I. I'm here to talk about what went on behind the scenes in the making of Ralph Shelton's four taps to maps,
how he used sex and surveys, what else he used and basically how he cobbled things together.
It would have been terribly simple for Ralph if he had when he was considering the decoration for his house,
simply to walk out into London streets and walk into one of the London shops selling off the pad tapestries.
It wouldn't have been that simple.
He would probably have ended up with a biblical or a classical theme with large speakers in the foreground and a nice selection of landscape trees,
a hill shaded on the right hand side and a little windmill.
When he lit on the idea of making a horror graphical picture for counties in which he held land, had family and friends and had some influence.
It was an unusual choice, and it became still more unusual when he realised he could personalise the scene.
Because he lived in a country without too many mapmakers.
He lived in a country without a tapestry industry, so he had to find, first of all,
a man capable of designing top streets, which are also maps whom I shall call from now on the designer.
Secondly, he needed a man capable of.
Seeing the project through. And thirdly, of course, he has to be able to find levers capable of delivering huge,
complex, tough straits and solve all these problems not only simultaneously.
But before he could even begin. His idea wasn't novel.
We've seen. The first in the series of the emperor, Charles Junior's Typekit streets, here are some details.
Barcelona and Santiago, a German nobleman, went on pilgrimage and came home and celebrated the event by commissioning two top stories.
Based on all the drawings we've seen, the full version of the siege of Leiden commemorated first as a painting,
and the painting was then turned into tapestry. Here is more detail.
Sharon's idea isn't novel, but it is unusual.
I don't you me in England, there was some help at hand because between 15, 74 and 15 78,
a Yorkshireman, Christopher Saxton, had surveyed all the counties in England.
It was a first. He then put them together in an Atlas 15, 17, nine and four years later.
He thought he could get some more money out of it. So he combined it into smaller.
Sorry for the gutter of the book going down the middle. But that's what it looks like.
Now it's roughly five feet high, and it's roughly six feet across.
So just under two metres across one and a half high, you can put something like that on the wall as it was designed to be.
Or you can put it on a table and look at it from a chair and it can comfort.
And if you're thinking of making tough tapestries to do some reverse engineering.
You can draw out the edge tones of what become the tough stories.
And there's your preliminary sketch. The red dots are up to a child from London.
Opted not up to nearly struck Fred West to show covers,
the northern part of Oxford and goes up to Ludlow and then the Blues, Warwick and the purple is Gloucestershire.
A designer can work out quite quickly how to make a panoramic view from the Bristol Channel through to our Worcester,
Warwick, Oxford, and because Ralph wants to extend his power all the way down to the Thames estuary and actually at London.
Looking again at the rectangles off the top stream up, one thing is going to hit Ralph.
Fair and square. And that is Western house buying in the middle of the four tough streets.
It's something else that's going to hit the designer. You can see that two tough stories.
Oh, dear. Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.
It doesn't take very much to push them down, so the bottom line is parallel with the floor.
But you've got a problem with Warwickshire and with Doster shot,
they're always going to be taller than the other top stories if you want to leave north at the top.
It isn't actually a convention that's yet established. It probably wouldn't bother an Elizabethan too much when one of the solutions
found is to push north over to this side and have east at the top instead.
It fits very nicely. And it means that this tough street can be not quite as long as Oxfordshire and to, but almost as long.
And from the designer's point of view, he can keep something that's extremely important.
The royal arms span dividers along text from Camden's Britannia, which was a travelogue first published in 1886,
and it raced through into eight editions by six seven and then Sheldon's in the corner.
Works for Warwickshire. It does not work for Gloucestershire.
They could have picked Gloucestershire with no effect at all. But then you disturb the extra bits.
So they pushed Gloucestershire so that North is over here and that is roughly east.
But it allows the Camden tapes to be in the same position, and it now allows for fragment, which could be here.
To be in the top border. This piece is in private hands.
