#Archaeology31: Creativity
Today I'm going to tell you a digital story from Suffolk. Let’s visit another Castle in the Waveney Valley, in the village of Mettingham, just outside the town of Bungay. It’s a Grade II listed building & is in private hands
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1182745

This begins during the reign of Edward III. The manor at Mettingham on the Suffolk side of the Waveney were owned by one Sir John of Norwich, a former Admiral of the Fleet & veteran of the Hundred Years War, amongst others. His father had been one of the richest men in Suffolk...

He was related to the Earls of Norfolk, the Bigod family, who built Bungay Castle. His distinguished career led the King to endow him with the right to hold fairs, markets & most importantly, permission to crenellate three of his three manor houses – Mettingham got it’s makeover

Licencing crenellation had a number of functions – display of status & royal favour, protection from theft, monuments to military careers. The Foundation deed for the crenelated manor house, Mettingham Castle, is dated 21st of August, 1342

A document of 1562 describes the site as enclosed by a stone wall and entered via a gatehouse. Inside there were stables, servants' lodgings, kitchen, bakehouse, brewhouse, malt house, storehouses & an aisled hall.

Very fancy. I was there this morning with the dog having a nose

On Tuesday June 18th in the year of the Peasants Revolt, 1381, a 500 strong rebel army drawn from the assorted men of the Waveney Valley attacked Mettingham Castle & stole cash, silver, gold, jewellery & arms. They destroyed charters & written documents & ransacked the place

In the subsequent reprisals later that summer, one of the peasant rebels from the village of Mettingham itself, Walter Coseler, was decapitated & his head displayed on the pillory of in Bungay marketplace, which now looks like this (image copyright Bungay Town Trust)

But the story of Mettingham Castle is not all about the tragic, inevitable crushing of the peasant classes beneath the delicately embossed poulaine of the landed elite

Find out more in Part 2 to follow...

John de Norwich must’ve worried about the next life, since in 1350 he founded a college of priests, ‘Collegium bte Marie Virginis’ in a manor he owned a few miles away along the Waveney, which consisted of a master & secular priests who prayed for the souls of his family members

In 1382, the college trustees paid the huge sum of £866 13s. 4d. to the Crown for licence to transfer the college to Mettingham Castle. This wasn’t easy, mainly cos the greedy nuns of Bungay Priory were very much against it, as they had the income from the church of Mettingham

But more on these troublesome Bungay nuns another time, as that’s a whole other story... In 1394, The College of Mary the Virgin finally moved to it's new home at John de Norwich's Mettingham Castle, where it stayed until the Dissolution

In the early 1400s, a large building programme took place at Mettingham Castle & a new chapel & cloister were built for the growing College. Expansion aside, the most interesting expenditure of the College was for the Library. This is the next part of Mettingham Castle’s story…

The College both held a library & produced books itself. One of the books was the Egerton Psalter MS 1066 ‘with calendar, Office of the Dead (imperfect), litany, and prayers’. You can see part of an illustration from it in the image below & read more here: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8715&CollID=28&NStart=1066

M.R. James noted 'the line-filling of grotesques, beasts & fishes' & considered that 'such pictures as there are in our MS are of the finest style and in minuteness unsurpassed'. It is amazing to visit this book online, when I'd walked past the place it lived only this morning

By 1393, one of the brothers at the College was known as 'Hugh the Scriptor' and was writing books. The Master's Accounts for the College from 1379-1400 mentions the need for glass for windows, and the purchase of parchment and paper

By 1403, the account show payments for vellum, gold book clasps, parchment & Hugh's time to write the books. Soon another chaplain, John Knyf, joined Hugh & began more intricate writing & illuminations. A pound of vermillion was purchased in 1409, gall and gum were bought

The College produced numerous manuscripts and books now lost or misattributed. You can read more about the Library of Mettingham College & its contents in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology & History http://www.suffolkinstitute.org.uk/proceedings-of-the-suffolk-institute-for-archaeology-history-online

We leave this story with another Waveney rebellion "John Godsell of Ditchingham on the opposite bank of the river Waveney from Mettingham" (just down the road from Bungay) "parchment-maker confessed to allowing 'schools' of Lollardy to meet on his premises where 'books were read"

Researcher, John Ridgard, whose work this thread relies heavily on, said "In addition to the other undoubted financial benefits it brought to the Bungay area, the college may inadvertently have supported members of East Anglia's first nonconformist heretical sect, the Lollards"