The first snow of winter

The day started with falling snow blanketing the surrounding countryside. As the morning progressed the snowfall subsided and we decided to brave the `elements` and equipped with camera, we set off to explore.

We soon found that, although it looked very pretty, it was not going to stay long. It was very `slushy` underfoot in places. Looking up the hill neat Overbury Hall did look rather winter like, as this image shows.

A close up of snow on the edge of a roof. 

Patterns formed by the snow and the structure of the barn.

The scene by Layham Mill, including the little snow covered island used by our resident swans.

A couple of images of the playing field.

And finally, Rosey, having ducked under the fallen branch, makes her way down the centre of the road. Wouldn't do that normally!

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The American link with the Suffolk village of Shelley

Shelley is a small village and civil parish in Suffolk, England. Located on the west bank of the River Brett around three miles south of Hadleigh, it is part of Babergh district.

Probable built C13 with a north facing tower added C14, this little church was very obviously used by the Tylney family, who lived in the Shelley Hall nearby. It contains tombs and a chapel, all in the Tylney name.

Elizabeth Gosnold Tilney, sister of Jamestown colonist and explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, is buried at All Saints Church, Shelley. Many people who come to Shelley will do so to see Dame Margarett Tylney. Her effigy lies in a window embrasure to the west of the pulpit. She died in 1598, shortly before the Tudor dynasty ended.

Thomas Tylney, who married Elizabeth Gosnold Tylney, is also buried in Shelley church.

Her sleeping effigy was witness to a quite extraordinary event in the early years of the 21st Century. In 2003, archaeologists working in Jamestown, Virginia discovered the remains of a body which had been buried with obvious ceremony at the James Fort heritage site. There was a theory that it could be the corpse of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, a Suffolk-born adventurer who led the pioneers that established the first English colony in the New World at Jamestown in 1607. A certain amount of DNA was recovered, and the only way of establishing for certain the identity of the corpse was to find a match from a source known to be of the same family. Gosnold’s sister Elizabeth Tylney Gosnold had been buried in the vault of Shelley church, and permission was given for the vault to be opened and a DNA sample obtained.

Permission was given because of “the strength of the educational and scientific rationale presented to us by the Jamestown team”. The Victorian tiles were removed from the chancel floor, then the 18th Century bricks below them, and then the 17th Century flagstones. A small amount of DNA was obtained from the corpse of Elizabeth, and lo and behold it was a match. 

A brass plaque on the chancel wall recalls the event and remembers Elizabeth - however, despite the excitement, identification of the Jamestown body still remains uncertain, as the body in All Saints’ Church – thought to be Elizabeth’s – turned out to be that of a much younger woman, possibly Anne Framlingham, who had married Philip Tylney, of Shelley Hall, in 1561 and died around 1601. It's a great story though!

North side view of Shelley church.

Another view of the front. This time with what looks like a couple sleeping rough in the porch.

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Cardinal Wolsey's Angels come to Ipswich

Thomas Wolsey was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, around 1475. His father, who is thought to have been a butcher, provided a good education and he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. Wolsey was ordained in around 1498. He became chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury and later chaplain to Henry VII, who employed him on diplomatic missions.

Wolsey was a cardinal and statesman, Henry VIII's lord chancellor and one of the last churchmen to play a dominant role in English political life.

Wolsey made a name for himself as an efficient administrator, both for the Crown and the church. When Henry VIII became king in 1509, Wolsey's rapid rise began. In 1514, he was created archbishop of York and a year later the pope made him a cardinal. Soon afterwards the king appointed him lord chancellor. Wolsey used his great wealth to indulge his passion for building - at his London home, York Place in Whitehall, and at Hampton Court, 20 miles south west of London. He also founded Cardinal College at Oxford (later King's College, and now Christ Church), but his haughtiness and grand style of living made him increasingly unpopular.

In 1524, he commissioned the Florentine sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano to create four bronze angels for his magnificent Renaissance tomb, but as we know, fate intervened and Wolsey fell from favour. When Wolsey died in 1530, his possessions were appropriated by Henry for his own use, angels and unfinished tomb included. 

Henry didn't live to see the tomb finished, though he outlived Wolsey by 17 years. Construction was halted despite Benedetto establishing a team of craftsmen in Westminster, and the plans of Henry's three children to complete the memorial posthumously went unrealised. 

After Henry's death, details of whether the angels remained with the tomb become scant. Elizabeth I moved much of the tomb to Windsor in 1565, where it stayed for over 80 years, with some parts sold off during the civil war to help finance the Royalist cause. After the civil war, the only element of the tomb known to have survived was a black stone chest, finally put to use as the centrepiece of Horatio Nelson's tomb at St Paul's Cathedral. 

As for Wolsey's angels, their location, if they had survived at all, was unknown. In 1994, an unillustrated entry in a Sotheby's catalogue listed two bronze sculptures 'in Italian Renaissance style'. 

A Parisian art dealer bought the statues, and soon afterwards the Italian scholar Francesco Caglioti attributed the angels to Benedetto. In 2008, the second pair was discovered at Harrowden Hall, a country house in Northamptonshire owned by the Wellingborough Golf Club. The Sotheby's angels, it emerged, had been stolen from Harrowden in 1988. 

So, when Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich were loaned the four Angels by the V&A, I just had to see them. 

Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich

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