A small band from the museum gathered at St Thomas’ church this morning in preparation for their annual Christmas tree festival which looks to be lovelier than ever this year. It opens tomorrow, Tuesday, runs until Sunday 10th and is free.
What a magnificent setting for this delightful display each year!
A group of incredibly talented Salisbury Museum Volunteers have produced an amazing array of tree decorations, loosely linked to traditional folk tales and crafts. Amongst them are Sally, Mary, Elizabeth and Maggs, and look for the tiny star, front and centre, made from Downton lace by Pompi.
Many of the decorations were brought in anonymously. We hope that all our makers will see their work in the photographs here and go along to the church to see how wonderful the tree is, as a result of their efforts.
A Giant among greater giants
Thank you to all involved. Thank you to St Thomas’, and to all the other charities, organisations, businesses and schools who are part of the display. Do go along and enjoy it all, including refreshments and music.
Thursday 30th March saw me visiting the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, an excursion organised by Sarum U3A.
Largely eschewing the ‘10 things to see at the Victoria and Albert’published on their website, I instead took my friend Stephen Dunn’s advice to visit the Cast Courts where there is a display of ‘Casts of Headsfrom Salisbury Cathedral’ (Fig 1). Stephen is a former Head Guide at Salisbury Cathedral. The stone sculptures from which these casts were taken are still in the Cathedral, mainly in the Chapter House and are among the finest surviving English Gothic sculpture. The casts were made during the Restoration of 1855-6. Each face is unique (Fig 2) and it is considered possible that each is based on a real person known to the mason who carved it.
Fig 1 Casts of heads from Salisbury CathedralFig 2
In the event, these heads turned out to be not in the Cast Courts themselves but partway up a staircase leading to the Medieval and Renaissance (AD 300-1600) Gallery.
Returning to the Cast Courts proper, I visited the Tomb Memorials and was immediately attracted to that of Eleanor of Aquitaine, seen here (Fig.3) reading a book, I paid particular attention to Eleanor of Aquitaine because she is said to have been imprisoned (or at least kept under ’house arrest’) by her husband, Henry II, for 16 years at Old Sarum Castle, from about 1173 until Henry’s death in 1189.
Fig. 3. Effigy of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Despite her incarceration, Henry still ensured that Eleanor led a queenly lifestyle, with fine clothes and hunting and fishing; but she was no longer allowed to play her part in the governance of the realm.
Also present in this line-up of tomb memorials was the tomb memorial slab of an unknown person, but thought to be an effigy of Roger le Poer, Bishop of Salisbury, 1102-1139, Fig 3. On seeing the photograph, Stephen Dunn quipped that this is in better condition than the original which is still in the Cathedral!
Fig. 3 Tomb memorial slab of Bishop Roger le Poer
The Raphael Cartoons Gallery was also of interest in that one of the exhibits was a tapestry woven at the Mortlake factory after a design of Raphael. This was ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ (Fig 4) which was commissioned for Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke (1584-1650), whose Coat of Arms is in the upper border (Fig 5).
Fig 4 ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, after Raphael, showing the Coat of Arms of 4th Earl of PembrokeFig 5
The final object which captured my attention was in the ‘Britain 1500-1760’ gallery (Figs 6 and 7). This was a chair of carved and joined oak, made in Salisbury (1600-1620). The caption stated that ‘From about 1500 a new type of armchair developed in Britain. It had an open frame and a greater variety of carved and turned ornament. This example was made in the city of Salisbury in southern England, where this distinctive type was fashionable, heavily influenced by contemporary French armchairs.’
Fig 6 Armchair made in Salisbury, 1600-1620Fig 7
As noted in John Chandler’s book, Endless Street, ‘the joiners, who seem to have set themselves apart as a woodworking elite [and] their furniture made something of a reputation for Salisbury’ .Thus most of us will be familiar with the Humphry Beckham chimney-piece, erected as his memorial in St Thomas’ Church, and inscribed ‘Humphry Beckham who died the 2nd day of February Anno 1671 Aged 83 Yrs. His own worke’ (Fig. 8).
As also noted by Chandler, , ‘The pride of the Joiners’ Company was their own hall in St Ann Street. [It features] six grotesque carved mannikins, possibly the products of a Beckham imagination [which] may still be seen from the street holding the first-floor windows in position (Fig 9).
