Samlesbury Hall – A tour with King Henry VIII
Let us embark on King Henry VIII’s magic tour of Samlesbury Hall.
Samlesbury Hall, first of all how should you pronounce the name? Well it is three names conjured up by the Anglo Saxons from the remains of the original Roman name for the whole are where it is located. Sam the
Borough, Sam Les Borough. Pronounce it Saaam-Lesbury.
The name Sam came with the Romans who arrived about 70AD in the
Northwest of Britain, their road had to be built and aimed directly at the biggest asset this land had, beautiful rich sand under the top soil. The sand would make them glass and glaze their pots and tiles, the salt next door in Cheshire would help in the processes and provide salaries for the soldiers and workers who would collect them with a Salute. The whole of
South Lancashire and North Cheshire was a flood plain and continuously at odds with water. The Romans had the answer to that problem; they had taken technology from others in flood plains and planted forests of Wych
Elm trees. These tree sucked the land dry in 50 years, leaving grazing and growing land which was well filtered by the sand underneath. The wet land was called The Leyland, we now have a town called Leyland nearby famous for the Leyland truck and bus company. Towns which were place on the hills out of the bog-land now have Ley on the end of their names,
Chorley, Leyland, Astley, Tyldesley, Worsley etc. The towns that had

something to do with the Roman Wych-Elm forests now have Wich on the end of their names, Northwich, Horwich, Middlewich, etc.
The Romans thought the area to be very valuable so they named it after their Goddess of Fire and Water, Bellasama, the whole Ribble valley had that name as did the River itself. The Romans left to defend their own lands and left behind the Romanesque Britons who began to fight for power, after about 100 years there were many Kingdoms in Briton with no central control, this is where King Arthur’s story was started and has some influence on the Tudor myth of being a descendant from Pembroke in Wales.
Along come the Anglo Saxons, Germanic in nature and dwellers of farmsteads and in the defence of the forests and hills not Fortresses like the Romans. I stress this difference because it brought about a 1,000 step back in Technology from Roman to Saxon. Chimneys, glass windows, running water, steam baths, tiled roofs, tiles floors and brick houses all disappeared for the Saxon way of life. Wood framed, wattle and daub houses with no apparent chimney and a thatched roof to filter the position indicating smoke from the centrally placed fire.

Just look where the smoke is coming from.
Samlesbury Hall has all the features just mentioned. The Saxons renamed the area Sam the Borough and now we are at the proper name. They also harvested the British trees and the Romano British trees too. They loved the hardwoods which were so scarce in Saxony, taking whole logs back by sea via a new town now called Fleetwood, they named the top of the
Pennines “White Oak” in Old Saxon “Darwen” and the river gained that name as well as the town there. The river descended down the Pennines and through an old pre Ice age forest which turned the water brownish and now we have the towns of Blackburn and Blackpool. The Oak trees were harvested for their acorns in a Saxon village called Acorn Town, now called Accrington.
The history of the House can now be attained, let us move to the 1200’s the country was in the serfdom system where people were virtually owned by wealthy farmers and manors but earned half of what they produced. In a place on the Lancashire/Cheshire border near Warrington there was a Crofters settlement, called Croft as is the village that is still there. A croft is where surfs live when their masters have died and have no direct owners; they work as extra labour for the rest of the community and us the surname Croft. An epidemic of sweating sickness struck the area in the early 1200’s, the Croft people surviving, the owners dying, a cause of healthier selection of marriage partners more than anything else.
The surviving Crofters worked the land and made money for themselves, buying their freedom and buying their own lands. Martinscroft village is one of them. One Croft family changed their name when they became

rich, pure speculation now that they gave themselves a name meaning rich and from south Lancashire, Southworth.
Move on to 1324 and the head of the Southworth family are looking for a wife from the nobility to produce a son with no surf background. Gilbert
De Southworth finds the D’Ewas family, pronounced De Eaves, living in
Samlesbury. A Scottish family of Royal Blood, decedents of King
Malcolm the victim of Macbeth, they had fled Scotland generations earlier and settled in a Scottish Tower design of home on the River
Ribble. 40 feet square and 4 storeys tall this was a stone property with chimney and fireplace, not defensive enough though as Robert the Bruce burnt it down in 1322 on his raid into England. The D’Ewas family had a daughter and they needed money, so Gilbert married into the family. The land where Samlesbury Hall is located is the dowry gift. Gilbert built the
Hall in Saxon style of Timber frame and wattle and daub, much to the annoyance of the D’Ewas family which became a feud eventually. The house had the Great hall with Manor house divisions, 25% for the Lord and Lady, 25% for the servants and 50% for all. These fractions became
Servants quarters etc.
See the moat and the servants quarters.
The house design was primitive at first, the central fire had a wooden canopy over it to prevent the fire setting the thatching alight, the canopy itself was plastered inside every morning with fresh cattle dung by a small lad called the Black Guard, becoming Blaggard. The canopy went up to the roof but not through it, again Saxon influences, this would warm up the roof giving nesting animals a place to live. Birds, rats and mice would live in the roof giving rise to the invention of the four poster bed to

