Jane Vavasor Durrel and the rural Oxfordshire of the 1810s

Jane Vavasor Durrel (1794-1871) was the granddaughter of an Oxford University Vice Chancellor and the daughter of the rector of Mongewell in Oxfordshire. The family, originally from Jersey and with longstanding - and even in her lifetime, strong - connections with the Channel Islands, had established offshoots in Oxfordshire, Wales and elsewhere by the end of the eighteenth century. Her father's long tenure of the living meant that Jane, like her sisters (who, like Jane, remained unmarried to their deaths), was closely acquainted with a rural community in Oxfordshire recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and facing the adjustment to postwar conditions in agricultural described by economic historians. Mongewell, like other rural parishes, remained essentially a stable population - few incomers, few people migrating any very great distance away. This settled order is reflected in the drawings Jane made in the late-1810s, which came into my hands from an antique dealer in London. The collection included drawing by other hands, including a sketch signed by William Crotch (1775-1847), musician and friend of J.B. Malchair. As an Oxford resident, Crotch would possibly have known the Durrels and (as often happened at the time) shared his drawings with the family. 

The small carton of drawings, papers, sermons and engravings form a collection documenting Jane's own interests - and the rural life of Oxfordshire people. The drawings are undated but almost all are on Whatman paper with a watermark for 1816. That the drawings might indeed be later is possible, but they are probably not much later, judging by the style of clothing and other evidence, than the mid-1820s. Here are a very few of them - many no more than sketches in the margin of drawings or on loose scraps of paper - as an introduction to Jane's world. They provide an insight into the daily life of an Oxfordshire parish and are offered without commentary.

Wagon entering a lane

Two people, one possibly an itinerant seller, the other off to market

Off to market

Gleaners (including two small children, probably girls)

Raft or punt fishing in Mongewell

Country Life and the 'Shakespeare portrait'

Country Life is the magazine we Brits buy primarily, I suspect, for the lavish illustrations of country house estates, and the advertisements for houses for sale of the type most of us could only afford with a major lottery win. (It is also, incidentally, still wedded to the idea of the society portrait of what - many years ago - would have been regarded as an 'eligible debutante'). As a magazine it is possibly as far away as one can get from a quintessentially modern journalism. Its stock in trade is the celebration of a country life style now enjoyed by fewer of us than ever, and celebration - rather than detailed examination - is the weekly diet of this glossy publication. It is not, certainly, a peer reviewed academic journal.

Why, then, the editor thought it wise to feature, prominently, the claims of one of its regular authors, botanist and historian of horticulture Mark Griffiths, that he has 'discovered' - by means of 'decoding' the images appearing on its title page - a portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of John Gerard's Herball (1598) is strange and bewildering. The 'portrait', Griffiths claims, is the figure standing on the right hand plinth labelled with what Griffiths says is not a printers device - as others maintain - but a cleverly encoded cipher for Shakespeare.

I don't want to add any more to the very obvious and extensive commentary on the doubts surrounding the iconography, or the character of the rebus on the plinth. A good summary of all of that can be found here , here and here , and enough commonsense let alone research suggests that the claims for a portrait from life on the title page of a book unconnected with Shakespeare himself or his world of the theatre and literature is unlikely to say the least.

What I do want to do is to add my 'two penn'orth' on the question of how the title page should be read -  that is,what all those figures are meant to be doing. My starting point is that a very similar, but not identical, title page can be found in Gaspard Bauhin's version of Matthioli's commentary on Dioscorides (also of 1598) produced in Frankfurt (below):

For those interested, you can see a more detailed version of the page at bit.ly/1Ai5sDS .

What's useful about this comparison is that Bauhin book is also, effectively a herbal; it also rehearses the contemporary elaborations of Dioscorides; and the title page has many of the same stylistic features as the Gerard book's title page (not least the garden portrayed in the bottom middle cartouche).

The Bauhin books shows a figure, to the left on a plinth, dressed in classical garb (Dioscorides); the other three key figures shown (on the right hand plinth and in the vignette scenes at the bottom of the page) are of different ages and are either all Matthioli or (possibly) the two at the bottom are he and the figure on the plinth is Bauhin. What is clear though is that the Bauhin title page is intended to mix Dioscorides with contemporary practitioners. 

So if - and its a big if - the representations in the Gerard title page are meant to be real figures one could read the Herball's front page as carrying images of Dioscorides (in painfully inaccurate garb) on the left plinth and all of the other figures as Gerard at three different periods of his life: in the 'Shakespeare' portrait as a military figure (we know he served in the army at an early part of his life) and in the figures above the plinth as older (top left) and older still (top right).

I should stress that I don't think this the most likely reading of the design of the title page of the Herball. The most likely is that, without the evidently greater skills of the engraver of the Bauhin book, Rogers - the engraver of the images throughout the Herball - was left to invent fantasy figures connected with the world of botany.

But it does suggest that it is possible to hold to an interpretation of the title page as a selection of real or imagined portraits of contemporaries or near contemporaries without any of them coming from a domain unconnected with horticulture and the medical uses of plants.

All about my office...

