Sun Court, Hadleigh

Sun Court, Hadleigh

Hadleigh is a small market town in south Suffolk, in eastern England.

Map link: Hadleigh

Like many towns in the area, Hadleigh prospered from the trade in wool and cloth during the Middle Ages.  The streets in the town centre still feature many handsome timber-framed houses built by successful medieval merchants.

The East Anglian medieval wool trade forms the background to The Town House by Norah Lofts (reviewed here earlier).  The inspiration for the house built in the 15th century by the central character, the peasant-turned-wool-merchant Martin Reed, may have been one of the houses in the centre of Hadleigh, Sun Court.

According to the Hadleigh town website, Norah Lofts saw Sun Court when she was house-hunting in Suffolk.  The house had been built centuries ago for a wool merchant. It still has a large door onto the street, big enough for a laden pack pony to enter, with a smaller door inset for people to use.

Close-up of the main door at Sun Court, showing the smaller inset door

You may wonder why even the most dedicated merchant would want to let his pack ponies into his house (!).  In The Town House, Martin Reed’s house was originally much smaller and on only one side of the passage.  He later built a solar for his bewitching wife Magda to dance in (Martin’s solar was also, apparently, inspired by one of the rooms in Sun Court), and left a space between the new solar and the original house so that the pack ponies could still get from the street to the yard behind the house.  Later, Martin roofed over this space to create a covered passage from the street entrance to his yard and built rooms above it.  So the packhorses now trotted through Martin’s house to get from the street to the yard.  Subsequent owners remodelled the house and changed its use over the succeeding centuries, but the central passage – and its packhorse-sized door – was such a key part of the structure that it always remained. (Whether this reflects the real history of Sun Court or whether it is purely fiction, I have no idea – but houses do evolve in this sort of haphazard fashion, so it seems entirely plausible).

The House at Sunset, by Norah Lofts. Book review

First published 1963. Edition reviewed: The History Press, 2009. ISBN, 978-0-7524-4870-1. 287 pages.

The House at Sunset is the last in a trilogy of novels telling the story of a Suffolk house and its inhabitants from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. The trilogy began with Martin Reed and his children and grandchildren in the fifteenth century in The Town House (reviewed here earlier), and continued with further generations of Martin Reed’s descendants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in The House at Old Vine (reviewed here earlier). The House at Sunset covers the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. All the main characters are fictional.

Like its predecessors, The House at Sunset is told in a series of independent but interlinked narratives, rather like a collection of short stories.  Each is recounted in first person by a different character, and the narratives are separated by interludes told in third person.  The characters come and go, appearing in the book when they arrive at the house and disappearing again when they are no longer connected with it.

The novel is beautifully written in deceptively simple prose.  The historical background feels very real, capturing changing social attitudes as well as the effects of new technologies, such as the impact of the railway arriving in Baildon.  Some things have surprisingly modern resonances, such as the anxiety of the Victorian shopkeepers when they think a large retail chain is planning to move into the town:

“They sell cheap muck, they give no credit, they’ll undersell for a year to ruin honest traders and then get a monopoly….”

which exactly parallels modern fears when a giant modern supermarket chain announces plans to open a superstore in a market town. 

One of the aspects of the Town House trilogy that I particularly like is its focus on day-to-day life, made compelling by the vivid characterisation.  The main characters are varied individuals, each with their own foibles, fears and hopes, each shaped by their circumstances and experiences, and each with their own dilemmas to face.  Many of the secondary characters are just as vivid, although drawn in less detail, such as the unhappily married Mike and Millie, keeping house (after a fashion) in two rooms and hating every minute of it; or Frances Benyon’s selfish husband; or the mercenary lawyer’s clerk who tries to deceive Felicity Hatton.  In The House at Sunset, the Old Vine starts to change hands by purchase rather than by inheritance, so most of the characters are no longer descended directly from Martin Reed.  Their circumstances vary as social and economic change alters the economy of Baildon and the uses made of the Old Vine. The arrival of the railway changes the street from a residential area to a commercial district and the Old Vine from a private house to a series of thriving shops; two world wars and the Depression reduce it to an overcrowded, overpriced, semi-derelict slum. Similarly, the characters associated with the Old Vine vary from minor gentry to prosperous local business owners – cattle dealers, shopkeepers, restauranteurs – to impoverished tenants and a conscientious environmental health officer.  It’s sad to see Martin Reed’s historic house suffer decline and neglect at the hands of an exploitative property company, though the book ends on a hopeful note with the prospect of a sympathetic owner who may care for the house again.

