The Great Hospital, Pt.2

Righto … Now you've seen the shabby state that buildings can get into after almost a thousand years of neglect and have glimpsed our desperate attempts to preserve what's left, let us venture inside the east end of St.Helen's Church where we will discover one of the most truly strange rooms I know of.

Laydees and gentlemen, pray allow me to introduce The Great Hospital's "Eagle Ward".

That's a doozy of a ceiling, isn't it?
Any guesses as to when it was painted and why?
Hokay, I'll tell you.

Way back in the 1370s, Bishop Henry Despenser (known to himself and his thuggish apologists as "The Fighting Bishop" but actually a particularly nasty mercenary in Pope Urban V's mad Vatican Army) was put in charge here when Urban got sick of him.
The Black Death raged all about. In 1371 almost half of the population of Norwich died of it and the streets would have resounded to the carters' Pythonesque cries of "Bring out your dead!"
And following hot on the pestilential heels of the Black Death came The Peasants' Revolt.

Eventually things started to settle down again and in 1381 Despenser himself put murder, rape and pillage behind him and rebuilt the chancel as an act of thanksgiving for the failure of The Peasants' Revolt.
While he was at it he spotted an opportunity to suck up to some royal patronage and decided to spruce the east end of the church up a bit for the visit in 1383 of Anne of Bohemia, King Richard the Second's new bride.

The black spreadeagle was her family motif and so the existing chestnut boarded ceiling - already almost two hundred years old - was decorated with carved and gilded bosses and framework to form 252 separate panels, in each of which was painted an eagle.

Six hundred and twenty-five years later it is still in remarkably spiffy condition, having survived a fire during Kett's Rebellion in 1549 (see old Norwich posts), another one in 1888 and a clutch of German bombs just across the road in 1942.

Now that we've admired the spectacular ceiling, we can lower our eyes and discover something truly strange and more than a little disturbing.

This is the upper floor that we mentioned yesterday and since the mid 1600s, the luckier among the city's elderly and infirm were housed here.
The current cubicles are Victorian and we'll take a good look around them in a moment, but what is truly scary is that these - with no running water until the 1950s and toilet facilities down a twisty staircase and out across several courtyards and alleys down toward the river - were still in use in the 1980s!

For a while this had been a unisex ward for the women, though the central corridor was a communal "snuggery" for everyone to use and was by all accounts quite a social gathering place.

Let's take a peek into one of the bedrooms, shall we?
Other than the obvious additions of contemporary newspapers (and a great copy of The Magnet comic with Billy Bunter on the cover) these rooms have remained exactly as they were when the last occupants were rehoused in the early 1980s.
Note the chamberpot beside the bed. Even in the eighties there were no inside toilets here and it was a fair old walk in the dark to get to the outside privy.

This is the other half of the same room.
Until quite recently this was all the space each person had to live in, but after a critical report in the 1950s every pair of bedrooms had a communal parlour between them made from what had been a third bedroom.

Again, until the fifties when the big old heaters were put in, the only heat came from a small fireplace at each end of the ward where the old folk used to huddle together.
I can vouch from many, many visits for the fact that this place is fucking freezing on all but the hottest summer days.

Here's one of the shared parlours between the bedrooms.
The trunk under the table is where the women's personal belongings would be kept.

Not much space for two crotchety old biddies to share their last years in, is it?
Check out the thickness of that partition.
There was no privacy here.
But of course, a few hundred years back, when the poor of the surrounding parish were living twenty to a room in dank, rat-infested cellars this was the height of luxury.

At least the residents had lovely windows, even though standing near them is like standing in front of an open freezer.
The buildings in the background are some of the more modern accommodation which Mike and I refurbished and extended during our time looking after the place. We'll take a look at those later in the week.

Another bedroom and parlour.
I remember my grandparents' homes feeling very similar when I was a lad. Dark furniture and bric-a-brac.
It makes me feel comfortable, as those of you who've seen my house with its dark furniture and bric-a-brac may have guessed.

There was a "snug" at either end of the ward where folk could gather round the tiny fireplace and stave off hypothermia.
Other than the chimneybreast itself, the walls here are icy to the touch and run with condensation in the winter.
Of course with only two puny little fireplaces in this cavernous hall the pitiful amount of heat they generated all went straight up to the ceiling and out through the high windows while drawing cold air in where the old folk huddled.

Here's where our nostalgia started to really kick in.
This kind of stuff was commonplace when I was young. Indeed it was still in use here until only twenty-five years ago.

We used to have a mincer like that! And bars of Fairy soap!
Boy, I wish we still had our old scales. I used to love playing with those weights when I was a nipper.

The running water was installed in the fifties. Before that, the ward had a designated "water carrier" to lug pails of cold water up here.

Having no toilet facilites folk had to rely on chamberpots and bedpans. With the open plan layout of the place that must have been pretty nasty at times.

Not as nasty as some of this lot, however. I shudder at the sight of that surgeon's knife.

Here was where the food was prepared for the poor old dears. Again, it only recently got running water.

Having said all that, by all accounts the residents loved the place - except for the cold and the lack of an indoor privy. But they were well cared for and could look out north to the river and south over the Cathedral and lie in bed and gaze at the lovely ceiling. Apart from two disruptive old gents who were expelled in 1631, everyone seems to have been happy here.

Up until the 1950s they were fed a diet of bread and gruel but had fourteen "Meat Days" spread throughout the year.
On Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays suet puddings were added to the menu plus ten ounces of butter and twelve ounces of cheese per week to snack on between gruel.
Residents were also given two pints of The Great Hospital's own beer per day as the water was unsafe to drink unless you really fancied cholera. The hospital's brewhouse only closed down in 1865 after the busybodies from the Temperance movement insisted on being paid a shilling a week in lieu of beer.

The last photo today shows one reason why it is always so bloody cold in the Eagle Ward.
Downstairs are the unheated storerooms and workshop of the caretaker and all that separates this freezer from the ward above is thin floorboards and several layers of rugs.

So … That was the weird and wonderful Eagle Ward of The Great Hospital.
Spiffy, huh?
Tomorrow we shall feast on eye candy when we wander the cloisters.