Model Farm House (built 1889) 

The Model Farm House at Church End, Hendon, is an example of late nineteenth century Queen Anne revival domestic architecture, and is sited at one of the most important and historic parts of Hendon. Together with the ‘Model Barn’1, it is a minor monument to Hendon’s agricultural past. Hendon was, until the nineteenth century, an agricultural community in which some 95% of farm and common land was used as pasture and meadow2. Soil here consists for the most part of green and brown clay intermixed with coarse or yellow sand and fine gravel allowing free drainage, in which well nourished and manured pasturage grass grows well. Winter stall feeding for milk cows was well established in southern England so that barn storage for hay was an essential part of any farm. The buildings clustered around the church and the Church Farm House at the top of Greyhound Hill seem, on the basis of archaeological and historical evidence, to have consisted mainly of such storage structures well before the present buildings were conceived in the late nineteenth century. The Hendon & District Archaeological Society ‘Church End Farm Building Record’3 notes, 

Surviving mapping and a water-colour by Thomas Bailey of c.1800, (identified as ‘Church End Farm’, and almost certainly providing a view of the north side of the farm yard), gives some useful clues to the later eighteenth century aspect of the farmstead. They indicate both the early presence of the barn still standing in 1961 and the limited number of other buildings then erected on the yard frontages, with perhaps only a single structure extending the northern yard range to the west by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Buildings immediately abutting the barn to the east, however, shown on the 1789 Rankin and Johnson estate plan (and still apparently in evidence on the 1863 OS) seem to confirm the existence of two cottages depicted in the water-colour, constructed with brick stacks, and with the larger of the two presenting a two storey sash windowed bay to the yard front.  

Late Georgian pictures of the top of Greyhound Hill show most of these stall feeding and storage barn structures to be lathe and plaster buildings in a poor state of repair. While few such structures would have been improved, they were probably repaired and patched well into the middle of the century. Hay, of course, was more than just for local feeding; selling hay to London city stables was an essential part of the Hendon farm economy during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. By the 1880s, then, the top of Greyhound Hill had several (probably dilapidated) structures and a largely undeveloped Church Farm House building with some smaller agricultural and residential buildings on the present site. When the architects Wimperis & Arber were engaged to produced the present buildings in 1889, the aim was not to produce simply an improvement in the current buildings but a whole remodelling of part of the site. 

Wimperis & Arber was a London architectural practice based at 25 Sackville Street, Piccadilly. John Thomas Wimperis (1829-1904) commenced practice in London before 1866. From the 1870s Wimperis was involved in the development of the Grosvenor estate in London and, in 1887, became one of the Grosvenor Estate's approved architects. In 1889 Wimperis took into partnership William Henry Arber, (b. 1847-1904), an assistant who had served articles with him from 18664. The partnership was formally dissolved in 18975 and Wimperis retired in 1898. Between 1889 and 1897, the partnership created some fine late Victorian buildings, such as ‘Chartfield’ on Putney Heath (1893), St Dunstan’s House (1893) and the Grafton Galleries in Bond Street (1892), all of which were startlingly novel realisations of revival ideas. The practice had gained some experience in, and reputation for, urban ‘agricultural’ architecture (as witness the Stables in North Audley Street, Westminster and the Stables at No 3 Lees Place, London) and, when engaged for the Church End site, used it to offer a solution that was at once practical, durable and elegant. Working in Queen Anne revival style6, with an unequivocal reference to contemporary arts and crafts detail in the building materials used, Wimperis & Arber produced a simple farm house echoing the main elements of Queen Anne revival ‘grammar’ in a small space – the irregularity of the ground floor design, the mock boarding of the upper floor (at Model Farm House, in terracotta exterior tiles), the half-timbering at the road-side gable end, for example, all find echo in larger more imposing revival domestic buildings of the 1880s.

1 More properly, the ‘long milking parlour’ as described in various late nineteenth century sources. Stall feeding and milking were, in parts of the east of England, occasionally combined in longer barn-like structures from the sixteenth century so that this is not out of keeping with vernacular tradition in the region. 

2 Daniel Lysons ('Hendon' in The Environs of London: Volume 3 County of Middlesex (Cadell and Davies: London, 1795), p. 1) says that in 1794 Hendon had ‘…8204 acres of land, of which about 300 were arable, about 120 woodland, the remainder pasture and meadow’. 

3 http://www.hadas.org.uk/projects/church-end-farm-building-record 

4 Antonia Brodie (ed.), Directory of British Architects 1834-1914: A-K Volume 1 of Directory of British Architects 1834-1914, (Continuum International Publishing Group: London, 2001), qv. ‘Wimperis, J.T.’. 

5 London Gazette, 24 December 1897, col. 7768. 

6 Donald Bassett has argued that ‘[b]y the 1880s the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair was being shared out between the 'Queen Anne' and Loire-chateau modes. French motifs were common to both. Men like J. T. Wimperis, Chatfield Clarke and Ernest George proved equally adept at the two styles, if two by then they still were.’(Donald Bassett, 'Queen Anne' and France’, Architectural History, Vol. 24 (1981), p. 90), but only a few details of Loire-chateau style (possibly the renaissance styling to the chimney-piece?) feature in the Model Farm House building itself, while the barn with the vernacular apse makes no continental stylistic references at all.