There is no Author’s Note, perhaps because all the people and events are fictional.

Beautifully written portrayal of the varied people associated with a medieval house in a fictional English market town from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth century.

The House At Old Vine, by Norah Lofts. Book review

First published 1961. Edition reviewed: The History Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7524-4868-8. 349 pages.

The House at Old Vine is set in 1496-1680, mainly in and around the fictional town of Baildon in Suffolk. Some historical events and figures appear in the background, such as the English Civil War. All the main characters are fictional.

The House at Old Vine follows on from The Town House (reviewed here earlier), and continues the tale of Martin Reed’s descendants and the other inhabitants of the house he built. Maude Reed, Martin’s grand-daughter, appears in The Town House and also in The House at Old Vine, and links the two novels.  Like its predecessor, The House at Old Vine consists of several separate but interlinked tales, each recounted by a different narrator.  Usually the narrators are a generation or two apart.  This gives the book more of the feel of a collection of linked short stories than a conventional novel.  The unusual structure works well, partly because the house itself is the main source of continuity.  The people come and go, some remembered by the generations who follow them and some forgotten, while the house endures through the centuries.  The structure also has the effect of showing some characters from different points of view, thus throwing new light on their actions and behaviour.

As in The Town House, The House at Old Vine conveys an authentic sense of how it might have been to live and work in a provincial English town during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the narrators are middle class, as they belong to a family that owns not only a substantial house but also a business based there, whether it is cloth manufacturing, a hostelry or a kindly but down-at-heel boarding school.  Sometimes the perspective is from lower down the social scale, as with Josiana’s description of the unrelenting toil of the medieval peasant’s life, or outside it altogether, as in Ethelreda’s vivid account of her childhood in the Fens before the traditional way of life was extinguished by landowners’ drainage schemes. The great events of politics and war happen in the background, and profoundly shape the lives and choices available to the characters.  From the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, when “…the beliefs for which Walter Rancon had died were now compulsory”, to the spies and plots of the Civil War, the inhabitants of the house experience and respond to the events of their times as well as to their personal concerns. Social changes shape the different generations of narrators too, as wool manufacture gives way to silk with changes in trade and fashion, or the demise of the monasteries leaves an unfilled need for hostelries that can accommodate respectable travellers, or the expansion of the East India Company (forerunner of Empire) creates a demand for boarding schools where the children of expatriate officials can be brought up and educated, or as new forms of entertainment such as plays and concerts become widely popular.  The house too changes with the times, evolving from private house to manufacturing enterprise to hotel to boarding school and back again.

Characterisation is lively and convincing.  All the narrators and many of the secondary characters are individuals with their own foibles and motivations, mostly neither good nor bad but something in between.  There seems to be a strange psychopathic trait that crops out occasionally in the descendants of Martin Reed – readers of The Town House will recognise its supposed origin – described by the perceptive Maude Reed as “The charm and the heartlessness […] Something not – not quite human, something wild and unaccountable”. For the most part the narrators are not the people with this characteristic, but the ones trying to deal with its consequences. 

There is no historical note or map, perhaps reflecting the original publication date (1961), or perhaps because all the main characters, places and events are fictional.

