Discovering Seventeenth-Century Life at
Llancaiach Fawr
On Friday, May 17, Dad and I left Somerset and drove along the M5/M4 toward South Wales, where he was born. We stayed with my Great-Aunt Dorothy and my
Uncle Martin for a few days. On our way
down, though, we stopped at Llancaiach Fawr.
Just off the M4, Llancaiach Fawr (pronounced Hlan-ky-ack vowr) is a
seventeenth-century manner house that belonged to Lord Edward Prichard in the
1640s. It is now a tourist attraction
that gives visitors the opportunity to experience life during the English Civil
War.
In the visitors centre, we were given
documents of introduction. These were
supposed to have been provided by the brother of Mary Prichard, the lady of the
house, to assure her husband and his servants that the documents’ bearers were
persons of good repute and trustworthy.
In a country torn by a civil war, where brother fought against brother,
such papers were the only way of gaining entrance to a family home.
Below
Stairs
We presented our papers to Rachael, the
under dairy maid, at the front door of the manner and she explained to us that
her master and mistress were not at home, but that we would be welcome to
explore the house on our own, or to be escorted through it by one of the
servants. We opted to be guided through,
and Rachael took us down to the servants’ hall, so that we could “rid our
minds” of the lower aspects of the house as soon as may be. In the servants’ hall, she showed us the
wooden trenchers the staff would have eaten from—heavy, squarish wooden plates
with a large round indentation in the centre for porridge or stew, and a very
small round indentation in the top corner for salt; musical instruments like a
saltry (something like a dulcimer), a fiddle, and a drum whose Welsh name
translates to “the pig’s nose.”
We then proceeded to the kitchen, where we
got to have a look at the huge fireplace with its rotating spit. It would have been the spit boy’s job would
be to turn the spit for up to 12 hours a day.
He would have worked in the house since he was about five—even though
his mother might have worked in a different house—and would be paid 2 pence per
day, plus food, and a place (under the table near the fire) to sleep. On the table were a variety of herbs and
spices that the family would have enjoyed, including cinnamon and nutmeg; some
oyster shells for scooping, and a wooden mould for making gingerbread men and
women.
The
Children’s Room
Rachael then escorted us upstairs and
passed us off to the under cook, who showed us the room the Prichard girls’ shared. Edward and Mary Prichard had two girls: Mary,
who was about 3 when the war started, and Jane, who was 7. The girls had a number of toys, including a bilboquet
(a ball and cup toy), a hobby horse made out of maple, a rocking horse, and a
hoop and stick game that was usually used by boys to practice swordplay. The hoop would be tossed up, and the child
has to thrust a stick through it. There
was also a Diablo, an hour-glass-shaped piece of wood that must be balanced and
spun on a string held loosely between two sticks.
For educational purposes, the girls had
hornbooks, which were similar to today’s board books: a piece of parchment with
writing on it would be placed on a wooden plaque. Then, a piece of cow horn would be heated and
stretched until it was clear and tacked over the parchment to protect it from
grubby fingers. Edward Prichard’s
children spoke Welsh and English from an early age, and were also being taught
French and Italian. The music master
taught them singing, dancing, and to play the bowed saltry, which is similar to
a modern violin. Sewing clothes for
their wooden dollies let the girls practice their stitching.
The
Indoor Toilet
In the short corridor joining the girls’
room to their mother’s a small bench with a lid. When the lid is lifted, it exposes a 35-foot
pit. This is one of the earliest indoor
toilets in Wales.
The
Lady’s Chamber
Lady Prichard’s room is large and sunny,
with a huge tester bed. This looks a
little like a four-poster bed, but there are actually only 2 posts at the foot
of the bed, the headboard being a solid piece of wood. The hangings and covers on the bed are all
hand stitched and embroidered in beige, burgundy and dark green. These would have taken 2 skilled seamstresses
nearly 3 months to complete, and the entire bed would have cost 5 pounds. This doesn’t sound like much today, but when
you consider the under cook’s salary was 2 pounds 6 pence per year, you realize
just how important a piece of furniture it was!
Lady Mary Prichard would have used her bedroom as a private parlour, and
the bed was a way of showing her status to the visiting women. Ladies would spin and sew and be entertained
by the music master, whose job it was to provide music for the house as well as
to educate the children.