This piece is the part that belongs to Bradley. But the designers may realise something else, and that is.
That Wal-Mart is going to be far too small because by now, he's demanded to know the wall space he's designing for.
And Sheldon happily tells him it's 80 feet, 23 and a half metres.
So the wall map is not going to be very much use when he sees the survey of Worcestershire,
though to minor Susan Plus the plus is here is his inspiration for the corners.
He saved himself some labour. The Royal Arms. The scale and dividers this, which sometimes mentions the engraver does name the county,
becomes the Camden text and lost of Thomas six foot arms, master of the Court of Request and the man who financed Sexton's project.
Go down to the bottom right hand corner and become the shoulder arms.
The pluses are that he's got the county boundary neatly delineated, and he's got the two main rivers, the seven and the Warwickshire Avon.
He's got forests to play with in the north, and he's got a line of hills going steadily north eastwards.
It was at this point that I had what passes for a bright idea.
I thought it would be very useful to find out how this map was actually used on when I worked with Mike Evans and who is a computer whiz kid.
Are we compared to Wal-Mart and the such Stone County map?
We discovered in Oxfordshire and actually elsewhere, the Wal-Mart towns on Sorry, Sorry, Sorry and Hampshire are misplaced.
But that mistake was not transferred to the top story, which the brown dots.
I had done this exercise before the old fashioned way,
I listed all the names in the county map room under tough straits, but it's much more fun doing it on a computer.
It's much more dramatic. Now, by now, we're getting an idea of who the designer is, she knows a thing or two about matchmaking,
and he knows his contemporaries would have used to grid either to fix positions or to reduce or to enlarge pictorial material.
This is a picture of Valencia made by a Flemish draughtsman and turned one God who worked for Philip, the second in the 50s and the 60s.
So we copied him. Here is Worcestershire printed.
And here is the area we chose to work on. We chose it deliberately because it's got four counties which need to be merged
because you can't just put what was to show or any other county into a top story.
Top story has to be either square or rectangular, so the designer was going to have to merge substance maps.
That is where it should. Part of Oxfordshire, very large part of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.
I have to say that at this point, we started cheating.
We considered what ought to go in first, the county boundaries followed by the natural features rivers,
hills and forests or the manmade features the villages, towns and parks.
We also can't come to grips with the problem, how in the world it was done,
so we made some mock up little drawings of villages because you couldn't possibly have left the weavers to design the villages as they went along.
One mistake in size, height or spread, and the whole tapestry has gone out of kilter.
And the same is true of the names you've probably noticed.
All the places are named underneath, and they're named in quite remarkably, regular letters.
We actually work from the restored tapestries and we noticed that everything is
in the little box on a pale background and in black or possibly brown thread.
Then we started counting warps, and it's very, very easy to make an eye the same size all over the place of the same size as everything else.
It's going to be less than an inch slightly county level warps, and that applies to any letter with a straight element.
It becomes difficult when there's a curve, a D or an O or B,
and it must have been a real headache on a letter with a curve and a piece at an angle like this or like.
Nevertheless, it does look to us, did look to us as though the names have been worked out on that precise mathematical formula.
We worked on the chief, I have to say, on a sheet of pass wrapping paper sellotape down the middle,
which does nothing for photographs, but it was terribly useful for us. That's why we got it wrong on this side.
We could try and put it right on that side or vice versa. And it can just see the grid.
It was three metres high and two metres across. Our first mistake and we made plenty.
We marked out the county boundaries in pencil and we made little dots for the villages.
And then we thought, right? We will place village icons.
This is one of the first areas we did. We gave Gretchen Aspire not to tower.
So we gave Stanley Asla, not a tower. When we place the main label, the Spire ran straight into the place name, and that just doesn't happen.
So we scrapped that effort completely and we moved on.
It really was quite easy to place these place names, although we did make an awful lot of mistakes and when we were fairly well advanced,
we could see how space is panning out on this section.
