Notes from the Tudor Torture Chambers

Hokay … so the Boardman floor is almost totally removed and revealing hidden secrets.

While two of the Norfolk Museums folk play the "You look down; I'll look up, then we'll change round and start a nod-a-thon" game, Tim notices some Tudor graffiti that was hidden within the floor thickness and inexplicably gives a Nazi salute.

Looks like I'll be putting in yet another section of glass floor to display this from up above. Some nice sideways lighting to bring out the relief more sharply and an explanatory touch-screen doohickey.

There appear to be two sets of figures kneeling at a crucifixion, one with the traditional Catholic Christian cross and one with the Greek Orthodox cross, plus an angry-looking man brandishing a sword above his head. No doubt we'll learn more once it's carefully cleaned and recorded.

More scratchings from the Tudor torture chambers, including what looks like Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar on the way to the Life of Brian film set … "Following a star? Following a bottle more like!"

Plus some swords, crosses, heraldic devices and a couple of unfortunate cement plaques from "10/9/31" which would have been the tenth of September, 1831 just as Salvin was re-facing the keep.

More from the pages of history as we turn them …

Wide Open Spaces

 

Enjoy these. For the first time ever we now have the complete keep stripped out and it's BIG!

No more prison buildings, no more Tudor torture chambers, just lots and lots of wide open space.

Just a few more pieces of Boardman's floor to be removed and we can begin reconstruction.

Once the Great Hall is complete you'll be able to walk in through the main arched doors from the Bigod Tower (top right) and not fall to your death. Groovy!

Innovative wiring solutions!

Boardman's roof-supporting stone columns and arches sit on top of the remains of the original spine wall, destroyed by Soane to make way for his prison cell blocks.

It's a fantastic space to just stand and gawp.

Unfortunately it will never be seen like this again (at least for many more centuries) so make the most of it. I just wish you could stand there and breathe it all in with me.

Next time: Tudor torture victims' graffiti uncovered at last!

Floating Æthereally

Gabriela gazes up at the top of the Bigod Tower, Britain's first flat-roofed porch extension.

Nobody's been able to see this properly since the 1700s but we're changing that. Where I'm standing is in the upcoming, glass-walled Education Centre atop what was the old 1960s block (currently being smashed to bits for which HUZZAH!); Gabriela is floating æthereally in the air just outside.

Hokay, so she's actually standing on some scaffolding and leaning on a safety rail but were that not there she'd be floating somewhat æthereally … or falling with a scream … er …

Betwixt us and the keep, one floor down will be a spiffy glass-roofed atrium so visitors will be able to see the east keep wall and the Bigod Tower in all their glory once more.

While we're here, let's nip up on the roof and see what we can see …

Quelle surprise: it's Norwich Cathedral.

This is from the south-west; I usually see it from the east end out of my office windows.

…and here's my office from the castle keep roof.

An award-winning 1969 Brutalist "masterpiece" overlooking the river and Pull's Ferry. I'll be moving out of at the end of the month as it needs a complete overhaul which will take at least a year.

 

The temporary office we're renting is only a two-minute walk from the castle which should make things a whole lot easier for my creaky old hips. It also has the unheard of luxuries of heating and cooling! No more scarves, woolly hats, thermals, lap-blankets and hot-water bottles in the winter and the ability to breathe in the summer. 

When we - eventually - move back those amazing things will have been added to our old office. I can't wait! In the meantime, look out for more Norwich Castle updates.

More Progress at the Castle

The unfeasibly small hammer from the previous post has at last done its work (each flint had to be recorded before being removed for storage while we tunnelled through the wall) and so here's a photo of the interior of the keep as never seen before.

All the prison era crap and Victorian tat has been stripped out of the keep and we're ready to get mediæval on its ass.

Hey, Let's Tunnel Our Way In To The Prison

Sounds like a plan …

Hell, the wall's only ten feet thick; hand me that unfeasibly small hammer.

And lo, they tunneled their way into the prison to find that it had ceased to be a prison a-hundred-and-fifty years ago.

We've been removing Boardman's floor to reveal the full volume of the keep.

See that door way up there on the right, with the fire exit sign? That's the original doorway into the Great Hall and pretty soon it will be restored to its original use.

You can make out the floor level of the Great Hall running round the keep walls.