Fig 9 Joiners’ Hall showing grotesque carvings
The Joiners’ Hall was built in the 17th Century and perhaps designed to showcase their skills. The carvings supporting the windows are of grotesque figures including hermaphrodites with beards and breasts, to ridicule the councillors as being a ‘load of old women’. The Guild of Joiners met here until early in the 19th Century and the building is now owned by the National Trust.
Finally, regular readers may recall my Blogs1, 2 concerning the Laverstock kiln, for which an information card in the former Salisbury/Clarendon Gallery stated was in the British Museum. However a visit by me in 2020 failed to show any trace of it and, on my return to Salisbury, Adrian Green (Director) told me that it is, in fact, in the V&A. Well, an online search of the V&A catalogue before my recent visit provided no information, and neither did I find it when I was there.
A group from the museum walked from the Close to St Thomas’ Church this morning, towing a trailer (Cuthbert to some!) containing several packages…and a Christmas tree.
Housekeeper Val led the way, being most familiar with Cuthbert’s temperament, Volunteers Mary and Jane in attendance and Sally waiting at the church. The annual St Thomas Christmas tree Festival begins tomorrow and the church was buzzing in a convivial way with others, also flocking in with trees.
Some weeks ago Mary set things rolling and Volunteers were asked to make tree decorations with a Tudor Christmas flavour. As always, it happened. Lucy had written this in our blog in October
“Following the successful production of felt Tudor roses (2019) and, last year, the hanging banners, our ‘volunteer make’ this year is to produce small decorations to hang on a Christmas tree. These will decorate the Museum’s tree at the St. Thomas’s Christmas Tree Festival (Tuesday 29th November to Sunday 4th December)“
Thank you to makers Sally, Mary, Elizabeth, Maggs, and so many others whose names we don’t know. I hope you will see your contributions in the following images, go along and see them at St Thomas’ and come to the Volunteer Christmas Party to see the tree displayed there.
Don’t miss:
Volunteers’ Christmas Party
Wednesday 14 December at Salisbury Museum 2pm – 4pmThere will be mince pies, mulled wine and music
We are back with a Christmas Tree at St Thomas’ Church this year and we need Volunteer help to make it happen.
Lucy (Volunteer co-ordinator) writes this:
St Thomas’s Church Christmas Tree Volunteer Make
“Following the successful production of felt Tudor roses (2019) and, last year, the hanging banners, our ‘volunteer make’ this year is to produce small decorations to hang on a Christmas tree. These will decorate the Museum’s tree at the St. Thomas’s Christmas Tree Festival (Tuesday 29th November to Sunday 4th December) and in the Museum for Tudor Christmas on 10th December.
For those of you who sew there are some ideas (and materials for you to use) in the volunteer locker room, but don’t let this stop you from producing your own in any suitable materials, to fit in with the theme. Please return completed decorations to myself (Lucy) at the Museum by Friday 25th November. Thank you!”
Volunteer Mary Crane has, as always at moments like this, applied her inventive creativity and produced these lovely examples of what can made, using the materials available to us all in the Volunteer locker room:
There are no templates or patterns this year as it is hoped the simple shapes are easy enough to replicate, but felt, gold cord and ‘stuffing’ are available. Size? About 10/12cms or 4/5inches. Or try your own ideas. But please remember, keep Tudor and Christmas as your themes…
Do you remember this comment, from an earlier blog about churchwardens’ accounts for St Thomas’ and St Edmunds’?
“Then there was Hocktyde, and the mystery of the Irish, together with the wrecking of the Dissenters’ Meeting House in Castle Street in 1680.”
It isn’t always obvious what the churchwardens were writing about in their accounts. The spellings were often different and sometimes take some ‘translation’. Other references are to church matters or other events now almost lost to time.
In 1546 at St Thomas’, “…Cooles agaynst Xpsmas” was the buying in of coal.
In January of 1567, “the Ryngers at the Kings’s Buryall” were paid “xij d”. Henry VIII had died at the age of 55.
This was followed by “...vij yardes of Oscon’ brigges for to make Seynt Thomas a lenton’ clothe at iiij d the yarde…”
We haven’t found ‘Oscon brigges’ yet. Any thoughts?