That's going to be space around here. And there is a very empty space there.
But is the space for the Cotswold Hills, which we put in this time in paint and we put it in before we put the village icons?
Remember that all this is movable. We are going to do things down later, not just terribly expert.
We got even into even more of a mess with our first attempt in this area.
You can see what's happened here is the river star.
That's the knee rock, which flows through a long, shallow valley, but it was Sheldon property, both sides, it has to go in.
Bebington, Teddington, Botched and the ship's done have all come out the right side of the river.
Huntington does not have a river flowing through it, and trading is not on that bank,
and Holford now Helford is closer to the river than you would know from this attempt.
We concluded that the designer was a man of some experience.
Once she had got all of his place names in position on the river,
some of which are very much more sinuous than they might be and put in the hills and put in forests,
he can get down to what Sheldon perhaps wanted most. Inclusion of houses of his friends and family here is certainly castle home of Giles Chandor's.
Lord Bridges from Sheldon visited very frequently.
He was coaching court, the home of the Throckmorton family.
Ralph was married to one of the daughters beach food court is another cousin, the Gravel's.
Here is a less happy example Park Hall is the home of the Arden's, and so Edward and his son were accused of treason.
Edward committed suicide. Sir Edward was executed and US Catholics, their estates were forfeit to the crown.
That's the toughest redrawing of the house. This is a drawing of a house made by the Crown Surveyor sent in to map their lands.
I'm not asking you to believe that the houses are perfect drawings of what stood there, but they aren't formalised drawings either.
I think they were made specially for the tapestries. I think much the same about the Times.
Here is an early 16th century Anytown. And here is Eve Shop.
It's shown from the South. You can see it two stone bridges and a wooden footbridge.
It's got the right number of tiles and spires. To be realistic, if you change sides, look at Henley, it's the same story.
It's seen from the South Stonebridge in the right relationship to the tower and the town round about it.
But this slide has something else. Christopher Saxton was working for the government.
He would have been required to show the parks because the parkland land around a house has several uses,
none of them agricultural, but they were used for breeding.
Horses and horses are needed for the armies, which fight in the low countries and in Ireland.
So the government needs to know who's got a park and who might therefore be lightly armed forces, which could be commandeered.
Sheldon's designer saw parks as an opportunity to frame a picture of the house.
Grace Court is now rather field Grace.
It was the home of Sir Francis Knowles who is kin to Sheldon, not Catholic king, but he was probably worth mentioning in passing in the top streets.
Having completed his list, which our nation was supplied by Sheldon, we move on to more detailed stuff.
Timber Bridge, a beacon, leafed trees or if you get bored trees without leaves.
These were never going to be seen at the top of Worcestershire mills, which are Sheldon property references to local history.
This is the earthquake which happened in Herefordshire in 15 71,
and I imagine it's on substance map because its surveyors were told about it and then
a brave couple preparing to be rowed across the Bristol Channel to the other side.
The designer hasn't actually yet finished. You can't just bring a tapestry to an end.
You need to do something about the borders. And there are two things that are important about the borders.
Very, very little of what is in the borders is original material, it's borrowed from books or it's borrowed from prints.
But that means for disobedience, it's going to be familiar material.
They will pick up references that we do not. It's easy enough, however, to pick up some of them.
Here's a Frontispiece to Christopher Substance Atlas. And here it has been borrowed.
On the tough streets, liner borrowed the two figures either side.
What he's done is to turn them the other way on.
The architectural detail and the floral detail comes from Prince Charity is familiar from religious iconography.
Her kidneys has been used in tapestries before and this may help this.
How can these may be modelled on tapestries woven in Brussels in the 50s and 60s?
He could have got into previous pattern books, or they could have had the prince moving up the Worcestershire vertical border.
We have Hercules at the bottom. The next stage is an inscription framed by columns, but the columns are not original.
They're borrowed from the frontispiece of one of three books printed in 15, 74, 50, 80 and 90.
