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Medieval Penn Floor Tiles

The Penn tileries formed the most extensive, successful and well-organised commercial tile industry in medieval Britain. For over 40 years of the 14th century, between 1350 and 1380s, Penn tilers secured something very close to a monopoly in the South-East of England. They were manufacturing vast quantities of floor and roof tiles for royal palaces, monasteries and churches, manor houses and rich merchants’ houses, in London and the surrounding counties, including Windsor Castle and the Tower of London. l A gazetteer by Laurence Keen suggests that Penn tiles were used at some 180 sites across 18 counties outside London. The distances involved and the constant mention of Penn and Penn tilers by name, argue that they had easily surpassed any rivals in both workmanship and price.

No local memory of these Penn tilers, whose industry completely dominated the parish in its day, has survived, other than that provided by the place name Tylers Green and a road name, Clay Street. Nonetheless, we know far more about the workings of this 14th century tilery than any other, both because there are so many well documented royal orders and because tiles have been found in hundreds of different locations. A good deal of research has been done over the last 70 years, notably Christopher Hohler, who opened up the whole subject with his thorough field work and his two comprehensive articles in Records of Buckinghamshire, in 1941 and 1942. One of his stated purposes was to bring out the importance of the tileworks at Penn and he drew and numbered all the known Penn tiles (in a series beginning with P) and thus laid the foundations for their accurate recognition.

Tile Kiln found at Rose Cottage on Elm Road, Penn 2003

Penn’s only surviving kiln – A 17th C roof tile kiln has recently been found that is very similar indeed to the typical medieval floor tile kiln, except that it is made of flat bricks 9 x 4 x 2 ins (220 x 100 x 50mm) rather than of tiles and the oven is a little longer at just over 7 ft (2.20m) long and 6 ft wide (1.8m) internally. It is aligned east-west, at right angles to Elm Road, the main road (B474) through Penn, in the garden of Rose Cottage (recently badly damaged by fire), next to the entrance to the Penn & Tylers Green Sports Club. The kiln was discovered in June 2001 because a newly adopted planning policy requires an archaeological evaluation before any new building or extensions are allowed along Elm Road and Church Road. The furnace with the oven above was set below ground level, as was usual, and the walls have survived to a height of 4ft 3 ins (1.3m). The kiln bars forming the floor of the oven were supported about 1 ft 4ins above the floor of the furnace. The oven walls would have been higher but had been deliberately collapsed into the furnace chamber after the kiln had gone out of use.

A typical 14th century tile kiln with front wall removed to show the inside. this drawing is an imaginative reconstruction based on all the information available. Tilers are shown preparing for firing by putting firewoood into one of the two stoke holes, bringing a box of tiles and stacking them in the kiln. Drawn by Mike Lamont.

Fragments of eleven medieval Penn tiles were found in the rubble of the furnace and stokehole. Some of them are wasters or unfinished, indicating that they may have been made on or close to the site although they were not found in their original medieval context. Five of them were nearly whole and were recognisably those classified by Hohler or variants of them.

Two separate, tile-built walls were revealed by the same trial trench, both orientated parallel to the main road and at right angles to the kiln. One was unusually wide at 2 ft 6 ins (0.75m) and was well-made of courses of fragments of plain square floor tiles and roof tiles. The report tentatively proposed that the tiles used indicated a 17th or 18th C building used as a drying or storage shed, but a subsequent reassessment has suggested that the wide, well-built tile wall could have been part of an earlier medieval kiln. It may be that the orientation with the stokehole at the west end was with the deliberate intention of taking advantage of the prevailing westerly winds to fan the flames in the fire boxes.

The survival of roof tilers – There is documentary evidence that roof tilemaking survived in Penn after the 14th C, supplying local needs. For instance, the great barn of Bassetsbury Manor in High Wycombe was repaired in 1411 with 1,000 plain tiles costing 3s 4d per 1000 with 12d for carriage from Penn. In 1512, there is a reference to a ‘tyle house lying at tyler-ende’ in Penn. The fact that the tiles were worthy of note suggests that ordinary buildings were not tiled, but probably thatched. In 1552, an inventory of goods in Penn Church untypically ends with the statement ‘The church is tyled’, which probably refers to the medieval floor tiles rather than the roof. The Penn parish register for 1580 records the burial of John Playter, a tiler. Physical evidence of the survival of the industry is provided by the late 17th C roof tile kiln found in 2001 at Rose Cottage, Elm Road

Tyler End Green – The name Tylers Green still reminds us of the local importance of the tilers. Tyler End, as a hamlet of Penn, is recorded in a 1493 property deed. It replaced an earlier name of Garrett Green or Gerrards Green, presumably in the 14^th C. The name Tyler End Green was used for the next four hundred years until the ‘End’ started to drop out of use during the 18^th C. The 1841 census still had Tylers End Green, but it was Tylers Green, Penn in the 1851 census, although even in 1854, Zachariah Wheeler, who was building St Margaret’s Church, was still referring to the ‘tilend green church’. As a hamlet grew up on the Wycombe side of the border, it borrowed the name of Tyler End Green from Penn and has now become Tylers Green. Clay Street and Potters Cross are two more place names in the parish associated with working clay.

