Facing page, The Tudor House frontage - a 1640s façade. This page (left) to the rear, and its replanted garden. Left (middle), traceried grandeur of the Great Hall; Left (bottom), the Norman ‘King John’s Palace’; Below, extraordinary Tudor ship graffiti have been uncovered during conservation
Pirates and profits
Southampton City archaeologist Dr Andy Russel on Tudor House
IN the Norman period Southampton received a boost due to its position between England and northern France, and merchants built large stone houses along the shoreline. The best preserved of these, now known as King John’s Palace, is the earliest structure on the Tudor House site, and was built with high-quality Isle of Wight stone from Quarr, topped with a roof of West Country slate. Behind the row of Norman houses on the quay, medieval Southampton sat at the top of a steep slope. A lane on the north side of King John’s Palace ran from the town to the quay and would have been a busy thoroughfare. After a French raid on Southampton in the mid 14th century the Norman houses were
partly demolished, their frontages were turned into the town wall, and the merchants moved from the quayside at the east of the Tudor House plot to new houses on the west side, fronting St Michael’s Square and Bugle Street. By the mid-15th century the street was lined with houses, each with a stone cellar. By this period the good quality Quarr was exhausted, and cheaper Bembridge and Binstead stone, also from the Isle of Wight, was used. The house adjacent to the lane was a Capital Tenement, one of the largest houses in the town. By the late 15th century the Capital Tenement and the two houses to its south were in the hands of John Dawtrey, a Sussex merchant. He demolished most of the earlier houses to create what we now know as Tudor House. We can pinpoint this to 1491/2. Dawtrey’s house consisted of a long room on the street with three chambers above,
one furnished with a Baltic oak panelled ceiling. Behind it he built a large hall, aligned north south and standing two-and-a-half storeys high, with two more chambers above it in the roof. The dendrochronological results show that he retained earlier timber-framed houses to the south and west, and they date from the 1460s and 1440s respectively. Evidence in the roof spaces show the house had a slate roof. Dawtrey’s house was built in the year he became mayor. The large hall had an impressive stone fireplace and traceried windows at the high end, with two doors leading to the service area. An entrance passage from the street prevented visitors from straying into the private areas of the house. Dawtrey’s house passed through various wealthy owners until it came to the Clungeon family in the early 1600s. Between 1570 and 1620 initials, dates and pictures were inscribed in the upstairs chambers. During conservation these images became clear. Ian Friel, historical consultant and historian with an interest in shipping, studied the
graffiti. The collection includes at least 27 ships, some almost certainly drawn by sailors, but there is a plethora of other images – men, monograms, animals and strange symbolisms. There are also pictures of considerable importance, such as a privateer, or pirate ship, from the age of Drake and the Spanish Armada; a very early, undocumented version of the British flag, and some rather subversive sketches of men of authority. By 1640 the house had received a face lift; literally, when a prefabricated timber-
framed façade with wide, leaded windows was hoisted up and pegged to the front of the building. A fourth chamber was added at the south end of the upper storey, presumably to make the house look larger and more impressive. It is this house that we see today.
Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011 45
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