But the old thing about those books is that they express a Protestant viewpoint.
Above that, we have the figure of Judas, an Old Testament heroine who went down to dine with the assailant of her native town,
made sure he got drunk, let him fall asleep, cut off his head.
But that story is in the Old Testament apocrypha, and those text only appear in the Catholic Bible.
They do not appear in the Protestant Bible, a point which would not have been lost on educated Elizabethan viewers.
The columns were repeated in Worcestershire. But they were changed in Oxfordshire to have a picture of a receding gallery.
And that is probably also print based. So far, then, nothing original looking at the top border.
Things change. We have two celestial globes, one left and one right.
And there were almost certainly both framed by inconsistency and a half moon and mercury.
Whatever gave toughs Shelton, the idea to put Globes into tapestry,
the earliest example I can think of is in the very famous set of the Acts of the Apostles, designed by Rafael and woven in the early fifteen twenties.
But then they creep into maps. Peter Barber showed us a wonderful picture of the Portuguese sovereigns claiming sovereignty displaying Africa.
Here's a map that was definitely imported into England.
Just look at the imagery to jolly gentleman. I think where the inspiration for Saxons figures.
But in the corners you have celestial globes.
Sheldon goes one better.
The left hand top flow is the night sky over London seen from below the bottom one is the night sky over London imagined from above.
I would love to be able to tell you who did this top story. It's really very odd that there should be so many names in the scripts.
It will almost blank, blank, blank, blank companies. That's William Condon, headmaster at Westminster School.
He is responsible for the Britannia, of which these texts in the top right hand corners of the top stories all are paraphrased.
Trans Juliet. Tricky word I'm going to go for transfer.
It's the William and there's only space for three or four letters.
I'm going to opt for William Kip because he was associated with maps in Camden's Britannia.
Whether or not he was associated with Sheldon's mapping effort, I don't know.
But he was a goldsmith and he was an engraver.
He's a potential candidate, but there's a much, much more popular figure when Richard Gough looked at the copy map of Worcestershire.
And incidentally, he would have seen Warwickshire and Oxfordshire as well. His eye was caught by this inscription.
And by the way, these are not the maps that came to the Portland.
Richard Hicks Embellished Enhanced, the county of Worcester when Gough saw these inscriptions, he said we do not know where the Richard Hicks was,
the weaver or the designer 80 years earlier, the Oxford gossip and diarist A. Word had absolutely no doubt whatsoever.
The first, Richard Hicks, was found to a Dutch iris weaver in Holland.
Settled departure, stunned, amazed and weep those fair hangings that were in the dining room at Weston.
Well, almost certainly not, but I'd like you to remember something else when that quotation came in tapestry literature.
It was absolutely murdered.
William Shelton commissioned a certain Richard Hicks a botched and to go to the low countries for the purpose of studying tapestry weaving.
It's the first of the many myths that surround Sheldon Tapestry history.
So when you read in many, many websites that William sent Richard Hicks abroad, just turn that website off or close the book.
So what do we know about Richard Hicks from Birch?
Tim Birch registers. We know that he died and was buried in November 16 21, aged 97.
That means he's born around 15, 24 or 15 25.
He's going to be starting an apprenticeship round about 40 15 40 one two three four five at the age of 17 or 18.
We have no idea whether he knew William Shelton or William Shelton knew him,
and we don't actually know what his apprenticeship might been in, Wood said he lived about.
And when you're up to a point, he did.
He was given by William Shelton, who established guidelines for the creation of a Tar.bz2 workshop by his will and 15 70.
Hicks was given the use of the Manor House staff,
but in the same year he was designated future head of the Queen's Irish workers, whose workshop was in London by St. Paul's.
So at the end of 15 70, Hicks has got two jobs two and a half days riding apart.
I don't know how he chuckled his commitments, but there are payments to him in the royal archives,
in the public record office that there is no mention of him at Boston apart from the burial of his two boys.