prevent mishaps at night whilst asleep with ones mouth open! Also as it rained it would wash these animals out, giving the family pets targets for food and fun, “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Now come into the house proper, the beams in the roof are made of the Roman Wych Elm, long spans with Kings post in the centre. There are also carved roses in the centres, not the Rose of Lancashire, but again Romanesque Sub-rosa, “to keep a secret”. In the centre of the middle beam there are two wrought iron hooks, these held a block and tackle from a ship, a loop with three chains descended into the room with the large cast-iron cauldron on the end. The cook would lift the pot and turn it three times on the hour thus keeping the contents boiling all day long. It was called the “Eternal
Kettle” all over England, except in Lancashire it was referred to as the
“Hotpot”, a name which now means the contents. An old saying was now invented to stop people laughing at the common name, “It’s the Pot calling the Kettle Black” which means it’s the same thing.
The Pot. If you go out hunting you take a Pot shot, if you are lucky to be served first it’s called Potluck as there was not much meat in it but it was fresher than the contents further down. At the bottom it was called the Pot
End which became Potent because of the fact that up to 3 days of left- over's had been boiling for the time in the pot. The day a new empty, clean pot was started was the Potential day and the ash from the fire was called Potash. Potash had a wonderful use, it was mixed with goat’s milk and got rid of spots, and also a small amount applied to the Hotpot itself would help keep your heart in good order. The chemical doing this was then named after the Potash that is Potassium of course.
Names of house types have been made up from the methods of build, a half timbered house does not mean the obvious but means that the tree would be split down the centre and used facing each other in the same room to avoid poor warpage. A ships-timbered house is also not the obvious, it means to build a house with ships joints and spans, and a bay is 16 feet long which is enough for two pairs of oxen in a barn; a jetty is the room that sticks out above the ground floor. The Jetty must comply with Tudor ideas, if you draw a straight line from the roof edge to the end of the wood on the permitter wall it will be about 15 degrees, this will stop rain drops touching the wood in a strong wind. The jetty corner should be within this line. Permitter stone was used to raise the timber off the ground, eventually this word became perimeter meaning to go all the way round. The roof was covered eventually with thick slabs of stone, too thick to be overlapped with a straight top because Welsh slate was unavailable, causing the design to be altered.

The slabs reduce towards the top of the roof, called after a Roman description of repeating a pattern “Dittonian” the word Ditto and Dither come from this too.
The eventual appearance of Chimneys is Tudor, poor brick making required large surface areas to cool the structure, so the fluted chimneys were built. Spiralled flutes were invented after this build, the wind would be forced upwards and take the smoke away higher, Hampton Court has this design feature.
The outside wall construction, the style is pure Tudor and Northern,
Quatrefoil, The halving of trees taken further into quarters and then used as blocks to shore up the square construction. Take the overhanging roof design one stage further, it was called the eavesdrop, now when people pretended to shelter from the rain, they would be listening through the windows, this is called “eavesdropping in”, the householder now retaliates against this intrusion by having secret holes for listening to conversations outside this is called “eavesdropping out”. Fun isn’t it?

