This Week at Ashdown

The conservation work is about to start! The portable cabins have gone up on the lawn in front of the house, looking curiously like the prefabricated huts that occupied the same position during the Second World War when US, Canadian and British troops were stationed at Ashdown. You can just see the main house peeking over the top in this rather rainy scene!

Before the work gets going, here are a few pictures giving an idea of some of the work that needs to be done:
Extensive repairs to the cupola. Yes, it does look a bit weatherbeaten!

Repair and replacement of the chalk blocks in the external walls. You can see how much of the chalk has worn away here on the south front of the house.

Re-laying of the Cotswold stone slates on the main roof and dormers. This was a photo taken a few years ago, the last time the house underwent some work.

Meanwhile the house is still open and guided tours of the interior and the portrait collection continue. On Wednesday it was very busy with a lacemaking demonstration in the Information Centre, a display by the Sealed Knot in front of the house and wood-turning in the grounds. Photos of all of that next week, I hope, when the sun will be shining!

Conservation in Action at Ashdown

Ashdown House is extending its presence on the web. Yes, we have gone digital with a Facebook page at http://on.fb.me/orrjXp and a Twitter account @AshdownHouseNT for short and sweet updates on everything that's going on at your favourite 17th century hunting lodge! The main reason for this is that in a couple of weeks time the scaffolding will be going up and a conservation project will be starting. The purpose of the project is to re-roof the house and to do major structural repairs. The progress of the project will be shared here on the blog and visitors to the house will be able to take special tours to see the conservation work in action. It's a very exciting time for all those of us who work at Ashdown and we will be able to see this amazing house with the roof off and to learn much more about its history, design and construction, plus all aspects of the conservation process. I hope that you will enjoy following progress here and on Facebook and Twitter, and that those visitors who can join us at Ashdown will enjoy seeing conservation in action!

Geocaching at Ashdown Park

This summer the National Trust is promoting the joys of geocaching. Here is a link to their site and a list of some of the Trust land where there are geocaches to be found. Geocaching is a high tech treasure hunt; here is the NT's description of what it entails:

"Geocaching is an exciting outdoor adventure for the whole family. It’s a treasure hunt for the digital generation, where you can enjoy the freedom of being outside and discovering new places. All you need is a handheld GPS device and a sense of fun. A geocache or ‘cache’ is a small waterproof treasure box hidden outdoors. Geocachers seek out these hidden goodies guided by GPS, which uses coordinates or ‘waypoints’ that can be sent directly to a GPS device from opencaching.com. Simply choose a geocache to find and click ‘send to GPS’.

On the side of a windswept mountain or on an expanse of beach, there are geocaches hidden right across the UK. Most have been set up by keen members of the public with our permission. But some, organised by our staff, also mark out a trail where your mission is to seek out more than one cache as part of a walking route.

Once you’ve found the treasure box – what will you discover inside? Most caches tend to have a log book for you to leave a message in and the satisfaction of finding the box is a reward in itself. But often you will also find a strange array of trinkets that people have left to swap. These can range from a key ring or a small toy to a pine cone or a pretty pebble. It’s important to remember that if you take a treasure out of the box, you should leave another trinket in its place. So come prepared! Always leave the cache in the same place and in the same condition as it was found for the next visitor. Sometimes there may even be a clue leading you on to more hidden treasure nearby."

Ashdown Park is one of the many places where geocaches have been hidden with the Trust's permission. These range from a special trail through the woods to a spectacular hide high on the top of Weathercock Hill to an earthcache exploring the sarsen stones. Here is a link to one of the caches to give you a taster!

The Lime Avenue

The Lime Avenue at Ashdown, which runs north from the car park, parallel to the North Avenue, is in full blossom at the moment and the scent is beautiful. The trees also hum because of the number of insects harvesting the nectar! As a tribute to the beautiful lime trees and their scent I am posting up a couple of lime blossom recipes that you might like to try.


The Wild Man Wild Food site offers Carragheen Wild Cherry Mousse, which can be made with lime blossom rather than cherries. It sounds delicious. Check out his recipes here!


Lime blossom tea is also a soothing remedy with a sweet aroma. To make lime blossom tea, pour one cup of boiling water over one teaspoon of the dried flowers. Cover the pot and let the tea brew for about ten minutes. Lime blossom tea can be taken as a herbal tea to sooth anxiety and fatigue and also as a remedy for fevers.