I have no idea what went on there. However, I do think that Richard Hicks is probably the man who in charge of the royal IRS workers,
most of whom were Flemish emigres, could have recruited the weavers that Sheldon needed.
And because he has contact in the emigre community, many of whom supply the artists and craftsmen carvers,
whether in wood or stone, he could also have found the designer.
Now, at this point, I notice I'm running out of time. So do you want me to carry on for three slides or sit them and come back to them?
Hurry up, please. Thank you. Right.
Richard Hicks does have a job to do. He's got to get the wheel of the sheep's back.
He's got to get it washed and carted off. He's got to get it loaded onto a doorstop and woven into thread.
He's then got to calculate the wool he needs for each tub spray and in each colour,
and he needs to get the full amount he's going to need died all at once because on vegetable dyes,
you cannot guarantee your second batch won't be exactly the same shade, and that has a very nasty habit of showing up in tapestry straight.
So the first thing you see? Then he's got to get his weavers to walk the loom and alleged put the wool threads in Honolulu.
That's a high wool. The warp thread tying vertically.
They're suspended on a roll. They fall down. They come on to another roller.
But by that time, they've actually turned into tapestry. The weaver is going to be sitting here.
The cartoon is either behind him or it's in front of him on a no walk in the room.
The principle of weaving is exactly the same, but the cartoon is going to slide under there sideways,
and it may have been chopped up into sections for easier use because I can't imagine a cartoon
which is exactly the same size as the top tapestry comfortably fitting under that space.
When the river is waving, this is the back of understood Gloucestershire, what we would see is Aston Foxley, Norton Bradfield and so on.
The cartoon is suspended sideways. What the Weaver is seeing is Aston Foxley, Norton Bradfield.
It's actually mind boggling, but that's how those top stories were woven.
This is the result of all their hard work.
The later copy, which they started again to draw, because if you try to superimpose this one on that one or vice versa, they don't fit.
They must have drawn the cartoon again. Oxfordshire has actually seen three restorations.
This one was actually done in 1913, but it's exactly the same positioning as 1894.
The reason that due to go so quickly is that moths got at the mining put in 1894.
The beach in the corner. Those belong to the bodley and they still belong to the bodley.
And that definitely is Gloucestershire. Like this, either.
Warwickshire, Gloucestershire no way to tell, but it's another zodiac blow.
These three pieces have been put in position here, here and here in the recent restoration.
But the big difference is that here a toaster is in roughly its right position.
These are not because this top st had to be reduced in height for display in 1914,
when all six shell tapestries were seen together for the first and last time.
National Trust has decided or reportedly has decided to move toaster away away from its geographical location, and I'm the height down still further.
You will notice on both tapestries as a working great empty space in the corner.
The family cut those corners out because they had the arms of earlier generations in Oxfordshire.
These two pieces turned up in 1954. The whole tough story would have been about 20 feet across, and it's 18 feet high.
It's got Africa in its central border. We've got the same columns I floral arrangements.
Mercury pops up again. That is a disagreeable figure of envy.
Hercules, the book columns, Judith, the book columns again with the arcades, the Globes and then you repeat the board at.
On the right hand side, Hercules would have been here.
His club is about to smash into the boy's had children.
Cypress trees were really a fantastic achievement.
They used the most recent choreographic sources available only about 12 or 15 years after they were made.
They made those flat, non dimensional sources into the picture we've been looking at.
They put Sheldon into a country by sharing not only its features, but his heart is, I think, slightly failed gloriously.
They put his activities between heaven and Africa because a lot of the houses shown are those of his friends and relatives who are Catholics.
I personally think that Sheldon had a reason to commission these top stories.
As Peter Bava said, propaganda and maps go together.
As Katie told us, Catholics are fighting a quiet war protest in art and architecture.
And I think that in these tough streets, Ralph Sheldon was doing very much the same thing.
Thank you very much.