Cavalier, p.5
Cavalier, page 5
There is a clear hierarchy among the masons. The lowest-ranking workers now return to their sweaty job of 'getting' stone from the ground, or else 'scappling' (roughly shaping) it, using crude, toothed chisels for speed. It is a relatively easy job to remove the soft sandstone from the cliff face: they chisel a crack across an outcrop, force wedges into it, then lever the block free with iron bars. Many such rough lumps lie scattered around the quarry, as only the most suitable are carried into the lodge for further working. Seven men are at work today getting stone from the ground, while two others, whose names are Shore and Roylles, are scappling. These labourers earn much less money than the skilled freemasons who dress the stone or the 'layers' who will hoist and set it into position; best paid of all are the fine 'carvers' who will complete the decorated fireplaces.
The names of the tools used at Shuttlewood echo onomatopoeically the thwacking blows that ring round the quarry as work resumes: the maul (hammer), the gavelocke (crowbar), the kevel (hammer for rough hewing or breaking the stone) and the wedge. Stone is shaped in the quarry so as not to waste effort transporting excess weight, but also because this sandstone is more easily worked fresh, or 'green', from the ground. It will gradually harden on contact with the atmosphere.14
Over the past two weeks the masons Goodwin, Baram and 'their fellows' have completed a great stack of dressed stone with their sharp, smooth-ended chisels. The freshly cut stones look like pale creamy-yellow pieces of cheese or butter, an illusion soon dispelled when their cold weight is touched. Each piece is discreetly signed with its mason's individual mark of identification: a letter or some other strange hieroglyphic according to the master mason's list, although the masons' individual styles of working are also apparent to the trained eye. The eye is the mason's most important organ, as brute force is useless without precision. Smithson now needs to check the quantities and quality in order to authorise payment, with Goodwin and Baram drawing attention to any excesses or explaining away any inadequacies. Smithson calculates that they have completed 124 feet of finished ashlar (smooth stone blocks), 57 feet of 'window stuff (jambs, mullions, cills and lintels) and 66 feet of the axed stone that will be used to create steps for the many twisting staircases running down into the cellars of the Little Castle. Goodwin and Baram have also made 13 feet of 'channell' to drain the kitchen floor and a window head for the room called the pastry, where baking will take place. Finally, they have completed a 'springer', one of the two stones from which a pointed vault rises.
Smithson now commissions the next fortnight's work. He wants bases for the pillars in the Great Beer Cellar and a spout for the kitchen sink, telling the masons exactly what he requires to a response of sage nods. Goodwin and Baram belong to a skilled and honourable profession. In 1599, the Shropshire mason Walter Hancock was commemorated in resonant phrases in the burial records of his parish, for his community was proud of his 'most sumptuous buildings, most stately tombs, most curious pictures'.15
These senior masons are usually peripatetic, working for no more than ten years on a particular house before seeking out or being recommended for another building project possibly hundreds of miles away. There are even cases of unscrupulous patrons trying to steal celebrated masons. Sir Edward Hext, when supervising the construction of Wadham College in Oxford, wrote of his pleasure in having secured the services of the fine freemason William Arnold:
If I had not tied him fast to this business we should hardly keep him; he is so wonderfully sought being in deed the absolutest &c honestest workman in England.16
Bands of masons are therefore accustomed to leaving their homes and travelling across England from one great house-building project to the next. John Smithson himself has worked as a mason in his youth, as did his own father Robert. When the latter was asked to build Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire for Bess of Hardwick, three principal craftsmen followed him from his previous project, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire: Thomas Accres, carver in marble, and two masons named Rode. Further members of the Rode family - a labourer, a 'boy' and a woman - are now working for Robert's son at Bolsover. During the building of Hardwick Hall, the masons lived in its incomplete shell, and one of the rooms on the roof became semi-officially known as the 'turret where Accres lyeth'.17 The masons working at Bolsover also sleep and work in the same half-finished rooms.