And way over yonder, that big dark arched opening is the kitchen fireplace at the other end of the Great Hall. That's the door to the garderobes to the left and above those will be the minstrels' gallery.

That huge stone arch shape was going to support the main floor as part of William Rufus' original build in 1086 but it was abandoned when the east wall began to fall down the mound and was replaced with a massive spine wall (see the first couple of posts in the Norwich Castle link).

Just the other side of the three yellow guys is another yellow guy who's just crawled through the re-opened doorway in the top photo. That will be the main entrance to the archæological display area.

Tim, Gabriela and Erin wander off in search of coffee …

Nearly all the stripping out and archæological investigations have been done; it'll soon be time to start putting the Royal Palace of Henry the First back to how it should be. 

 

More to come … Don't miss it!

Twelve Cellists Play the Chase music from Butch and Sundance … Who Needs A Reason?

Radio 3 played this at me on my drive home just now and it cheered me the hell up. Hope it does the same for you.

Meanwhile, Back in the Land of the Crusty Cumtwang …

There is a bunch of occasionally amusing pedants sequestered in this sceptred isle who name themselves the Plain English Campaign.

Their raison d'être is admirable as they were founded in the dark, Thatcherite years when management gobbledygook conquered the world and sucked all meaning out of sentences.

Their own Gobbledygook Generator is an absolute joy, especially during dull meetings, but their success has led to the execrable horror that is the Microsoft Word "Conciseness" Tool (shudder).

This po-faced piece of crap constantly rebukes me for using English for the sheer joy of the language, nagging me that conciseness would make my document easier to read and suggesting the dullest possible alternatives to pleasurably purple prose.

'Twas reading Nashe that jogged me into this train of thought, when - rather than the plain English of, "King John, in the ninth year of his reign …", our Tom writes, "King John, in the ninth year of the engirting his anointed brows with the refulgent Ophir circle …" Much more fun, I am sure you'd agree.

A couple more examples from the same page; the first a description of the sea battle off Sluys, where our forces, having encountered the French fleet, "there so sliced and slashed them, and tore their planks to mammocks, and their lean guts to kites' meat, that their best mercy was fire and water, which hath no mercy, and not a victualler or a drumbler of them hanging in the wind aloof but was ribroasted …"

Lastly a description of the defensive walls of Yarmouth, "They have towers upon them sixteen; mounts underfonging and enflanking them two of old, now three, which have their thundering tools to compel Diego Spaniard to duck, and strike the wind-colic in his paunch, if he prance too near them."

Forsooth, marry and hey-nonny-no, I feel a distinct temptation eftsoones to commence a Campaign for the return of Elizabethan English. Who's with me?

Friday Morning Wood … Droop

Crusty Cumtwangs - Safe to Use at Work

To save you trawling back through old comments-threads, the byre-yard photo added a nice new word to Katie's scrabble list, but today I found a better one.

Reading Thomas Nashe's "Lenten Stuff" of 1599 - as one does - I came across a corker.

Nashe was one of the Shakespeare, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe gang of writers, poets and critics who liked nothing better than insulting one another in hilariously OTT purple prose pamphlets. Reading their diatribes is a good source of a Covid-busting giggle or three.

Anyhoo … In the intro to "Lenten Stuff", which responds to a critical pamphlet about a play he'd co-written with Ben Jonson the previous year which got banned and got them both a brief spell in the clink, our Thomas beautifully berates his critics for being "Those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cumtwangs" being "struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionism and snudgery …"

Much as I love "snudgery" my insult of the day simply has to be "crusty cumtwangs".

It actually means "miser" so it's safe to use it at work and I hope you introduce your colleagues to it at your earliest opportunity.

Lenten Stuff is available dirt cheap in the Penguin English Library paperback of Nashe's "The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works" (including some racy porn poetry which got him into all sorts of trouble).

It is actually a satirical piece in praise of Great Yarmouth, which, as long-standing Blogville residents will know is the arsehole of England. Anyone who can refer to that stinking shithole as "ten-thousand-fold delicate paramour of Neptune" and "redoubtable Sophy of the floating kingdom of Pisces" in the same paragraph has got to be worth a read.

Crusty cumtwangs. Use it today!

Where The Hairy Heck Am I?

Or rather, where the hairy heck was I when I took this photograph.

I'll give you a clue; it's at the entrance of the David Attenborough Building …

but then just about every city in Britain has a David Attenborough Building.