There are several mentions of ‘Hocktyde’ in the accounts. It clearly refers to an important event in the Medieval calendar and involved, amongst other things, donations to the church. By the 1540s, St Thomas’ wasn’t receiving many of those. Resorting to Google, we find that Hocktide was a very early ceremony associated with the first Monday and Tuesday following Easter. Origins are not clear, but inevitably it seems that it eventually included much consumption of ale and kissing of the young women in the towns. A good source for all this is the Hungerford Virtual Museum site where it says::
“One (discredited) theory relates Hocktide to a medieval festival that may have celebrated the massacre of the Danes in England or the death of Harthacanute in the 11th century. Traditionally the festivities consisted of a practice called binding: the men of the parish tying up the women and demanding a kiss for their release. The next day the women would tie up the men and demand a payment before setting them free. The monies collected would then be donated to the parish funds.“
Hocktide in Hungerford today. (photo: the Telegraph)
Then, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, a time of civil unrest, war and plague, there are many mentions of Irish people passing through Salisbury, seeking help from the church.
In August 1643 “...an Irish gent. woman and her children” were given 2s 6d, then “...two poore Irish widdowes and children 1s 6d“. A few weeks later “…an Irish gent. woman 1s” and “...poore Irish woman and 6 children 1s” and “poore Irish Minister 1s”. In March 1644 it was recorded “…many Irish people 2s”, then another Irish Minister, an Irish doctor’s widow and children 2s and “...a poore Irish Lady, the Lady Tracy 5s.” There were many more the next year also.
These are apparently the dispossessed, immigrants, refugees, not the poor of England who were also suffering at this time. In 1641 there had been an uprising of Irish Catholics who didn’t like the way the political and religious winds were blowing in England. Some Catholic rebels drove out or killed thousands of Protestant settlers. Presumably our visitors to Salisbury were amongst those?
Unrest was everywhere at that time, not least Salisbury. Dissenters were repressed at the end of the Civil War. Northey in his ‘History of Salisbury’ (1897) relates this tale:
“Sunday 18 December 1680. Whilst the Mayor, Richard Minefye, was in London …(an) assault was made in the Meeting House in Castle Street. The intruders pulled down the pulpit and seats and broke the walls of the house and threw them into the main stream and took the names of several persons to prosecute them (they were suspected of plotting at meetings)”.
The churchwardens accounts had hinted at the growing schism between high and low church some years earlier. Those who came to St Thomas’ in 1664 were being encouraged to take “…some care how to take notice of persons that doe not come to the sacrament that so they may bee proceeded against according as the law requires.”
Three things that appear frequently in the 17th Century churchwardens’ accounts for St Edmunds’ and St Thomas’ are the need to conform with the frequently changing edicts about worship, the plagues, and the expense of the bells!
St Edmunds had become a stronghold of the Protestant Church, frequented as it was by the puritan-leaning cloth workers. They had ‘shown their colours’ decades before when they had pulled down their high altar during the early part of the Reformation but set it up again during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I. In 1648 it was the only church in Salisbury to ring triumphant bells for a defeat by Oliver Cromwell’s of the Royalist-supporting Scots. Only three years later, in 1651, St Thomas’, perhaps reluctantly, did join in when the Scots, under Charles II, suffered the final defeat of the Civil War. It is probably significant that the churchwardens’ accounts say “Ringing for the Victory at Worcester against the Scots, by the Mayor’s Order”.
At St Thomas’ they had also whitewashed over the King’s Coat of arms in the church at the creation of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, but were able to remove the whitewash a decade or so later at the Restoration. From the churchwardens’ accounts 1660/1: “washing the Kinges Armes and making them cleare 2/6″. And from the previous year :”The pulpit to be removed from the place where it now stands and sett where it last stood adjoining to the quiere and that … Mr J Cabball is desired to see it done some time this week.” This, as the puritan Commonwealth ideals began to slip and high church became acceptable again.
These middle decades of the 17th C were tough times. In 1646, in the middle of civil war, the plague had struck with a vengeance and the churchwardens at Thomas’ were desperate to find room for burials.
Loosely ‘translated’, this transcription of the accounts showed that they were required in December 1645 by the then Mayor to put together a census of the parishioners “by the next Friday”! It doesn’t explain exactly what this was for but it may have been to keep track of matters during the plagues, or to do with requirements for church attendance. But the following month “the scantnes of the burial place in the parish and the multitude of the Inhabitants therein” had them petitioning the Cathedral for space in “the ancient burying place (belonging to the said parish) in the Litten* of the Cathedral Church…”
They were prepared to open up and re-use the graves of dead “lately buryed” but were worried about infection. All this tells a grim tale.