Living far from home and family, often in squalid conditions, a gang of travelling masons may present a formidable, almost feral, appearance to the locals. Strangers of any sort are unusual in Bolsover, and these men inhabit a tiny world of sweat by day and near-comatose exhaustion at night, taking their pleasures as well as their labour very seriously. Drunkenness is far from unknown, though few reach the levels of depravity reported in a 'lewd company' of travelling French stonemasons at a sixteenth-century building project of Sir John Thynne:
I never saw the like [Thynne wrote of the foreign masons]. They be the worst conditioned people that ever I saw and the dronkenst; for they will drink more in one day than three days wages will come to, and then lie like beasts on the floor not able to stand.18
The most experienced masons are the jealous owners of drawings of both ancient and the very newest designs; piles of well-thumbed paper are available for consultation and discussion as Smithson describes what he wants. The Elizabethan designer John Thorpe, like Smithson the son of a mason, inherited part of his father's collection of drawings. All but one of the drawings in Thorpe's possession show the upper floors of buildings, because his brothers inherited the lower floors and elevations.19 Smithson likewise possesses a collection of drawings given to him by his father, and the presence of some late Gothic drawings among them suggests that Robert had himself inherited material from an earlier generation.
During the masons' rest periods in the lodge at Shuttlewood, books also circulate from hand to hand. They examine, for example, Walter Gedde's discursively entitled Booke of Sundry Draughtes principally serving for glasiers: and not impertinent for parterres, and gardeners; besides sundry other professions (1615). At Bolsover, this book will give someone the idea for the design of the intricate paved floor in the Pillar Parlour.20
Goodwin and Baram now check that they are using the correct templates to guide them in shaping the stone. Smithson draws the sections he requires for decorative mouldings (for a window jamb, for example) onto paper at a one-to-one scale. He gives these paper templates to the joiners, who then make cut-outs for the masons in oak or beech. Sometimes these paper or wooden patterns are reused at another house. This is how architectural details creep from house to house across the countryside: masons carry old templates with them to new projects, and a regional architecture develops.
There are no definitive plans of the building site for the masons to consult. Many details are agreed in daily discussion, and minds are often changed along the way. When William Cavendish comes to build his Riding House opposite the Little Castle, there is a major switch halfway through the process: the windows are raised by about a metre. The walls show the scars left by their original position. This is a fairly minor mistake by the standards of the day. At Chastleton House in Oxfordshire, for example, the door into the Great Hall itself is squeezed into an odd little corner because the central courtyard of the house had been incorrectly laid out.21 In the seventeenth century, the foremost designers are beginning to understand that the Italian practice of drawing every single part of a building beforehand minimises these risks, but the process involves a conceptual grasp of three-dimensional space and detail which is not yet common in British building.
Some of those working in the quarry are not up to their jobs, and Smithson is on the lookout for slow or shoddy work. In April, he had to dock the wages of a mason called Arthur Reade 'for bad scappling'. 22 It looks like Reade's work did not improve, for he left the project in May. Meanwhile, at another house-building project taking place this same June at Kyre Park in Worcestershire, an inept mason is paid, reluctantly, 'for 15 days naughty work [ . . . ]& so discharged for a bungler'.23
Once dressed, the stone will be taken up the hill in groaning carts. Towards midday, Smithson becomes anxious to reach the castle site before his masters' visit. He now brushes some of the stone dust from his breeches and mounts his horse to accompany a cartload of stone travelling up to the building site. Transport is in short supply, especially during the harvest season, and those who live locally and have carts in their possession find themselves earning lucrative fees for their use. This hill is dangerously steep. On one occasion Henry Kitchen of Bolsover is killed when his wagon, pulled by six horses and four young bullocks, overturns on Castle Hill; on another, a baby girl named Isabella Bennet is crushed to death by a runaway cart on the 'hilly highway' at Shuttlewood.24 The Cavendish habit of building their houses on hills inevitably poses transport difficulties: at Hardwick Hall, for example, Bess was forced to use nimble packhorses to bring up stone from her nearby quarry.