Sir William Craven - Gentleman?

On Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend a performance of The City Madam at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. This would have been enough of a treat on its own but the fact that the play, a satiric comedy, was written in 1632 and reflects on the consumer culture of the early 17th century was an added bonus. The story contrasts the city and the court, new money and old and as such throws a contemporary spotlight (okay, that's an anachronism but you know what I mean) on precisely the society in which Sir William Craven, founder of the Craven family fortunes, rose to prominence.

The playright, Philip Massinger, was the son of a provincial gentleman and a tradesman's daughter who was very familiar with the scramble up the social ladder in 17th century society. As such he was well-placed to ask the question "What makes a gentleman?" John Evelyn, in The Mode, 1661, complained: "How many times have I saluted the fine man for the master, and stood with my hat off to the gay feather, when I found the bird to be all this while but a daw." Clothes, it seems, not birth, did maketh the gentleman, at least superficially.

In scene two of The City Madam Sir Maurice Lacy makes fun of the gentleman Mr Plenty with the following words: "Thy great-grandfather was a butcher, and his son a grazier; thy sire constable of the hundred and thou the first of thy dunghill created gentleman." This demonstrates the arrogance but also the fear and dislike that the aristocracy had for those rich men on the rise.

One of the themes of the play is that there should be a distinction between the city and the court. Wives of city merchants, no matter how rich, should not ape their betters in the aristocracy, either in terms of their dress or in their proud attititudes. Their social climbing is ridiculous; inappropriate and a poor example. The character of Lady Frugal, for example, dresses with extraordinary ostentation in her silks and furs despite the fact that she is the daughter of a country farmer who was only "ladified" because her husband made a fortune.

Sir William Craven fits beautifully into this profile of a man on the make. He came from a poor family, he was a self-made man and he rose to be Lord Mayor of London. He married late, when he had made his pile, into the rich mercantile class to which he now belonged. He bought himself a knighthood. His wife was thereby "ladyfied." Craven was also renowned for his charitable giving - another feature of rich London merchants - both in the City and back home in Yorkshire where he endowed a school, rebuilt the parish church, paid for a bridge and causeway to be built and undertook many other good works. He was also a moneylender to the aristocracy, which increased his fortune immeasurably.

Despite this rampant and some might say entirely admirable social climbing, Craven was still very much a man of the upper middle classes, not the aristocracy, when he died in 1618. What happened next in the Craven family, though, was possibly even more interesting in terms of upward mobility. In his will Craven specified that his wife (for obvious reasons now one of the most sought-after widows in London!) should invest some of his billions in land. This she did, buying estates at Combe Abbey, Ashdown, and Stokesay amongst many others. This was an interesting move. Arguably land was a good investment but it also had strong social implications as well. Craven was posthumously moving his fortune and his family's social positioning from the middle to the upper class.

The transformation of a "poor" family into an aristocratic one was achieved in only two generations when Sir William Craven's sons William and John became respectively First Earl of Craven and Baron Craven of Ryton. The entire family in fact moved up the social scale with Sir William's brothers and sisters and their children becoming country gentry and moving on the edge of aristocratic society. At the end of the 16th century no one would for a moment have considered the apprentice William Craven to be a gentleman. In 1664 his sons were undeniably aristocrats in that they both held titles in the peerage.

Interestingly William First Earl of Craven chose not to further consolidate his family's position in the aristocracy through a rich marriage. A suggested betrothal between him and Lady Mary Cavendish did not come off and he never married at all. And although he was undeniably a member of the court and prominent in the aristocracy, old prejudices of blood and title still persisted. The First Earl was very much looked down upon as an arriviste by members of the "old" nobility. It was ever thus...

One Man and His Dog

Rupert of the Rhine, son of Elizabeth of Bohemia and nephew of King Charles I was renowned for his love of animals, a curious and rather endearing trait in a man also known for his ferocity in battle! In this he was said to take after his mother who, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, was recorded as “preferring her dogs, her hunting and her monkeys to her children, in that order,” according to her youngest child Princess Sophie. Perhaps this explains why Elizabeth was estranged from all her children at one time or another.

