Month: January 2020

Larder, 1322

larder

An account from 1322 records what was being stored in the larder at Sandal Castle. This includes carcasses of beef, sides of bacon, casks of herrings and measures of salt.

Googling for ‘measure of salt’, I found a Market Scene by an van Horst, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with a tub of salt which I thought looked just right for how I imagined the larder at Sandal, even though it was painted two centuries after the inspection of the castle.

A Saint in Pontefract

A miracle at Thomas of Lancaster’s tomb in the Priory Church at Pontefract: in 1359 it was recorded that ‘blood ran out of the tomb of Lord Thomas, formerly Earl of Lancaster.’
Seige of Sandal Castle, c. 1317, from my roughs for ‘Walks in
Robin Hood’s Wakefield’.

As I discovered when I researched my booklet of Walk in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, 1322 was a momentous year for Sandal. On Monday, 21st March, the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield, Thomas of Lancaster, was sentenced to death by beheading after a trial for treason at Pontefract Castle at which the previous Lord of the Manor, John Earl de Warenne, was one of those who sat in judgement. John got his castle back – presumably along with the casks of herrings, sides of beef and legs of bacon in the inventory.

But a year later, after miracles there, the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster in Pontefract’s Priory Church was attracting huge crowds, and Archbishop Melton of York was concerned that people had been killed in demonstrations there.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Great Hall

great hall

This is all that remains of the Great Hall at Sandal. The hall itself was on the first floor and the arches – recently restored – opened on to the ground floor cellar which was used as a store room. The windowsill on the left has a groove for a wooden shutter.

As with the garderobe drawing, I’ve gone for a simple graphic style, with flat colours, as a contrast to the main illustration, which is an aerial view of the castle in ruins.

Garderobe

gardrobe
gardrobe

Amongst the most substantial remains at Sandal Castle are two garderobe shafts on the moat side of the Great Chamber. The gardrobe gets its name because the smell associated with a medieval toilet was reputed to protect clothes from moths.

I’ve drawn this using the cartoon style that I used when I painted scenery for the Pageant Players’ pantomime. To create something that looked like pen and ink from the point of view of the audience, I’d draw the scene in slightly watered-down black emulsion using a half-inch filbert brush and get my team to fill in the blocks of colour.

We’d normally conclude a pantomime with a palace scene but occasionally we’d have a more rugged-looking castle to paint but the audience never got to see the garderobes.

Medicine Jars

Medicine jars

My latest drawing for my Sandal Castle spread if of some of the jars found during excavations.

To quote a caption from Wakefield Museum:

Many small jars or bottles made of pottery and glass, probably for medicines and ointments, were found in the building that used to be the kitchen of the castle. This suggests that wounded soldiers were being treated there in the Civil War.

Diggers

diggers

Presumably the Royalists didn’t employ any of The Diggers, otherwise known as The Levellers, in the construction of Sandal Castle’s English Civil War defensive earthworks because The Diggers were a radical Puritan group keen to claim common land on behalf of the people.

earthworks

Earthworks

earthworks

I’ve added a few more figures to my illustration of constructing defensive earthworks at Sandal Castle and now I’m adding flat colours, using a vector brush in Adobe Fresco and the paint-bucket tool to fill in larger areas. I can see why people find colouring relaxing.

I was going to go for red for the cavalier directing operations but I discovered that Cromwell’s New Model Army was issued with red shirts, so I’ve gone for blue instead.

Rhubarb Rambles

Rhubarb Rambles

The final section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation is all about the pleasures of getting out and walking in the Rhubarb Triangle between Wakefield and Leeds.

Highlights include:

  • a medieval deer park at Gawthorpe
  • a rabbit warren on Lindale Hill
  • the ‘world’s first railway’ at Middleton
  • a Viking boat and a Victorian aqueduct at Stanley Ferry.

There’s a possible fourth section too: if time (and a little extra budget) allowed, I’d add a short animation featuring the three rhubarb recipes that proved such a popular feature in my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle.

Rhubarb Folk

Rhubarb Triangle history

For the local history section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation, I can draw on a host of colourful characters:

  • Puritan plotters at Middleton
  • bodysnatchers at East Ardsley
  • Prophet Wroe’s ‘temple’ at Kirkhamgate
  • John of Gaunt’s Manor House at Rothwell
  • Robin Hood (and his dad, Adam Hood, a forester) in the Outwood
  • plus a commercial break: from Ossett, John ‘Imperial Leather’ Cussons’ ‘Compound Rhubarb Pills’ (just don’t OD on them!).

Just dropping a few frames into my storyboard, I realise that I could easily devote a whole cartoon to the life and adventures of Prophet Wroe.

Rhubarb Animation

storyboard
Storyboard for section one of my ‘Rhubarb Sketchbook’ animation

Speeding along the motorway, you can cross West Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle in five or ten minutes but put on your boots and get out walking and there’s so much to discover. For a Creative Digital Challenge for next month’s Rhubarb Festival, I’m putting together a proposal for a short animation. I’m trying to pack a lot into it:

  • 8 picture maps
  • 3 comic strips
  • 60 pen and watercolour sketches

Section one is A Brief History of Rhubarb: From mammoths to Marco Polo; Chinese medicine and herbal cures; Victorian gardens and the Rhubarb Special night train from Ardsley Station, which, until 1966, carried 200 tons of rhubarb to London.

Bastion

constructing defences

As a contrast to my detailed aerial view of Sandal Castle, I want quite lively, smaller drawings to dot around the spread to illustrate aspects of its history. I’m starting in the south-east corner with the gun emplacement constructed by the Royalists during the English Civil War. By then, with the introduction of artillery, the medieval stone walls were old technology. Cannon ball-proof earthworks were needed.

Unfortunately the cannon needed to complete the defences never arrived.

My swaggering cavalier directing his team of barrow boys is drawn directly from a detail in an engraving by Henrik Rusc, The Strengthening of Strongholds, dated 1645. I’ve used the ‘Blotty Ink’ virtual pen in Fresco, which matches the style of the engraving. Examining Rusc’s drawing so closely, I’m impressed with the way he could evoke character with just a few lines. The wheelbarrows themselves look as if they’ve had a history and repeated figures of the labourers in a broken rhythm give a sense of movement and suggest the hard work that was involved.