A visit to St Mark's Church, or the Lord Mayor's Chapel

Despite being born, raised and resident in Bristol, there are lots of buildings in the city I don't know well, or indeed at all. One is the 13th century church on College Green, just off the city centre, which has had several names during its long existence.

Founded in c1230, it started life as Gaunt's Chapel, adjacent to Gaunt's Hospital and part of St Augustine's Abbey. It was then known for centuries as St Mark's Church, both before and after its purchase in 1539 by what is now Bristol City Council, following the dissolution of the monasteries. Since 1722, when it became the official church of the Lord Mayor and the city corporation, it's generally gone by the name of the Lord Mayor's Chapel.  

Its elusive nature is in part because until recently, it was often closed to the public. My sole previous visit was on one of the Bristol Open Doors weekends, back when you didn't have to buy a wristband and the whole point of the initiative was that it was free to visit places that were usually out-of-bounds, giving it a vaguely illicit, 'mass trespass' feel that's been lost now you're required to pay for the privilege. 

For the last year, however, the Chapel's been open from Thursdays to Saturdays, and as I recently found myself in town with no need to hurry home to the dog, I decided to revisit it.

Another reason for not having been there more often could be that it's relatively easy to walk past it without really noticing it. For a start it's in the middle of a rank of shops, so that with the exception of the frontage, you get little idea of how the building looks.

(About that frontage: it's a rebuild dating from the 1820s, when the cast-iron viaduct was built over Frogmore Street to raise the level of Park Street and improve its gradient. The original was removed to Sheep Wood in Henbury, to provide a picturesque folly in the back garden of some wealthy Bristolian whose identity is in dispute.) 

To see it better - or at least, its south elevation - you have to go down a little alleyway, itself easily overlooked. 

Because of this tucked-away appearance, when you go inside, there's a Tardis effect. 

16th century Tudor roof

The Chapel of Jesus, or Poyntz Chantry, built c1523 by the Poyntz family of Iron Acton ... 

.. with its contemporaneous floor tiles from Seville

The Chapel of St Andrew, with 17th century wrought-iron screen and gates by Bristol blacksmith William Edney, removed from Temple Church following the latter's bombing in the Bristol Blitz  

The Lord Mayor's Chapel is filled with treasures. Its collection of 16th century French stained glass was purchased by the council in the early 19th century and so, to me at least, is somewhat less interesting for not being original - presumably those windows went the way of most mediaeval glass during the Reformation. Most of the panels seem to be made up of fragments of this earlier glass mixed with far more modern work, as in the East Window. 

Likewise, the corbel tables contain mostly 19th century corbels carved when the Chapel was restored, although there are some that date from the 13th century, that were found in the rubble infill of walls when the new Choir vestry was constructed. 

Also originating in the 19th century are these - well, I've seen them described online as horses holding shields, but looking at their foreheads and their tails, I'm sure they're unicorns, which have an association with Bristol dating back to 1529, when the city was granted a crest supported by a golden pair of the beasts. 

Rather older is the font, which has been dated to the late 13th or early 14th century ...

... and fragmentary wall paintings  (c1500), which were discovered by chance in 1824. From left to right they depict the Resurrection, the Nativity, and the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene in the garden. 

But the best thing about the Chapel is the proliferation of mediaeval and early modern tombs and memorials, some of which are dedicated to women.

Necessarily early are the effigies of the founders of Gaunt's Chapel, Maurice de Gaunt who died in 1230 and his nephew, Robert de Gourney, who died in 1269, their feet resting on a dog and a lion respectively. 

Unknown merchant, dating from c1360 and erroneously identified as Henry de Gaunt as early as 1531

Sir Maurice Berkeley of Uley or Stoke Gifford, who died in 1464, and his wife, Ellen (1475)

Bishop Miles Salley, died 1516

Willian Birde, Lord Mayor of Bristol, died 1590

Elizabeth James, died 1599

(Look at that fabulous winged death's head mask)

Sir Richard Berkeley of Stoke Gifford, died 1604

The tomb of George Upton Esq, 1553 - 1608

Thomas James, died 1619  

 

John Aldworth (died 1615) and his son, Francis (died 1623)

William Swift, 1571 - 1623

John Cookin

died aged 11 in 1627

Dame Mary Baynton, 1623 - 1667

I've saved my favourite tomb till last. It was erected by Sir Baynham Throkmorton of Tortworth in memory of his wife, Lady Margaret, who died in childbirth in 1635, at the age of 25. 

Sir Baynton was the great-grandson of Sir Richard Berkeley of Stoke Gifford (tomb above). He's depicted on the tomb but not in it: he married twice more, and is buried in St Margaret's Church in Westminster. In any event, it's Margaret that draws the eye with her daisy emblem on her chest, her baby in one arm, her free hand in her husband's. 

Seeing the tomb again, I found that although I'd remembered lovely Margaret quite clearly, I'd completely expunged Sir Baynton in the intervening years. 

The other thing I like about it is the fascinating graffiti on it, dating from thirty years after its installation to the late 20th century. 

Now all I have to do is visit Sheep Wood to find the original Chapel facade. Maybe in the New Year. 

