The Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries

In my previous blog post, I described Exeter Cathedral as the best example of the English Decorated Gothic style of architecture.  An important manifestation of this style is found in the cathedral’s stone roof bosses.  Roof bosses are the keystones at the intersection of ribs in the vaulting which in fact hold things together.  They serve an important function but may be quite plain in other Gothic churches.  In Exeter Cathedral, however, the Exeter roof bosses are done with relief carving that is highly decorative.  There are over 500 bosses in the cathedral, ranging in size from five inches in diameter in some of the side chapels to a yard across for the bosses running down the centre of the main vault.

There is no one theme to the carvings on the bosses.  Some show important biblical narratives and Christian stories with Old Testament characters such as Samson, the crucifixion, or the coronation of the Virgin.  Important religious subjects are often repeated in several parts of the cathedral.  The most famous of Exeter’s roof bosses is in the nave and shows the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral during the reign of King Henry II.  Some bosses feature angels, including one in the Quire playing a medieval violin.  Many, however, are mysterious such as the bosses of foliate faces, called Green Men in the 20^th century.  The meaning of the foliate faces to ancient peoples such as the Celts and the Romans is unknown.

Some of the Gothic roof boss carvings are realistic representations of nature to identify the flora or fauna represented.  Others present armorial bearings indicating noble families who contributed to the decoration of the cathedral.  Other are mythical or fanciful featuring dragons, mermaids or somebody’s dog.

My second Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery, Plague of a Green Man, uses the idea of the foliate faces in its title.  In her tour of Exeter Cathedral in 1380, the Lady Apollonia is shown both the Becket boss and the green man boss which is featured on the cover of my book, shown in the above picture.  The survival of the Becket boss in Exeter is especially interesting because King Henry VIII ordered all Becket references destroyed when he took the English church from Rome.  It is not possible to remove a roof boss because it is the keystone which holds the vault ribs together.  The canons of Tudor Exeter simply whitewashed the Becket boss, covered it over and so it survives to this day.

Medieval carvings such as the Exeter roof bosses would have originally been painted in brilliant colours.  Restorers through the centuries repainted the bosses and other carvings in more modern paint.  This was especially true for the centre bosses in the western end of the nave such as the Becket boss.  More recent restorers have been inclined to clean them and expose whatever is left of the original ancient paint.

For more on the Exeter Cathedral roof bosses, click on
http://hds.essex.ac.uk/exetercath/docs/introduction.htm .

Exeter Cathedral was rebuilt in the English Decorated Gothic Style primarily between 1275 and 1340.  This re-building project extended from the Lady Chapel at the east end to the carvings of the image screen on the west front.  Some features of the previous Norman cathedral remain, however.  The side towers were opened to make the Norman transepts of the new Gothic design.  The new Gothic nave was built on the foundation of the Norman cathedral using the Norman walls up to the sills of the windows.  Yet, the construction of the new edifice in just two-thirds of a century achieved a homogeneous consistency that makes Exeter the best example of English Decorated Gothic architecture.

Decorated Gothic architecture is more grandiose than the simpler Early English Gothic style found in places like Salisbury Cathedral, but it does not seem as extreme as the Flamboyant Gothic one finds in France.  In Exeter, the vaulting is boldly ribbed and features beautifully carved roof bosses at the intersection of ribs.  Exeter’s is the longest unbroken Gothic vault in England because there is no central tower to interrupt it.  A picture of the elaborate tierceron vaulting in Exeter is shown above.  It gets its name from some of the ribs called tiercerons which rise from the side pillars but do not all go to the centre of the vault.  Rather, they meet the cross pieces.

Another feature of the Decorated Gothic style is the tracery found in the windows.  There are variations in the tracery design from one window to the next, but each window on one side of the cathedral will have its tracery duplicated in the corresponding window on the opposite side even though the stained glass in the two windows may be quite different.  Much of Exeter’s stained glass had to be replaced after the damage of World War II but all the surviving medieval stained glass in the great east window was removed and hidden away early in the war and thus saved.

The north doorway on the west front was one of the last parts of the building to be finished and is in the later perpendicular Gothic style.  At the east end of the south side of the nave, there is a seldom-used door left over from the Norman period called the Brewer Door and of course, there are the two Norman towers mentioned earlier.  These Norman style features are the exceptions.  Most of the architecture of this magnificent building in Exeter is a perfect example of the English Decorated Gothic style.