We were allowed to look through Lady Mary’s
cosmetics. In the seventeenth century it
was fashionable to be very pale. Lady
marry would have worn a half-face mask
of soft leather as well as a large hat and veil if she went out in the
sun. She would also have powdered her
face with white lead, which could be applied by a cloth puff, or by a hare’s
foot. She would have carried cloths
soaked in scented oils to make herself smell nice, as well as to mask any
unpleasant odours that might be floating on the air. It was still believed that bad smells carried
illness, and if you were able to mask the scent, you could stave off sickness.
Lady Prichard’s clothes were of the height
of fashion, and even during the civil war she would have gowns sent over from
France. She wore her hair in the French
style—in a large bun on the top or just to the back of her head, with ringlets
coming down in front of her ears. If her
hair was not dressed, she would cover it with a coif—usually a white
cloth. All women of all classes wore
coifs, but Lady Prichard’s was of the finest linen and trimmed in lace.
The
Lord’s Study
Just down the hall from Lady Prichard’s
room was her husband’s study. Two stone
walls in the centre of the room framed a narrow staircase that went down to the
steward’s rooms; when the lord was away, it was the steward’s job to take care
of estate business, so he had to have access.
This room is the only room in the house that has a window capable of
being opened. This is because Lord
Prichard kept pigeons, whose nests could be reached through a panel in the
wall. These pigeons were used to send
messages to the surrounding nobility, and would fly as far as Cardiff.
The best part of this room was the
weaponry. If the house was ever
attacked, all the men in the house would arm themselves with the equipment
stored here. We were shown a matchlock
musket—which looks basically like a standard musket except for the striking
mechanism. Flintlocks, which came into
prominence a little later in the century, use a piece of flint that snaps
forward when the trigger is pulled, creating a spark when the flint strikes a
steel plate; matchlocks, by contrast, have a long piece of rope that is kept
lit, and which snaps back when the trigger is pulled, so that the flame touches
the hole in the barrel and ignites the powder inside.
I pressured Dad into trying on
seventeenth-century armour—a backplate, breastplate, and helmet with gorget (a
neck guard), and he was give the musket to hold. The musket was taller than I am—though
admittedly, I’m pretty short :P I was
then pressured into a seventeenth-century cavalry costume—a hugely heavy
leather jacket that could stop a sword and even a musket ball (at long range),
a “lobster tail helmet” (which has a neck guard like a lobster’s tail at the
back), and then given a flintlock pistol and a sword to hold. The cavalry men would guide their horses with
their knees, fire their pistols as they charged, then rely on their swords.
The
Great Hall
Finally, we joined a group of about 50
women from Pembroke in the great hall.
There, we were greeted by Evan James, the music master of Llancaiach
Fawr. He was very funny, and when the
women from Pembroke heckled him, he had no problem heckling back. He began by saying that he was glad my Dad
was in the room, because it meant he wasn’t the only man. Then he went on to say that many of the court
cases that Edward Prichard heard in the great hall, as a justice of the peace,
had to do with wives who heckled or nagged their husbands. Punishment for this “crime” consisted of a
metal scold’s bridle, which was fitted over the woman’s head, and a plate that
was inserted into her mouth to press on her tongue and make it impossible for
her to nag. The husband would then be
required to lead his wife around the town by the chain attached to the
bridle. If the same woman appeared
before the court 3 times for nagging, a metal spike was added to the plate and
pierced through her tongue.
One of the women present mentioned
modern-day tongue rings, and Mr. James expressed both horror and fascination at
the type of woman who “would so wilfully pierce herself so.” ;) He
then went on to say that he was concerned about one of the women in the room,
because of the way she was sitting: in the seventeenth century, crossing one’s
legs was enough to suggest that one was a strumpet. Needless to say, she uncrossed her legs!
After that, Dad and I made our way
downstairs and out through the main door.
Llancaiach Fawr was a fortified country house and, as such, had only one
way in and one way out. The stairs were
also made unevenly, so that those familiar with the steps could race up, but
newcomers had to take the stairs slowly to avoid tripping. We were bidden “God’s speed,” by Rachael, and
left the seventeenth century to drive on to Brynna, a little village in the
Vale of Glamorgan where my Dad was raised.