It was said that when Rupert was little more than a boy and captured during one of the battles in the Thirty Years War he had a pet hare to keep him company in prison and trained it to open the door of his cell. Now that I would have liked to have seen... Given that Rupert also had a pet dog at the time, it would have been interesting to see how the dog and the hare interacted.

The most famous of Prince Rupert’s dogs was a standard poodle called Boy or Boye, who ran with his cavalry. Boy was a particular target for the Roundheads, who became obsessed with the idea that he was Rupert’s familiar and attributed various magic powers to him, including that he was fluent in several languages, that he was invulnerable in battle and that he could put a spell on the enemy. Boy began to feature in Roundhead propaganda. In a pamphlet of 1643, “Observations upon Prince Rupert’s Dogge called Boy” the writer reported that Boy sat beside Rupert in council meetings and that the King himself allowed Boy to sit on the throne. Boy attended church services most… doggedly. After one Royalist victory it was said that Prince Rupert and his officers sat up all night drinking in celebration and raising a toast to Boy. The Roundheads tried both poison and prayer to destroy “this Popish profane dog, more than halfe a divill, a kind of spirit.” Although the dog was a white poodle they depicted him as black in the propaganda pictures in order to identify him with the traditional colour of the devil.

Almost inevitably, Boy fell prey to a Roundhead bullet at the Battle of Marston Moor. The Puritans claimed in another pamphlet, “A Dog’s elegy, or Rupert’s Tears” that Boy had been “killed by a valiant soldier who had skill in Necromancy.” The verse ran:

“Lament poor cavaliers, cry, howl and yelp,
For the great losse of your malignant whelp.”

In an age of superstition it is easy to see why men might attribute magic powers to such a creature and also why the enemy might use it as a symbol of the Royalist cause. To the cavaliers, Boy was a talisman and they mourned his loss very deeply. Boy went down in the Army records as the first official British Army dog.

Palatine Pets!

In a memorable line in her memoirs, Sophie of Hanover, youngest daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, commented that her mother preferred "her hunting, her dogs and her monkeys" to her children. This may be a little unfair - Sophie was renowned for her sharp tongue and her criticisms of Lord Craven, amongst others, were somewhat ungrateful perhaps - but there was certainly some truth in the fact that Elizabeth was devoted to her animals.

Even as a girl at Combe Abbey Elizabeth had a pet dog, a "ruffle dog" as he was referred to in the accounts when Lord Harington paid twelve pence for his shearing. She also had pet monkeys, who slept on beds of herbs and cotton that cost three pence, and parrots, whose cages were renovated by a joiner for three shillings and ten pence.

After her marriage Elizabeth took her dogs and her monkeys with her to Heidelberg where Frederick extended and modernised his palace to include a monkey house and menagerie. Friends sent Elizabeth pets; Irish dogs and more monkeys which were apparently shunned by the older ones already in residence. Elizabeth loved her monkeys so much they were referred to as her "jewels" and they became so conceited with her attention that they would come to no one but her. She would play with them every morning.

There is a story that when Frederick and Elizabeth were forced to flee Prague after the Battle of the White Mountain, a servant was hurrying through the palace checking that nothing of importance had been left behind and discovered that Prince Rupert had been left behind in the nursery. He rushed out to the carriage with the child, only to find that Elizabeth had made sure that her monkeys were safely on board! Whether or not this is true, by the time she had been in exile in The Hague for a few years, Elizabeth's menagerie had increased to thirty dogs and monkeys. Jack, the most senior monkey, would sit by her writing-desk in the salon. Apollon, her favourite dog, was a beautiful greyhound. Right until the end of her life, in fact, Elizabeth took solace in her menagerie and in her letters often enquired into the health of her relatives' pets whilst sometimes forgetting to ask after their family!

Some of the portraits of Elizabeth feature animals though in the 16th and 17th century the inclusion of an animal in a painting might have a symbolic meaning rather than indicate that it was necessarily a pet. Dogs in particular have been human companions for thousands of years and so might feature alongside other possessions. Their close connection to the sports of hunting and shooting also make them obvious choices to include. In Elizabeth's case, though, it seems likely that the animals that appeared in her portraits were real pets.

Of her family, Prince Rupert notably inherited Elizabeth's love of animals (despite having had to take second place to a monkey) and next time I will be blogging about Rupert and his dog Boye.