Sequel to The Town House, taking the story of Martin Reed’s house and his descendants into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Town House, by Norah Lofts. Book review

First published 1959. Edition reviewed: Hodder and Stoughton 1983, ISBN 0-340-15182-X. 350 pages

Set in and around the fictional town of Baildon in Suffolk, England, in approximately 1401-1451, The Town House tells the story of Martin Reed, who first built the house of the title, and three generations of his family.  All the main characters are fictional.

In 1401, Walter is a serf training to be a smith on the manor of Rede in Norfolk.  When he falls in love and the lord of the manor refuses permission to marry, Walter and his intended bride, Kate, flee to the walled town of Baildon in Suffolk.  If they can live there without breaking a law or being reclaimed for a year and a day, they will gain their freedom.  Walter changes his name to Martin, the better to avoid detection.  Making a living and raising a family in a strange town is no easy matter, and their new life is precarious, subject daily to the vagaries of fate and the arbitrary whims – both kindly and malign – of powerful townsmen and the Abbey that dominates the town.  Until rebellion flares, when tragedy strikes and Martin must make a choice.

This is a tale of medieval life as lived day to day by the ordinary people of a fairly ordinary town and its rural hinterland.  The cast ranges from the destitute to the minor gentry, by way of farmers, craftsmen, labourers, traders and merchants.  Kings and magnates and their doings hardly impinge on the lives of Martin and his neighbours (e.g. Agincourt happens during the period of the novel but is never mentioned).  The novel conveys a vivid sense of what it might really have been like to live in the Middle Ages as a near-destitute labourer, an impoverished knight, a clerk or a prosperous merchant. 

Martin’s tale of hard work for low wages, the daily struggle to avoid starvation, the joy from occasional acts of generosity, and the slow crushing of his and his wife’s modest hopes under poverty and injustice, makes compelling reading.  All Martin’s industry, ingenuity and skill count for very little against the casual abuses of power that thwart him at every turn, until an unlikely twist of fate suddenly gives him an unimagined opportunity.  Higher up the social scale, the daughter of an impoverished knight is almost as much a prisoner of circumstances, as are a poor knight and a girl of high birth with no dowry, and a little girl trying to understand how the grown-up world works and eventually recoiling from it in disgust.  Anyone with a rose-tinted view of the Middle Ages as all about chivalry, courtly love, tournaments and pretty dresses, will find The Town House gives a refreshingly different picture of how the rest of the population lived. 

All the people in the novel are individuals, with their own faults and motivations, hopes and fears, shaped by their upbringing and constrained by the society they live in.  Each faces their own dilemmas and must live with the consequences of their choices.  Each faces joy and tragedy and must cope in their own way.  The characters are so vividly drawn that their personal quandaries and vicissitudes are every bit as gripping as any thriller about great affairs of state.

The novel is told  in five overlapping first-person narratives, each recounted by a different character, interspersed with shorter sections in third person labelled ‘interludes’.  It is an unusual structure but an effective one, as it shows the characters and the interactions between them from several perspectives.  Actions taken by one character that seem inexplicable in one narrative become comprehensible in another when seen from a different point of view.  The writing style is deceptively simple, written in clear modern English.  I say ‘deceptively’ because many key events are conveyed by allusions and hints rather than spelled out explicitly.  Sometimes this reflects the character who is narrating at the time; for example, Maude Reed is a little girl of eight or so and the undercurrents of adult scandal bewilder her, though the alert reader can recognise the gathering clouds.  This is a novel that rewards concentration.

There is no author’s note, perhaps reflecting the date of first publication (1959), perhaps because there are no historical events or historical figures featured.  The historical detail feels very authentic.  A map would have been useful to set the fictional town of Baildon and the fictional port of Bywater in the context of the real places mentioned, but this is a minor detail.

Compelling family saga of three generations of a family rising from serfdom to prosperity in fifteenth-century England, with a powerful sense of authenticity and wonderfully human characters.