The bells must have been a great worry. They seem to have been extraordinarily expensive to keep in good order and a constant drain on resources. In 1643/4 alone, the following sums were spent:
Bellropes £18 7s 6d; clapper 13s 6d; hanging treble bell 10s; Carpenters 8 days £1 and pieces of timber to strengthen the frame 4s; (more!) bellropes £16 6s 8d; bolt for the great bell 1s 6d; a clamp for a bell 4d; (and yet more!!) bellropes £15 6s 3d; and of course ringing the bells on special occasions, in this case for the visit of the Marquis of Hereford, 4s. The equivalent of that total in purchasing power today might be several tens of thousands of pounds.
Then there was Hocktyde, and the mystery of the Irish, together with the wrecking of the Dissenters’ Meeting House in Castle Street in 1680. No peace…… More on all of this later.
*Litten – an old Saxon word for ‘churchyard’ or ‘burial place’.
Thanks, as always to Newman and Howells ‘Salisbury Past’ (available in the Salisbury Museum bookshop),and, for the accounts, to Churchwardens’ Accounts for St Edmunds and St Thomas, published by the Wiltshire Records Society (in the Salisbury Museum library).
The Volunteer Research Group is still beavering away on its task to find out as much as it can on the huge number of objects destined (we hope) to be part of the displays in the planned new galleries.
Your blogger is looking at aspects of Salisbury in the seventeenth century. In many ways a grim time – Plague, Civil War, poverty – but lives went on, as they do, in spite of such things, and it makes for interesting history.
It is easy to get sidetracked, of course, and searching in the museum library is especially diverting. While looking for information on Richard Minifie (Mayor, 1681) I found myself drawn to a book of transcripts of Churchwardens’ Accounts for St Edmunds and St Thomas. It was published by the Wiltshire Records Society many years ago, and certainly saved a trip to the Wiltshire Records Office to try and cope with the originals.
The accounts for St Thomas’ 1651/52 showed that, between spending 10d on “scouring the pewter” and “paving the church, £3 16s 6d” they spent 12 shillings “Ringing for the Victory at Worcester against the Scots, by the Mayor’s Order”.
The Battle of Worcester, September 1651, was the final battle of the Civil War . Charles I had been executed in 1649 but trouble rumbled on, with his son, Charles II of Scotland (and eventually England) bringing a Scottish Army south , hoping to take London.
Charles II c 1660
Hopelessly outnumbered, the Scots were defeated. Charles returned to his lodgings in Worcester, then ducked out the back door when Cromwell’s men came to find him. The hunt was on!
When Charles II was eventually restored, after exile, to the throne of England in 1660, the Churchwardens at St Thomas’ recorded “Ringing on the day the KIng was Proclaimed, 18 shillings“. It was, perhaps a longer peal of bells than in 1650!
Charles II was famous for regaling friends and dinner guests with the story of Cromwell’s attempts to hunt him down, and it is a story re-told in another book in the museum library, Hatcher’s ‘Old and New Sarum or Salisbury’ written in the early 1800s.
More on this, and the Wiltshire connection, soon…..
The ’Coffee and Conversation’ topic earlier this month – ‘A photo adventure with Peter Read’ unearthed something of great interest to me, namely a collection of Medieval Pilgrim’s Badges found in Salisbury’ (Fig 1.)
Fig 1. Medieval pilgrims’ badges found in Salisbury
Among these was one described as ‘Monkey Physician standing on a Fish with Pestle and Mortar adding his own urine. A satire on medical practice’ (Fig 2).
Fig 2. The Monkey Physician
This was of interest to me as the pestle and mortar is one of the tools in trade of the alchemist and early chemists, and used as well as by pharmacists to crush various ingredients.
For some time now I have been researching the alchemist who was said to have inhabited a room above the north porch of St Thomas Church and a plaque near the North Door, recently removed (2019/2020), describes him dashing ‘to escape the noxious fumes of his experiments’. (Fig 3.)
Fig 3.
I have been curious to discover who this alchemist was and when (s)he lived. As I have been unable to find any source for this description, I have subsequently become curious as to who composed it, and from where they obtained their information.