For more information on the Exeter Cathedral Architecture, click on http://www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk/_assets/Education/141107%20A%20History%20of%20Exeter%20Cathedral.pdf .

The image screen on the west front of Exeter Cathedral is one of its medieval treasures.  It contains three registers of deep-relief stone carvings of angels, kings and knights, apostles and prophets.  The lowest register is a horizontal row of 25 demi-angels or half angels, carved from the waist upward.  All the figures are carved in local limestone brought from Beer in Devon in 1342 to 1348.  Beer stone is wonderful for the carver, in this case a man named William Joy, but the limestone has not held up well to the elements encountered on the west front of the cathedral over nearly seven centuries.  A few of the angels have been replaced but many details of the figures are badly eroded away in most cases.

The second register was carved between the 1340’s and 1380, the year in which my story, Plague of a Green Man, is set.  William Joy’s original plan also had niches for 25 statues in this register.  Ten statues in this row date to the 1340’s.  They include eight kings and two knights as well as two demi-kings.  Many of the kings are seated.  Work on this register stopped with the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and then resumed in the 1370’s, perhaps by a man named John Pratt.  Seven of his statues survive to the present.  In general, these statues in the second register have fared much better than those in the register below.

The first two registers formed the image screen that my heroine, Lady Apollonia, would have encountered when she visited Exeter Cathedral in 1380.  Today we see bare stone, but in her time, each of the statues would have been brightly coloured, as shown in the reconstruction above.  After viewing a colourful image as in the reconstruction, she walked around its north end to enter the cathedral through its, at that time, brand new north porch.

A third, upper register of Exeter’s image screen was added in the 1460’s, some 80 years after my heroine’s visit to the cathedral.  It consists of 35 statues, many of which are apostles along with some prophets.  A few statues have been replaced over the years, and all their colour has been worn away or removed.  Still, by looking at the contemporary screen, we can get some sense of what my heroine would have seen at the time of her visit in the 14^th century.

For more information on the Exeter Cathedral Image Screen, click on
http://demolition-exeter.blogspot.com/2013/05/exeter-cathedral-image-screen.html .

Earlier this year I have done postings on Exeter Cathedral (September 5) and its Minstrels’ Gallery (September 9) in which I have discussed the influence of the cathedral on my life and the inspiration it has given me in creating the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries.  If you wish to see my September postings, click on https://blogs.valpo.edu/ellenfoster/2016/09/ .  My last posting discussed the Cathedral Close.  For the next few weeks I would like to do more postings on the topic of Exeter Cathedral which I knew and studied as a steward and tour guide during the four different years my husband and I lived in Exeter.

Exeter Cathedral has this status as a church because it has the throne or cathedra of the bishop of the local diocese.  There are many dioceses in England and were fewer in number in medieval times.  Not all great churches are cathedrals.  In London, for example, Saint Paul’s is a cathedral while the great Westminster Abbey was originally a monastic church and is now a Royal Peculiar.

The exterior image screen on the west front of the cathedral is something that I wish to discuss in some detail because two of its three registers of carvings had been completed when my heroine, the Lady Apollonia, visited the cathedral in Plague of a Green Man.

The architecture of the building is essentially English Decorated Gothic of the 13^th and 14^th centuries, but certain parts are more ancient.  The side towers had been built for the original Norman cathedral and were incorporated into the Gothic building, as was the outline of the nave whose walls are Norman up to the sills of the windows.

Tomb effigies in Exeter Cathedral are important to my stories.  A medieval knight’s effigy in the south aisle inspired me to visualise the first title in my series of medieval mysteries, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof.  Another Exeter effigy was part of the inspiration for Memento Mori, the third book in the series.  Yet another of the cathedral’s knight’s effigies in the north choir aisle which included the knight’s horse, inspired the memorial which the Lady Apollonia commissioned after the death of her son, Sir Alwan, in that story.  The aristocratic effigies of the Earl of Devon, Hugh Courtenay and his duchess in the south transept of Exeter were helpful in providing information about the nobility’s dress in the late 14^th century.

For more on Exeter Cathedral, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_Cathedral .

