BeenThere-DoneThat
The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain
BeenThere
DoneThat
DoneThat
The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain.
Comment about
It is asserted that English bricks were used to build the chapel. According to C. F. Innocent in his 1916 book "The development of English Building Construction." it's more probable that the bricks used at Little Wenham Hall, Caister Castle and St. Nicolas in Coggeshall were imported.
To support this view, he wrote "... the early history of brickwork is more obscure than that of any other modern form of wall or partition. Lacing courses of bricks were used by the Romans in Britain in their stone walls; such Roman bricks were approximately square and only about 1 inch thick and thus they were what we should tiles rather than bricks. Similar tiles or bricks were used by Saxons and Normans in their buildings, principally at or near Roman sites and it is generally considered that they are Roman materials reused. St. Martin's church at Canterbury and St Alban's cathedral are well known example, the one Saxon and the other Norman.
In the neighbourhood of the Roman wall in Northumberland; the Roman buildings do not contain lacing courses of brick, nor do the pre-Conquest buildings built of the Roman materials in the Roman manner, such as the chancel of Jarrow church. At St, Patrick's chapel, Heysham, Lancashire, thin stones are used in a rough imitation of the courses of bricks of Roman walls; and this is some evidence that the pre-Conquest builders of the chapel could not make burnt bricks. The glossaries show that the Saxons understood the word "tiles" to mean thin stones. In Aelfric's vocabulary of the tenth century "tegulae" the Mediaeval Latin word for roof tiles is placed with varieties of stone and translated "hroftigla" (roof-tiles): probably he was thinking of such fissile stones as those of Colley Weston and Aelfric translates the Mediaeval Latin word "tesselae" (floor-tiles) as "lytle fetherscite florstanas" that is "little four cornered floor stones". However, in Modern Danish a brick is known as a tile-stone "teglsten).
The baking of bricks does not seem to have been practised in England in the earlier Middle Ages. ........ Professor Thorold Rogers found that bricks appeared in the mediaeval building accounts at the beginning of the fifteenth century and that they were used in the Eastern counties long before thy were used in other parts of the country.(History of Agriculture and Prices IV Page 434)..... In the year 1437 William Weysey a "Brike-maker" was given powers to make bricks for Speen Abbey and the first payment for bricks in the "Records of the Borough of Leicester" was made in the year 1586-7.
Since 1916, archaeological research has moved on. Perhaps the bricks have been analysed to see if the clay is local? /em>
Perry, NW London
Looks like a stone portaloo.
Anonymous Fri 29th May 2009
I live inCoggeshall and this chapel is gorgeous, I hope to get married there.
Sophia, Coggeshall Sat 25th Jun 2011
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