Here Be Dragons

So … You've seen the outside of The Old Barge Inn, now before we go inside and take a look around, here's an aerial photo taken in 1979, the year I did my day's guest dig with my college class on the archæological site.

Just off the bottom of the photo is the river and the remains of buildings being excavated in the foreground are the wharves for the stock being traded in the great hall.

There are very few extant houses left in the country (or indeed anywhere on the planet) from pre-Tudor times. Of course, in Norwich we have the Castle and the Cathedral which were begun 150 years earlier, two years after the Norman Conquest, but virtually no timber buildings survive in Britain from this period, and only one house; this one. The Jew's House on Steep Hill in Lincoln and The Music House a few doors along King Street in Norwich are both slightly older but are built of stone and very little of their interiors remain original.

Here in the cellar is part of the archæological dig left as an exhibit, showing the post holes of an earlier house on the site from around 975 A.D.

The brick undercroft, like so many in Norwich (and we have over a hundred beautifully preserved) dates from around 1200AD, but whereas most of the houses that now sit above those undercrofts date from the 1400s to the 1700s, this one was built in around 1220 and remains substantially unchanged.

The main changes came around 1400, when local merchant Robert Toppe bought the building and converted part of the great hall to a trading floor.
Norwich was then the richest city in the country, thanks to the wool trade. Worsted is just up the river and supplied English cloth to the the known world. At the mouth of the river sits Great Yarmouth, then a major herring port and just across the North Sea the cloth merchants of Amsterdam.

Toppe was an astute merchant and this house became the entrepôt for the English cloth trade, making him and his Guild Of Saint George obscenely wealthy.
In the aerial photo you can see the huge arcade he installed at the rear of the house and this is the same arcade seen today, with a protective glasshouse installed.

This is the same arcade from the inside.
From this room, English worsted cloth was carried down to barges and out across the North Sea to Holland and south to the ports of the Mediterranean.

Toppe divided the great hall in two. The further end in this photo is his domestic living quarters and the near end the trading hall.
The magnificent crown post roof is from the original great hall of 1220.

When Toppe had made enough money to buy himself and his children into the gentry with vast country estates, he sold off the trading house and over the next two hundred years it declined until, in the early 1600s his house became the Three Merry Wherrymen Inn (later, in the 18th century becoming The Old Barge Inn) and the trading hall was divided up into a series of smaller houses.
The great hall had an additional floor installed at the level of the transom halfway up this window, which was still in place when I visited the dig in '79.


This panel has been left in place to show the original wattle and daub infilling to the walls and some scraps of Tudor rose wallpaper, probably from Victorian times, when the top floor was domestic bedrooms.

Here you can see the marvellous carving that had just been uncovered from its hiding place within a bedroom wall when I first came here, and what gives the house its present name of Dragon Hall.


Toppe was the leading member of the merchants' Guild Of Saint George and this was his - and their - symbol.


He inserted this beautiful carving into the roof bracket just above the entrance to the great hall and it was somehow built over in the 1600s and not discovered again until 1979.


This dragon on Saint Ethelbert's gate at the top of Cathedral Close celebrates his and his guild's munificence in funding the building of the gate after the townspeople stormed and burned the Cathedral's monastic buildings in protest at Norman taxes.
Toppe, being an Englishman who had risen to power under the Normans would have been keen to appease the Plantaganet Norman King but proud enough to assert his own power as an Englishman on the new monument.

So that's the oldest surviving timber dwelling house left to us.

Norwich has a vast treasury of early mediæval houses, from the earlier but stone-built Music House, just along King Street, to the fabulous Stranger's Hall, a vast Elizabethan house that's now a museum. And indeed many others that I may well wander into on my travels.

The city was ridiculously rich in the pre-Tudor period, rivalled only by Venice, but with the opening up of the cloth trade its fortunes gradually declined after the reign of Elizabeth the First and - due to its isolation behind the fens - it was ignored and remained untouched and unchanged for centuries, which has left us with a fantastic treasury of original mediæval buildings.
Even though a disastrous "slum clearance" policy in the 1930s and Nazi bombing a few years later deprived us of perhaps seventy percent of the best examples in the city it still has one of the finest stocks of beautiful mediæval buildings anywhere.