As Christmas approaches, this is a good time for me to talk about a medieval Christmas and how differently it would have been celebrated in the 14^th century.  A description of the holiday is celebrated near the end of my second book, Plague of a Green Man.  Some ancient aspects of the celebration of Christmas in 1380 have come down to us today, but we have added much more to the celebration that was not part of Christmas in Lady Apollonia’s day.

The name of the holiday “Christmas” comes from the Middle English usage “Christ’s Mass” when on the 24th and 25th of December, there were three masses celebrated:  the Angel’s Mass at midnight, Shepherd’s Mass at dawn, and the Mass of the Divine Word during the day.  In my story, Plague of a Green Man, Lady Apollonia and her husband are able, with her chaplain and household, to observe each of the masses in their family chapel newly built in Exeter House.

A holiday banquet was also an important part of the celebration of Christmas in medieval times.  We often have turkey for our Christmas dinner, but turkeys came from the New World more than a century after the time of my story.  Instead, a medieval family that could afford it would prepare a yule boar for the feast.  More humble tables might substitute a meat pie shaped like a boar.  Churches, chapels, and homes were colourfully decorated with ivy, mistletoe, holly, and anything green in the midst of winter.

In my story, the Lady Apollonia’s Exeter House also included a crèche created outdoors in the garden by Friar Francis, the Lady’s chaplain.  The first actual Christmas crèche was a Franciscan holiday tradition begun in the early 13^th century by Saint Francis of Assisi that became very popular throughout Europe.  The picture above shows a modern Christmas crèche that we found in Lichfield Cathedral in England.  The medieval version put the emphasis on the Christ child and the animals while the more contemporary crèche has added Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and wise men.

Christmas was not a single day in the year.  All of Advent was a part of its celebration and involved fasting before the major feast on Christmas day.  It continued until Epiphany, 12 days later.  Some folk even prolonged their festivities for forty days after Christmas until February 2.  That part of the holiday began as an ancient pagan festival but became Candlemas in the Christian calendar or alternatively celebrated the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.

There were special religious days immediately after Christmas as well.   First an important saint’s day honoured Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, rather than the Boxing Day holiday on modern English calendars for December 26.  The day after that was dedicated to Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, while December 28 was Holy Innocents’ Day commemorating the male children killed by King Herod.  We also should remind ourselves that gifts were not exchanged on Christmas Day but on New Year’s Day.

To learn more about medieval Christmas, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas or on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas .

The Prologue of Plague of a Green Man, the second book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery series, opens in a blinding fog on Dartmoor not far from the city of Exeter in Devon in the year 1380.  Dartmoor is southwest of Exeter where I lived with my husband four different years in the late 1980’s and 90’s.  In 1951 Dartmoor became the first English national park covering an area of 368 square miles.  Lou and I enjoyed every opportunity we could find to hike and explore Dartmoor National Park

Six major rivers flow in various directions towards the sea from their sources in the peat deposits of Dartmoor but all the moor takes its name from one, the River Dart.  I use the eastern part of Dartmoor as my setting in the Prologue of Plague of a Green Man.  Brandon Landow, the disreputable pardoner in my stories, seeks to meet someone in Grimspound but gets lost in a dense fog so common on Dartmoor.  He eventually finds a flowing stream and follows its path downstream along the Wray Brook until he reaches habitation and a church in the village of Lustleigh.  Unbeknownst to him, Grimspound was a Bronze Age settlement having been abandoned for millenia.

There are many churches on Dartmoor that go back to the medieval period, including the Church of Saint John in Lustleigh which plays a role my story.  Only the north aisle has been added since the time of my story.  We found the parish church in Bovey Tracey to be particularly interesting because it is said to have been founded in 1170 by William de Tracey as penance for his being one of the four knights who murdered Thomas Becket.

The medieval church in Brentor, on the western side of Dartmoor, is the highest church in Britain as well as the fourth smallest.  The church of Buckland in the Moor is constructed from local granite and though much of its present building is 15^th century, it has a, 11^th century Norman font and a beautifully preserved 14^th century wood screen.  Widecombe in the Moor has a church tower which provides commanding views over the village and surrounding moorland.  Finally, there were monastic churches on Dartmoor such as Tavistock Abbey which is left in ruins after the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII.  Buckland Abbey near Yelverton survived the Dissolution because the new owner built a fine residence for himself right over the church as you can see in the picture above.  The house is now open to visitors through the National Trust.

For more information on Dartmoor, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor .

The Prologue of Plague of a Green Man, the second book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery series, opens in a blinding fog on Dartmoor not far from the city of Exeter in Devon in the year 1380.  Dartmoor is southwest of Exeter where I lived with my husband in the late 1980’s and in the 1990’s.  In 1951 Dartmoor became the first English national park covering an area of 368 square miles.

There are signs of human life from the Neolithic period or New Stone Age but Dartmoor was sparsely populated until the early Bronze Age.  Then, things changed.  Archaeologists have found the largest collection of Bronze Age remains in all of Britain on Dartmoor.  The climate was warmer in the Bronze Age, and a good-sized human population had moved into these uplands clearing the forests for farming.  They created tracts of open moorland which eventually, as the climate cooled, became less hospitable and eventually covered with heather. It was eventually abandoned and no longer cultivated.

Much of our hiking on Dartmoor helped Lou and me to learn of interesting survivors of the pre-historic period: menhirs or standing stones, man-made rows of standing stones, as well as cists or burial tombs, and cairns or human-made stacks of stones.  A cist near Postbridge is pictured above.  The remains of an estimated 1500 hut circles are scattered throughout Dartmoor.  In the Bronze Age, Grimspound, a place mentioned in my story, contained 24 huts within a stone enclosure of about four acres.  The remains of this settlement have been excavated and can be visited.

We often encountered clapper bridges, made of horizontal slabs of stone, usually granite, which are another ancient and unique feature of the moor.  There is a large one in Postbridge dating back to at least 1380.  Other smaller clapper bridges, perhaps much older, are scattered around Dartmoor.  Many of the towns and villages of Dartmoor date back to the medieval period, and our hikes took us to one medieval village, located near Hound Tor that survives only in ruins.  We never learned why it was abandoned.

More recent history of Dartmoor involves extensive extraction of granite from the moor to build such things as the early 19^th century London Bridge.  One can find unused corbels for this bridge near Swelltor Quarry as well as evidence of the former narrow gauge railway that once ran from Plymouth to Dartmoor.  When this London bridge was replaced in the 20^th century, it was moved to Arizona.  A very different early 19^th century development on Dartmoor is the prison built at Princetown by French and American prisoners of War.  We found a stained-glass window in the church in Princetown given by the Daughters of the War of 1812 to commemorate the American prisoners who also helped to build that church.

For more information on Dartmoor, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor .

The Prologue of Plague of a Green Man, the second book in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery series, opens in a blinding fog on Dartmoor not far from the city of Exeter in Devon in the year 1380.  Dartmoor is southwest of the city of Exeter where I lived with my husband four different years in the late 1980’s and in the 1990’s.  In 1951 Dartmoor had become the first English national park covering an area of 368 square miles.  There are signs of human life on the moor from the Neolithic period or New Stone Age as well as the largest collection of Bronze Age remains in Britain.  The climate was warmer in the Bronze Age than in the 14^th century, and a good-sized human population had moved into these uplands clearing the forestland for farming.  They created tracts of open land which eventually, as the climate cooled, became covered with heather when it was abandoned and no longer cultivated.

The centre of Dartmoor is dominated by many towering outcroppings of granite called tors which sit on a granite base of 240 square miles.  There are 160 of these tors on Dartmoor.  Much of the underground granite is covered by great deposits of peat which absorb water like a huge sponge.  Such peat deposits are called bogs, a phenomenon popularised by J. Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Dartmoor, too, is a wild upland country and being just ten miles from the centre of Exeter, we found it to be a glorious place for hiking and exploring getaways when we were living in Exeter.

Six major rivers flow in various directions towards the sea from their sources in the peat deposits of Dartmoor.  All the moor takes its name from the River Dart, one of these six rivers.  I use the eastern part of Dartmoor as my setting in the Prologue of Plague of a Green Man when Brandon Landow, the disreputable pardoner in my stories, seeks to meet someone in Grimspound and gets lost in a dense fog so common on Dartmoor.  He eventually finds flowing water in the fog and works his way downstream on Wray Brook until he reaches habitation and a church in the village of Lustleigh.