Here is an actual eavesdrop in the window.
Back inside the great hall, let us find out how people lived in Tudor times. To understand the morality of Tudor England you must consider the human instinct to see your grand children grow up, this is easily attainable if you live to 80 on average. What happens then if you live to
40 on average then? Tudor England the lifespan of 38 to 42 was considered a good life, so to attain your desire with your grandchildren you will need to marry early and start having babies early too. With this in mind, your betroval would be at the tender age of 8 or 9 years of age, the age to start full time working as well. An aside here, you were considered old enough to work if you could touch the lobe of your right ear with your left hand over the top of your head, this was thought of as about 8 years old. Back on the plot, you eventually married your intended when you were about 11 years old, giving birth to your first baby at 12 and having 6 on average by the time you are 20, alas 3 have died. You will achieve grand parenthood at the age of 24 and you will die at the age

of 40. Your life will be hard, cold, wet, dirty and you will work long hours for no thanks, your church the Catholic Church that is, will tell you that your life is a test for your salvation to paradise. You believe them and accept the need to give some of your free time to the church as well as undertaking a fast every night of 8 hours. No eating or drinking of non water fluids and to pray every hour on the hour. Just how many of you parents put there have told their children to go Fast Asleep? Just think what you are telling your child. After 8 hours in bed you are awoken for a new day and partake in the breaking of the fast, Breakfast, a meal of bread and water. 4 hours now in the fields whilst the cook makes bread for dinner. I did not say bakes bread, I said makes bread. Baking bread would produce a brown crusted loaf as we know it today, but to the minds of status Tudors, brown is common, white is of rank. So, the cook makes bread by steaming it over hot stones in a purpose built trencher maker.
Just what is a trencher has led me to travel hundreds of miles to meet food historians and to see the trencher maker designs from around
England, Samlesbury Hall has one. The round loaf is made and cut horizontally into two pieces; the bottom is burnt on a hot plate to seal it so that the workers will have a plate to eat off. The top, white half is for the gentry as they have real plates to eat off, now we call them the upper crust! They were not the lucky ones though, their plate were pewter an alloy with 60% Lead, no need to draw a picture here then. There was a curse of being rich called “rich man’s dropsy”, we call it lead poisoning nowadays.
All food left after dinner is put into the pot with the leftovers from the previous days, this is the actual Lancashire Hotpot. No potato’s, sorry, not come over yet from the America’s. POTato, mmmmm I wonder where that one came from?
The Minstrels gallery is not an original one. It was once a safety screen of mediaeval design between the hall and the service end of the room, cut up in the 1700’s to make the present gallery. Big mistake! Yes of course it is at the wrong end of the room, the gallery should be at the service end instead it is at the solar end. Let us move into the parlour……wrong name.
To parlay is French of course, so a parlour is a French word, a table is also a French word and the Tudors did not like the French so the table would have been the Board and the talking room would then be the
Boardroom. The Lord of the Manor decided where people in his family sat for their meals; look at chairs there are faces carved upon them, either a face of a priest, a happy face or a frowning face. Obviously the priest of the manor sat in his own chair, but if you had not pleased the lord enough that day you would be put into the frowning face chair, now its half measures for your dinner. The lords chair was moved from nearest the

fire to the end of the Board because of the Jesuit witch hunt of the early
James I era, strong arms were put on these chairs to guard against a moving sword. This is where the name carver chairs comes from, nothing at all to do with cutting meat, lords of manors do not cut their own meat.
The occupant of this chair became known as the Chairman of the Board.
Stay at the Manor and get “Room and Board”, let the lord of the manor give out rewords evenly “across the board”, put the plats into the
“sideboard” put the cups into the “cupboard”. Whilst in this room the wooden cupboard like structure behind the boards is the house Trencher maker.
Now study the fireplace, yes it has a break in the stone, yes it seems to have a patched coat of arms in the centre. But it also has a magnificent history.
In the end of the 16 th century and into the era of King James I, the country was at war with itself and its religion. The Jesuits last hope was Mary
Queen of Scots to no avail and when her son became the King of England the Jesuits rejoiced the thought that they would find freedom to worship.
Alas, not so. The King hated the Jesuits because he also hated his Mother, for the way she tried in vain to change Scotland back from its Protestant direction. The murder of his Father Henry Darnley was suspiciously like the hand of Mary too, so it was never going to happen this release of the
Jesuit souls, instead the opposite happened thanks to the Gunpowder plotters ( it is another story who I believe was the top man in the plot).
The Jesuit leader for England was Edmund Campion and along with his

