for the reconstruction of Donne’s journey from Warwickshire to Montgomery in 1613. Like the mythological figures which are its subject, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been translated, reworked and woven into countless other books; in addition to Ted Hughes’ selected Tales from Ovid (Faber, 1997), I am indebted to Ciaran Carson’s Fishing for Amber (Granta, 1999) and to David Raeburn’s verse translation of the complete Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2004), from which I have freely borrowed here.
For a detailed analysis of the architecture of Morville Hall see Arthur Oswald, ‘Morville Hall, Shropshire’, parts I–II, Country Life, August 1952. The garden historian Mavis Batey has been hot on the trail of Lord Nuneham and the Earl of Harcourt for many years, and I am indebted to her chapter on the garden at Nuneham Courtenay in The English Garden Tour, and her article ‘The Gentle Executioner’ in Oxford Today, Trinity Term, 2000. The painting of Morville Hall showing the architectural improvements of William Baker (1748–9) is in the Government Art Collection (ref. 10663); a modern copy also hangs at Morville Hall in the collection of Dr and Mrs J. C. Douglas, and I am grateful to them for allowing me access to it. The papers of the Papillon family of Lubenham and Acrise Park, Kent, are divided between the Northamptonshire County Record Office and the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone; for some of the strange stories surrounding Papillon Hall see http://web.ukonline.co.uk/lubenham/folklore. The will of Arthur Weaver III (made 6 January 1747, proved 2 May 1759) is in the National Archives at Kew (PROB/11/846/473).
For the idea of butterflies as ‘beautiful airheads’ I am indebted to Miriam Rothschild’s enchanting The Butterfly Gardener (Michael Joseph, 1983). The reference to Arthur Blayney’s legendary hospitality is from Philip Yorke’s The Royal Tribes of Wales (1799), quoted in the guidebook to Gregynog (now part of the University of Wales). For information about quinces I am indebted to Roach, Cultivated Fruits of Britain, and to Jane Grigson’s marvellous Fruit Book (Penguin, 1983). For the suggestion that lions only mate with leopards (with which I end the story of Atalanta) I am indebted to Ciaran Carson’s Fishing for Amber. Observations on the diet of the English peasant were prompted by J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham’s The Englishman’s Food: Five Centuries of English Diet, new edition by Tom Jaine (Pimlico, 1991).
Sir Thomas Browne’s observations on wreaths and garlands are contained in a letter to the diarist John Evelyn, printed in Browne’s posthumously published Miscellany Tracts II (1683) and reprinted separately in 1962 as a keepsake by the Gehenna Press, Northampton, Massachusetts. I am indebted to Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, for the origin of ‘Poppy Day’. The idea of dining with the dead was prompted by a reference to funerary gardens in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens’ Garden Lore of Ancient Athens (1963). Information about war graves came principally from the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (http://www.cwgc.org); Gertrude Jekyll’s use of thrift in this connection is from Betty Massingham’s biography, Miss Jekyll (Country Life, 1966). The literature on comets is immense, but the NASA website, especially Donald K. Yeoman’s article ‘Great Comets in History’, was especially helpful (http://ssd/jpl.nasa.gov). The will of Arthur Blayney (proved 30 October 1795) is in the National Archives at Kew (PROB/11/1266/173). For Bridgnorth elections see Victoria County History of Shropshire, vol. III. The Members of Parliament for Bridgnorth from 1295 to 1800 are listed with brief biographies in Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, Series 4, vol. 5. Information about Joseph Loxdale Warren and his family is taken from gravestones and memorials at Morville, together with contemporary newspaper reports and other material kindly supplied by Patricia Scott.