The slopes and valleys around the sides of Dartmoor are often wooded providing a sharp contrast with the central moorland which is open range for grazing sheep, cows, and wild ponies.  To negotiate bogs when we were hiking on the moor, Lou and I learned to follow in the footsteps of livestock who always seemed to know where it was safe to walk.  A fascinating anomaly in the moorland of Dartmoor is near the village of Two Bridges.  It is called Wistman’s Wood and is nine acres of high altitude oak woodland growing out from the granite slabs covering the earth. Wistman’s Wood survives in the shelter of a southwest slope of the moor, and some of its gnarled trees are shown in the picture above.

For more information on Dartmoor, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor .

In my first book in the Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof, my heroine, Lady Apollonia, journeys from her home village of Aust to visit Cliffbarton, a fictitious village in the Exmoor region of Somerset.  Exmoor is a sparsely populated, hilly moorland in western Somerset and northern Devon and includes 34 miles of coastline along the Bristol Channel.  It takes its name from the River Exe whose source is in the centre of Exmoor before it flows south  to reach the English Channel.  The area of Exmoor became a national park in 1954.

Along the coast of Exmoor by Porlock Bay, I created the fictional village of Cliffbarton which Lady Apollonia visits with her maid, Nan, in the first book.  Dunster is a real village on the eastern edge of Exmoor where my heroine stayed overnight on her way to Cliffbarton and on her return.  There is an Old Nunnery built in Dunster by Cleeve Abbey in 1346 with the intention of housing nuns.  Although it never served this purpose, I have used the idea of the nunnery as a place where the Lady Apollonia and her maid could find accommodation for the night.  The ancient castle on the hill or tor from which Dunster takes its name dominates the town.  It overlooks the High Street and the Wool Market, an important part of the economy of Dunster for many centuries.

Exmoor shows signs of human habitation from the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age onward.  The Tarr Steps on Exmoor is a clapper bridge, made up of horizontal slabs of stone, dating from about 1000 bce.  One can also find standing stones and prehistoric burial sites on Exmoor.  The photo above shows me standing in 1993 with two English friends near a vertical stone called the Longstone in Exmoor.

Just a few miles from fictional Cliffbarton are two more ancient sites on Exmoor which I have visited with my husband.  One is a Saxon church at Culbone called Saint Beuno’s, although its porch is 13^th century.  It is thought to be the smallest parish church in England.  Another ancient site is the village of Selworthy which is mentioned in the Domesday Book in the 11^th century.  The contemporary village of Selworthy is the perfectly charming Somerset village, full of flowers and picturesque thatched roofed cottages. 

Our travels have taken us to the source of the River Exe near Simonsbath.  Although this is near to the Bristol Channel, the river flows into Devon where it passes through the town of Tiverton and the city of Exeter, eventually flowing into the English Channel at Exmouth.  Other rivers flow out of Exmoor into the Bristol Channel such as the East and West Lyn which meet at Lynmouth.

For more information on Exmoor, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmoor .

Chepstow Castle in Wales is important to the story of my first Lady Apollonia West Country Mystery, Effigy of the Cloven Hoof.  Two of the young men in Lady Apollonia’s affinity, Alwan and Owen, have a Welsh background.  Both can speak the language and love to sing Welsh songs and ballads whenever they are together serving the Lady.  Apollonia sends them on a mission to Chepstow Castle in Wales which is only five miles away from Aust.  Today it requires ten minutes to drive that distance using the modern motorway bridge across the River Severn, but in 1400, Alwan and Owen had to use the ferry to cross the mile-wide river.

Their assignment took them to Chepstow Castle, the oldest post-Roman stone fortification in Britain, having been started in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest.  The castle had been enlarged and strengthened in the centuries that followed, but by the time of Alwan and Owen’s visit, it was declining in military importance and had fallen into a state of decay by the 18^th century.  Although much of it is in ruins today, the castle has become a tourist destination in more recent times, managed by Cadw, the official government guardian of the heritage of Wales.  My husband and I, along with our younger son and his wife, visited the castle in 2003.  The picture above shows the castle at the time of our visit.

The footprint of the castle is unusual as dictated by its geography.  It is not laid out concentrically but rather stretches along the River Wye which is another of England’s tidal rivers.  Particularly at low tide, the steep river banks below the high walls of the castle make it a formidable obstacle to attack from the river.  Because it is situated on a narrow ridge parallel to the river, even an approach from the land side is imposing and challenging.

For more details on Chepstow Castle, click on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chepstow_Castle or on
http://www.castlewales.com/chepstow.html .