younger brother John he had a faithful companion in the form of a hunched backed stone mason called, Nicholas Owen. Let’s not beat about the bush here, Nicholas Owen was the most hunted, hated enemy of the state, much more of a threat that Edmund and John, he was the peoples hero, a sort of religious Robin Hood figure. He was beatified by the
Catholic Church to be St. Nicholas Owen, one of the 40 martyrs. Why?
Well nobody knew what he looked like, he worked in the day time as a craftsman making carved stonework whilst at night he was building secret priest holes, tunnels and escape routs in Catholic houses and that made him a hero. The party left Oxford, travelled east to Anglia, north to
Lincoln and Yorkshire before turning west to Lancashire. We know that the Campions were captured in Samlesbury hall and John was killed here under torture to find the whereabouts of Nicholas Owen. Edmund was taken to London and executed in the usual barbaric way; Nicholas was still at large when the Campion leadership was taken by a Northern priest called Henry Garnett. We have a society and Church in Lancashire of
St.Nicholas Owen to commemorate his life. Now back to the fireplace, the only man who could have built this fireplace was Nicholas Owen because their is a secret room inside it, there is a break in the stone which pivots on the corner of the inner room wall, the front panel is of wood and plaster whilst the opposite one is of stone.
There is an anomaly on the fireplace, the centre crest is raised and is of the Southworth family with the House of Houghton and Lancaster on each side. Not possible sorry! It is against all Tudor rules to have the lowest status crest in the centre in fact this patch would have been treasonable as it covers the highest crest in the land, the three lions of
King Henry VIII himself. After some research we found that the crest was put there in the mid 1700’s to cover a hole that some idiot had put there to hang a cooking pot on a hook. Oh! Look at the roses carved in the ceiling, no need then to remind you about sub-rosa.

Go see the last window on the right, full of quarries and cames, and the glass full of spin marks. Now, glass has been a word for centuries before the word class. Glass has always been a symbol of status and the word class is a derivation of it. The method of making the glass was to spin the molten blob into a flat disc before cutting it into the quarries to make the window. The nearly wealthy people who cold just afford the glass near the centre were called the “Middle class (glass)” and the ones at the edge who were the super rich with less ripples, they were the “Upper class
(glass)”, now the middle class were jealous of their rich neighbours and would say “they think they are a cut above us!”

The centres of the glass can be seen in this window indicating that the
Southworths were not that rich at the time of building this room.
Move along to the oil painting of a woman in Protestant clothing, must be important in a Catholic house. She is. This is the only original portrait of
Alice Carpenter, married to Edward Southworth who was also a
Protestant, second sons could do what they liked without fear of losing any inheritance as they got non anyhow. They decided to go to America on the third ship after the Mayflower, sadly he died and she was pregnant.
She married the ports governor and 8 generations later they are Teddy
Roosevelt’s family. See the family line.

Above each doorway is a carved picture of Catherine of Aragon and King
Henry VIII can you notice a big mistake on Henry’s carving? Yes you are right it’s the wrong way round from the Holbein portrait. A mistake that goes back to that date, Henry ordered that his portrait be shown all over
England so the people knew what he looked like. Holbien knew this was impossible in the format of oil paintings, so he produced a black and white sketch called a cartoon. A stack of blank canvasses were covered by the cartoon and a spike pushed through making blanks with holes. The blanks were sent around the country for other artists to carbon copy them onto another blank canvass, trouble is someone put the master the wrong way up and produced a mirror image of the King, and I suspect that to be the artist in Shropshire. To see the original of this carving visit Thornbury
Castle near Bristol.
Now into the old entrance hall, see the pictures on the wall, especially the one with the moat.

Not a defensive moat, but a fish farm moat, there were stepping stones which still exist and a manifold which still exists. Notice the straight change in colour showing up the chapel as an older stand alone building.
The floor has a curve in it which aims directly at the centre of the fireplace, see the secret doorway to a tunnel and by the way you are standing on that tunnel.

St.Nicholas Owen at his best here, building a tunnel out of an existing sewer tunnel that everyone knew was there. No not a joke, a Red Herring!
Nicholas was expert at giving searching soldiers what they were looking for so they would go away when they found them empty. Good old
Nicky.
Enter the Chapel and you are entering 1420, a Roman Catholic domain with a separate entrance doorway for the poor and a balcony for the rich.
The windows in stone are nicked from Whalley abbey when it was pulled down in the reformation. Don’t edit the word nicked please. Nicked is an old English word meaning “to legally take what is not yours”! What?
Go to Derbyshire, to Chapel en le Frith, get an OS map and look for
Nickers grove. A medieval series of mines where the surf were rich because of the lead and tin in them, they must not have more than 5 days off per year or they will loss there mines. So, speculators would sit outside the mine and cut a nick into the entrance beam if you missed a day’s work, when they got the sixth nick they got your mine. They’d nicked it!
That’s all for now.
Henry Tudor