One possible inspiration for this information was a snippet in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal of 18 January 1868 (Fig 4.) which describes a discovery made by the antiquarian, Rev. Edward Duke and written up in his Prolusiones Historicae.This describes five small crucibles which were found plastered over in a niche by the fireplace. Duke speculated that these crucibles were the utensils of an alchemist.
Since then, I have been engaged on a hunt for these crucibles, so far fruitless. I have also hoped that, if this alchemist actually existed, some further artefacts of his trade might perhaps be found. Indeed, I am disappointed that no such artefacts appear to be in the Drainage Collection. Hence my interest in the ‘monkey physician’ badge.
Fig 4. Snippet from Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 1868
Our colleague, Alan Clarke, kindly unearthed the Museum Record for the ‘monkey physician’ badge which is described as a livery badge made of metal/lead, being the head and torso of a monkey physician, made 1400-1429, and found in the River Avon in Salisbury at SU143302. It has the Museum Number SBYWM:1987.200.12.
The Grid Reference of this find places it at the River Avon opposite the Central Health Clinic (just north of Avon Approach).
Alan Clarke kindly directed me to the website of the Henfield Museum where there is an article entitled ‘The Mudlark Treasures of Graham duHeaume’. In this article, the author, Jason Sandy, describes DuHeaume’s extraordinary collection of fluvial treasures from both the River Thames in London and the River Avon in Salisbury and description of ’satirical badges’.
Satirical badges were produced in the Middle Ages, and the article quotes Brian Spencer from his book, ‘Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges’, Boydell Press (2010), in saying that they were produced to show “disapproval of the established order by parodying reality and by poking fun at hypocrisy and human behaviour generally, especially in the upper strata of society”. The medical profession was one of the most common targets of medieval satire and complaint. In the church of St Mary, Bury St Edmunds, a late 15th century roof-boss takes the form of an ape with a urinal, the universal emblem of the medieval physician.
Sandy’s blog goes on to say that, during the 1980s, Graham duHeaume found (in Salisbury) a wonderfully comical 15th century pewter badge depicting an ape standing on a fish and urinating into a mortar that rests on the fish’s head
The ape holds a long-handled pestle which he uses to stir or pound the contents within the mortar. It clearly illustrates what people thought about doctors and their wild concoctions in the 15th century!
The following is verbatim from Sandy’s blog:
“Monkeys were often seen as imitators of man. The famous bishop St Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), sometimes called the ‘last Father of the Latin Church’, claimed that the word simius derived from similitudo, because monkeys mimic what they see. Medieval bestiaries continued the same etymological tradition, suggesting that apes were so called because they ape the behaviour of human beings (1).
Monkey physicians combine satire with a serious moral in the same vein. At one level, they echo the widespread suspicion of ‘Doctours of Physik’, whom poets like Chaucer portrayed as those who ‘loved gold in special’. But this scene is more than satirical. As St Peter told the Jewish priest, only one physician could cure men – Christ. Whilemonkeys might ape physicians who purport to look after physical health, only priests were the true ‘doctors of souls’. Christ alone can cure men of their sins, their spiritual ailments.”
In their book, ‘Men and Apes’ (1966) Desmond and Ramona Morris write:
“The ape’s capacity for imitation gave rise to the odd notion that he deliberately copied human actions in order to convince people that he was really one of them. As a result of this, he became the prototype of the imposter, the fraud, the hypocrite and the flatterer. In particular, he came to represent persons of little worth, or base origin, who pretend to high position’. Further on the Morris’s comment that, ‘ Monkeys burlesquing human actions became very popular in humorous art. Clergy, scholars, doctors and aristocrats were portrayed as apes; so also were peasants, but much less frequently.”
The local Blue Badge Guide David Richards has written to me, saying:
“Salisbury Museum’s three (slightly different) grotesque ape physician badges are very striking. I believe the best interpretive source is Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum’s ‘Medieval Catalogue Part 2: Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges Brian Spencer (1990) Another informative source is the illustrator of the badges, Nicholas Griffiths FSA,“
This alerted me to consult the Medieval Catalogue from which I discovered that the Museum does indeed possess two such badges plus a fragment (head and torso) of a third. (Fig 5.)
Fig 5. Ape physician badges in Salisbury Museum
The first of these is described as ‘An ape, wearing a hood and standing on a fish, pounds the contents of a mortar with an immensely-long pestle, and adds a stream of urine to the concoction from his own over-large penis. Early 15th Century’.