The carts ascending from Shuttlewood quarry to the castle site weave their way through a landscape where shallow opencast coal mining is already under way. Today Smithson authorises payment to the colliers of Bolsover for sixteen loads of coal to feed the building site's limekiln.
After climbing the hill, Smithson's horse follows in the wake of the cart of stones, crossing the causeway through the bank and ditch that provided the medieval castle with its outer ring of defence. As he enters the outer bailey, now a grassy field, Smithson glimpses the bowed figures of labourers creeping across the rough ground of the castle site. Some are lugging heavy buckets of water, sand and lime. Others are breaking or loading limestone, digging foundations, taking down old walls, tempering mortar, sifting lime, sorting and cleaning wall stone and sand, or serving the masons and layers.25 The building site is relatively quiet: the loudest noises are the rasp of saws, the tap of chisels and the rattle of a load of limestone rubble being tipped out of an upended cart.
Some of the tools used on the building site, including masons' templates
The figures pausing to observe Smithson's approach include women and boys, and whole families can be found employed in different jobs across the site. William Yeavlee of Bolsover, for example, works as a labourer, as do his wife Bess and his son Thomas. In a field to the north of the castle, the limekiln puffs out its clouds of noxious smoke. It is manned by the lime burner and his group of female assistants, while other women carry out a variety of back-breaking jobs: sieving lime, carrying sand or getting bracken to cover the tops of walls.26
Unlike the peripatetic professional masons, these poorly dressed and lowly paid labourers come mainly from Bolsover town. They return home at night to work in their own fields or vegetable patches. Small-scale agriculture is a popular safety net against hard times among craftsmen of all sorts. Of sixty carpenters who lived in rural Lincolnshire in the late sixteenth century, probate inventories show that all of them possessed the necessary tools for farm labour as well as for carpentry.27 The wages earned by the labourers' wives form a vital part of their home economy: only in the nineteenth century will it become possible for a working man and his wife to live off a single income.28 Now that Protestantism is the state religion instead of Roman Catholicism, the loss of saints' days as holidays means less rest for the workmen. A few festivals endure, however, and later this year eight labourers will sacrifice their '3 Christmas holidays' to work only because of the urgent necessity of demolishing a dangerous wall.29 Because of the steep inflation in prices that is taking place throughout the early seventeenth century, the labourers are in the gruelling position of needing to work for an ever-increasing number of hours simply to maintain their purchasing power.30
As midday approaches, the men and women of the building site prepare to break for dinner. A labouring man needs 3,000 calories' worth of food daily, which he can buy for tuppence. A day's sustenance usually comes in the form of two pounds of bread, nine ounces of peas, 3 Y2 ounces of cheese, and beer. Beer is an important source of extra energy, as well as being safer to drink than water with its risk of dysentery. Workmen also eat beef with their bread, fish on Fridays, and sometimes eggs; cheese, surprisingly, is often more expensive than beef.31 During the building of Hardwick Hall, where some of these Bolsover labourers gained experience, cheap bread for the workmen was made out of the inferior materials of 'oats and dredge' and peas.32
On any building site, the layers form a caste higher than that of the general labourers. Smithson's horse now passes through the gateway into the inner bailey of the medieval castle and he dismounts near the depression in the ground containing the new cellars and the stubs of the Little Castle's walls. Here the layers are hard at work, hoisting the dressed stones into position and placing them on a bed of mortar mixed with oyster shells; crustaceans contain a chemical which helps the mortar to set. The layers also undertake the responsible work of setting out arches and vaults like those now beginning to rise over the cellar roofs. They will also perform whatever alternative work is to hand.33 As the building rises, the layers' job will become even more arduous and dangerous. Treadmills are the usual means of lifting stone, and it is only in 1637 that the architect John Webb will devise a pulley for use at St Paul's Cathedral that works by turning a capstan 'to raise great stones with ease'.34
The scaffolding sprouting from the rising walls of the castle's semi-subterranean basement is a precarious construction of wooden poles, with wickerwork shields called 'fleakes' slung between them to walk upon. Pulling these poles out will cause a gruesome death during another Cavendish building project, that at Nottingham Castle. As one George Jackson 'was fetching out a short end of wood', the arch it had supported, 'built of brick, &c ye lime not well set', fell down upon his head. He was so badly crushed and bruised that he died two hours later. The building site is far from safe, and those injured have only the charity of the Cavendishes to fall back upon.
