In London, Easter Sunday was sunny this year. A blessing for those who work indoors all day, like the kind and friendly shopworkers I meet. They could finally tank up on Vitamin D.
I kept Easter Vigil on the Saturday night at a Roman Catholic church I know, and heard the Exsultet welcoming in Easter there. The following day, Easter Day, was mine to go out and play.
In the sunshine I paid a visit to an Anglican church for their Easter service. It is another church I know well and the liturgy was well-attended. But the roof over the sanctuary was not in a perfect way. In one corner of the ceiling there was a large hole – very high up. A tell-tale sign of a leak, but one which would need internal scaffolding to remedy.
Expensive.
Yesterday, Easter Monday, seemed a large stretch from the Sunday. There was so much rain in the morning. At the moment I wrote these words, there was a brightening between the clouds, but the radio warned of storms ahead. How both cursed and blessed we are with our weather systems on this island. Were we really warmer than Rome on Easter Day?
The sight of the hole in the roof reminded me of some research I undertook a long time ago, which ended up in my book of 2013, all about the Red Bull playhouse and its associates.
Thomas Seckford (1515-1587), a hard-working man of law and a Tudor map commissioner and charity founder under Elizabeth I, was never made a knight, but owned a piece of land in Clerkenwell where the Red Bull playhouse came to be in the seventeenth century. Seckford lived there, when in the London area, alongside his brother Henry, who was knighted in 1603, nearly sixteen years after his brother’s death. Since Cambridge University Press published this ten-year-old book, I have realised that confusion has existed over Sir Henry Seckford who, it is possible, was not a privateer as some have believed (and I believed them), but an Elizabethan entertainment-related office-holder, who held interests in ventures at sea, engaged, as he appears to be, in some measure of ship-building. It is possible that he was rather more like the land-bound Antonio, the eponymous merchant in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, rather than a more Thomas Heywood-type personal-style adventurer, his hands on the wheel and his men in the rigging. Henry Seckford, you see, had too much to do in relation to these isles. Regularly to be seen in state-controlled financial accounts of a few kinds to do with deer-hunting, some victualling, and other activities of a property nature – in East Anglia (where the Seckfords and their friends came from), and elsewhere – Sir Henry, as he became, could not have squeezed in quick but profitable cruises around the Mediterranean, not for all the tea to be picked up in Antwerp or other helpful market places. The scene of him aboard ship is one I might have to amend for my comedy screenplay about the Red Bull and its actors.
What is real about Henry Seckford is his office, linked to that of the ‘Revels’, found close to the Red Bull at the old Knights of St. John of Jerusalem buildings. Today the site is found on either side of the current Clerkenwell Road at St. John Square, with a museum dedicated to the order and its founding of the St. John Ambulance association. The museum is very close to St. John’s beautiful old stone gate.
On the north side of the square is where Sir Henry had a residence in the old Prior’s Hall, we think, as ‘Master of the Tents, Toils, Hales and Pavilions’, a job looking after the necessaries of the monarch’s journeys, venturing to places removed from the palaces, when he/she was out hunting or visiting the countryside, needing tents, hunting nets, human sheltering, informal stabling, and somewhere private for the Queen to go to the lavatory, etc. As a buildings-based outdoor recreation person, Sir Henry, as all of us must, had to deal with the annoyances of building works, including leakes coming from very high ceilings. One such record made it to my ten-year-old book.
Quoting an old book of the early twentieth century, I suspect the record is an ‘AO3’ when found in its original at the National Archives. It is noted as dated between the end of 1572 and a couple of months into 1573.
A very cold time of year.
The title the book gives it is ‘Reparacions on the Leades’, and the sums include works disbursing “Rushes in the hall and in the greate chambere where the workes were doone & the playes Rezited” and, among other things, he also put in for money for “hanging vp Tentes to keepe away the wynde & snow from dryving into the hall”. In other words – with reference to roof leads – gumming up the areas susceptible to – or open to – the outdoor inclemencies. Leaks.
This entry goes on to describe a great deal of other items to do with constructing three dimensional design items for the business of the office, but also, with reference to the above, boarding up windows and buying replacement lead from “Sr Christopher Draper… and for Bestowing the same vpon the Roofe of the howse adioyning to the greate hall & for sowdering [soldering] & mending dyvers other places”.
Monday turned out changeable. By the time I finished a first draft of this post, a fierce wind was blowing, right through the old window behind the table where I was writing. It’s good I met up with double-glazing experts recently. But even today, there has been no real storm, just wind.
How did the early modern man ‘solder’, amend, and replace leading? This I do not know, although my stone mason great grandfather might have had an idea (see a previous post). There are further Revels’ entries of note recorded concerning these matters, but for these we must wait for the next essay from my pen, and a subject that I’ve seen come up as a topic of interest among my fellow academics recently, namely the topic of that which has been ‘hiding in plain sight’.