The second, the one we have been considering thus far, is described as, ‘The mortar has handles and the fish a more predatory look. Early 15th Century’. Spencer doesn’t comment on the ‘strap’ that apparently supports the penis against the pestle.
The description of the third, a fragment, says that the face is more ape-like.
Spencer goes on to say that fragments of three other versions have been found at Salisbury (Private Collection) and many more have turned up at London (e.g. London Museum 1940, pl lxxiv, 60; pllxxii, 49, where the creature is wrongly described as a woodwose (2).
Spencer goes on to say that:
“The various components of this grotesque scene, the mortar and pestle, the hood and the fish, are all well-known medieval sexual symbols…. .The constant association of urine with the diagnostic technique of medieval doctors and of the mortar and pestle with the apothecary make it more likely, however, that the ape has taken on the role of a doctor.If his hood can be interpreted as a cowl, then he is very probably burlesquing a monk physician. In that case the back of the slippery fish on which the physician in standing many underline the insecure basis of his remedies.”
This is also on the Blog of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
A woodwose is the wild man or wild man of the woods; a mythical figure that appears in the artwork and literature of medieval Europe, comparable to the satyr or faun type in classical mythology and to Silvanus, the Roman god of the woodlands.
Many thanks to Alan Clarke, David Richards and Stephen Dunn for helpful comments made in the preparation of this article.
And thank you Alan for a fascinating piece on some of our objects!
With respect to a blog of 29th May, I was mildly disappointed that, arguably Salisbury’s most colourful medieval character, the astrological physician Simon Forman, did not receive a mention.
Described by a biographer of Simon Forman, Barbara Howard Traister, as ‘”he notorious astrological physician of London”, Simon was born in Quidhampton in 1552 and according to his Autobiography and Diary lived at several premises in and around Salisbury, including Fisherton parsonage and a house in St Thomas’ churchyard.
The reasons for Forman’s notoriety are well summarised on the dust cover to Judith Cook’s book, ‘Simon Forman -A Most Notorious Physician’, which describes his battles with the College of Physicians who labelled him a quack, a crank, a practitioner of black magic, and tried constantly to have him thrown into gaol. (Forman was an ‘irregular’, unlicenced by the College of Physicians). He was also a compulsive womaniser who kept an intimate coded diary of his sexual conquests with patients. These include Emllia Lanier, a strong contender for Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’. Forman has also been linked with Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘School of Night’ and, posthumously, with the notorious Overbury murder following which four minor accomplices were executed, but the beautiful Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, later confessed. On the plus side, Forman claims to have cured himself of plague during the 1592 epidemic and remained in London, after the wealthy had fled, in order to treat others so afflicted.
However, it is his earlier life in Salisbury which I have been trying to unpick. Thus it was while he was living in the parsonage at Fisherton that he claimed to have first gained his miraculous powers, writing, “This year [1579] I did prophecie the truth of many things which afterwards came to passe, and the very sprites wer subjecte unto me; what I spake”.
Whilst living in Salisbury, Forman was tutor to the children of John Penruddock MP, the grandson of Edward Penruddock of Arklebury, who was Great Great Grandfather of Col. John Penruddock of the Penruddock Uprising through a different line.
Whilst living in Salisbury Forman was frequently being thrown into gaol and having his books confiscated, principally by his bete noir, Giles Estcourt JP. Indeed, one of Formans biographers, Professor Lauren Kassell, speculates that the reason Forman eventually left Salisbury for London (in 1589) was due to a scandal. He had been seen to go with his girlfriend of the time to the aisle of St Thomas’ Church containing Estcourt’s recently-laid tomb and there they ‘had their pleasure on of thother and had carnall knowledge eche of others bodie’.
Nowadays Simon Forman is also renowned as having written first-hand accounts of four of Shakespeare’s plays. Ironically, seeing as he was an ‘irregular; Forman’s meticulously recorded case-histories are now one of the main sources for knowledge of Elizabethan medicine.
The interior of St Thomas – with the mural depicting Doom above the aisle!
Alan has included mention of Simon Forman in earlier contributions to this blog, particularly this one from 2017. He is quite right – how could we have missed mentioning Simon Forman in “More Odd Facts About Salisbury” when Simon gets odder and odder! Thank you Alan….