Psychogeography and Poetry in Old Bristol

Now that Project Breadcrumbs is nearing completion, I'm starting to think about what I want to focus on next as a poet.  Landscapes - both rural and urban - have always fascinated me, which is fortunate because I can combine that interest with another passion, which is walking about a bit. And as writers from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, to Thoreau and Dickens, to Woolf and Rowling have attested, the two drives - to walk and to write - are often inextricably linked. 

Having recently moved house to an area I knew well as a child, I've been enjoying wandering around the lanes that run along the back of almost all the houses, though they contain little more than dilapidated garages, brambles and puddles.  There's something secret about them, and they also hotwire my childhood in a way that the streets and roads I've been familiar with consistently, throughout my life, don't. 

And there are other, more exciting lanes to be explored in the centre of the city.  Much of  old Bristol that survived the slum clearances of the Victorian era and post World War I was either obliterated in the blitz in 1940-41 or subsequently demolished by a council intent on building a wholly 20th century city.  But down by the Church of St John on the Wall, the last remaining stretch of the ancient city wall, the city remembers itself in the shapes of the lanes that echo the walls and the River Frome, now culverted and buried under tons of concrete.   

I've known these lanes all my life.  For many years, my mother worked as a legal secretary in nearby Albion Chambers. My father would pick me and my sister up from our grandmother's house in Bishopston on a Saturday lunchtime and we would drive to town to meet her from work, before stopping at the chippy to pick up dinner. 

He would park in Small Street outside the tobacconist and confectioners and point out things to me like the old stone step into the Chambers, worn by the feet of countless Bristolians over centuries - and since replaced, probably for reasons of Health and Safety.  

Years later, I also worked in the area, in an office in St Lawrence House (now fashionably graffitied and converted into student accommodation), the windows of which looked out directly onto the tower and clock of St John's.  

However, despite being in thrall to them since earliest days, it was only when I went on A Guided Walk Around Mediaeval Bristol a few years ago that I really started to get a feel for their history.  On that walk I was introduced to the 15th century topographer, William Wyrcestre, and learnt that back in 1480, Nelson Street was known as Gropecunt Lane; that in the middle of the crossroads that marked the centre of the settlement, where the High Cross stood in Wyrcestre's day, there was once a waymark hawthorn tree (now a traffic bollard);  that a ship with an oak mast and a stripy sail was found buried in mud under the tower of St Stephen's Church during 15th century renovation work, thus indicating the original course of either the Frome or one of its subsidiary streams in the marshy delta that existed before wholesale drainage and re-routing of the river took place;  that the concrete car park off  Bell Lane was the site of the Jewish Temple prior to King Edward I's Edict of Explusion in 1290.  (Almost 200 years later, Wyrcestre, a man of learning, was so ignorant of Judaism that he repeated a rumour he'd heard, namely that Jews worshipped an idol named Apollo.)

William Wyrcestre also gave me a poem, reprinted below. 

Here are some photos showing the shape of the now lost city walls.

Leonard Lane

John Street

Because its contours are, like the Frome, buried under layers of rubble, concrete and tarmac, it can be quite a surprise to discover how significant the hillock upon which the city was originally founded actually is.  This becomes most evident on Leonard Lane, where a doorway will suddenly take you down 22 steep steps to the next street, St Stephen's Street. 

Yesterday, while I was maundering about in town, I also decided to find the site of an etching by John Skinner Prout, which used to hang on my grandmother's wall when I was small. I remember being fascinated then to discover that this romantic (romanticised) scene was of somewhere in Bristol, now long vanished.  It says on the back that it is the Frome ... but where is the bridge?  

Oh, look ... could it be? ... Fairfax Street with Union Street above it?

Of course, when I got home, I looked online and someone else had already beaten me to it, and in colour. Even so, unearthing buried rivers under buried roads is what I want to do next.

Here's my poem about walking around Bristol in the company of William Wyrcestre.  It's from my collection, Map Reading For Beginners, published by Indigo Dreams.

William Wyrcestre Dreams Of Bryggestowe

Ditchers, digging through silt

to strengthen foundations, discover a relic.

‘A boat,’ William tells us in Latin,

‘with sails of striped canvas,

a main mast lofty as a tree.’

His Bristoll’s a modern-day port,

yet the names of its streets

conjure mudflats and creeks,

long after its rivers were tamed

and rewritten in mortar and brick.

William’s a wanderer like me

though topography, not stories, is his passion.

He’s obsessed with measuring space,

pacing quays and sizing buildings,

plumbing drops with knotted rope.

He fathoms every well and drain,

reveals the length of Gropecunt Lane,

not what goes on there.

When my attention wanders too,

he stops at the crossroads and relents.

‘Dynt the Pumpmaker,’ he says, ‘heard tell

how once a hawthorn flourished

where now stands this splendid Cross.’

But all I see’s a traffic bollard,

yards of tarmac, withered grass.

‘And here,’ he adds by a concrete car park,

‘in deep vaults beneath these walls

the Jewry made a heathen temple

to exalt their tin-pot Lord, his name

Apollo, folk do say, or some such idol.’

©Deborah Harvey 2014