In the final stages of the project, masonry of an even higher order will be required for the decorative carving both inside and out. Sometimes carvings are imported from the expert workshops of London: the delicate decoration for Sir Charles's tomb, for example, is ordered from Southwark, and the well-known sculptor Nicholas Stone sends whole fireplaces from his London workshop to the provinces.35 Yet over the next few years at Bolsover, the carving of the Little Castle's fireplaces will be executed locally. They will become uniquely famous for their brilliance, individuality and use of rare Derbyshire marble.
Many other activities are drawing to a halt across the building site for the rest period. James Wilson, in charge of the kiln in Limekiln Field, now releases the labourers breaking up forty cartloads of limestone for him. Lime mortar, which will be used right up until the 1930s, when it is supplanted by Portland cement, is made out of a mixture of lime and sand. To make mortar, quarried limestone is split into small pieces and slowly burned in the kiln. Once the stone is burned into a powder, Wilson's assistants use a rectangular sieve to remove lumps. At this point, it can be used as an agricultural fertilizer, but to create mortar it is 'slaked' or mixed with water, a dangerous process that gives off scalding heat and results in a sludgy paste. Finally, the lime is pummelled with an instrument called a beater and left to mature for several months. Only then is it served up to the layers.
Elsewhere on the building site, perhaps in one of the ramshackle buildings of the old castle, the carpenters Chester and his son are taking a break. They have been making scaffold poles, wheelbarrows, hods and wooden centring for the construction of stone arches. The building will very soon rise high enough to require structural timber. Then, the Chesters will journey out from Bolsover into the surrounding Cavendish estates to select trees. They will slice up the best trunks on the spot in sawpits dug into the ground, a recent innovation that has made it far easier to make boards. Structural timbers are heaved directly into position, but wood intended for finer work such as panelling or joinery has to be seasoned to avoid future warping. In John Smithson's youth, timber was treated by the simple method of standing it up to 'dry with sticks between it so that it may season', but now there are superior methods, such as soaking the pieces in water to remove the acid sap before drying them in a kiln or oven.36 No better way of treating timber will be discovered, and much of the fine internal woodwork of the castle will survive intact for four centuries.
Craftsmen and labourers now congregate in the sheltered corners of the old castle ruins, settling down amid clover and dandelions to eat their bread. They are all hoping that John Smithson will find nothing to fault in the work for which they expect payment this evening. Smithson himself expects to be reimbursed for ten meals eaten during the course of his duties in the last fortnight.37 Unlike other great families, the extended Cavendish household has grown accustomed to its almost continuous programme of building; most noble families realise just one major building project in a generation. Sometimes extra labour is drafted in from as far afield as the family's Northumberland estate, and these men eat meals cooked by Winifred Rambott, the innkeeper at Norton Cuckney near Welbeck.38 Everyone on this building site is bound to the Cavendishes for his or her livelihood.
Now a stir runs through the prostrate figures. Everybody was expecting the arrival from Welbeck this afternoon of a couple of Cavendish officers with the bag of wage money. The labourers stagger to their feet and exchange comments, however, because the group of horsemen coming up through the outer bailey additionally includes both Sir Charles Cavendish himself and his son William. William, now nineteen years old, has inherited his father's love of architecture and has come to see the castle that will one day be his home.