1918 Penn Church – The parish register notes that, in 1918, Lord Howe retiled the chancel floor in marble. Hohler recorded that tiles out of Penn Church had strayed into the Herts County museum at St Albans and he drew the seven different designs that he saw there. These chancel tiles are now in the Verulamium Museum. The nave floor was stripped of tiles during the 19th C and replaced by a timber floor between the pews.

The cover of the book ‘Medieval Penn Floor Tiles’ is an artists impression of how the original chancel floor might have looked.

1967 Mosaic tiles in Penn church grave – the Vicar of Penn, The Rev. Oscar Muspratt, found tiles lining two graves just outside the door to the north porch of the church, but there was only time for a quick examination of one and a half of them. He sent 19 tiles to Elizabeth Eames at the British Museum, who was particularly impressed by two of the floor tiles that are now in Penn’s Lady Chapel, because they are totally different from all other Penn tiles. They seem to have been made by the method which preceded the use of any stamp, that of incising as a freehand drawing, since lines cross eachother beyond the point where they should end. Both are the central parts of a mosaic and are the first evidence of this earlier mosaic technique to be found in Penn. The presence of both types together in the grave suggests that both techniques were being used at the same time or had at least overlapped. The much more laborious manufacture of mosaic shapes was finally abandoned after the Black Death in favour of the simpler and cheaper square tiles.

One of the tile fragments is about a quarter of a round tile or roundel, originally about 8 ½ ins (225mm) in diameter, and is decorated with the outlined figure of a pilgrim with staff and satchel with a border inscribed .. M SEMPER A… The other is a lion’s face in profile on an octagonal tile about 6 ½ inches (160mm) across. Both had been coated with white slip and the incised decoration appeared as brown lines on yellow. Both seem to have been wasters as a result of breakage. Their fabric is comparable with that of the usual Penn tiles.

There were a further 17 tiles, of which five were plain green glazed and three were plain yellow. The presence of stabbing holes on the base of three of the plain green tiles was unusual for Penn but typical of an earlier ‘Stabbed Wessex series’, which Elizabeth Eames had thought might have been the work of an itinerant band of tilers. There were eight decorated fragments, in seven different designs, of which five have not been found elsewhere in Penn and only one is of a design known to have been laid in Penn church itself.

Following the retirement of the Rev, Oscar Muspratt, a further 32 floor tile fragments were found in the vicarage, wrapped up in 1967 newspaper. He later thought that they must have come from the graves outside the north porch door, in addition to those he had sent to the British Museum. There was one unrecorded tile of particular interest. It was a complete polygonal tile with a fabric apparently similar to the other tiles in the grave. It was decorated with the crudely drawn head of a lion or mythical beast that appears to have been part of a 9-tile mosaic requiring a large octagonal tile at its centre. This octagonal tile would have had a side of about 2 ¾ inches (72mm), much the same size as the incised example with a lion’s face discussed above, although these two particular tiles are not contemporary.

Apart from the mosaic polygonal tile, there were varying numbers of seven known designs. Altogether, 23 out of the 32 pieces had matching designs with the earlier British Museum collection from the grave, but there was only one shared design with the tiles that used to be in the church itself.

The focus of the Penn tile industry – The vast majority of tile finds have come from the three gardens, Grass Side, Cobblers and Yew Tree Cottage, all of which back on to the same large clay pit at the end of Beacon Hill. Two reported kiln sites (T1 & T2) are close by, and it is also noteworthy that Slades Garage, which was formerly a blacksmith, is adjacent. The record shows that there has been a blacksmith on the same site since the 18^th C and it could well be that 14^th C blacksmiths were working there making lath nails and iron-bound forms for the tilers, shoeing their horses and repairing their carts.

Chemical analysis of the tiles and other ceramics has not yet been able to distinguish between different clay sources in the same production area and so we have to rely on tile designs for clues about where particular tiles were made. This may seem a hopeless cause but the table below is surprisingly informative:

Site where tiles No.of different Same designs in Same designs in
were found designs found Beacon Hill gardens Stratfords Cottage

Penn Church (chancel)              7                                5                                 1
Aerary, Windsor Castle             10                                8                                 1
Amersham Church                    3                                3                                 0
Missenden Abbey                     6                                 3                                 2
St Albans                                  8                             3                                 5

This is only a snapshot, but it does suggests that a Beacon Hill kiln was the source of most, if not all the tiles used on the first three sites and that this area was the main focus of the tile industry, at least in the 1350s when the Aerary floor was laid. The finds at Beacon Hill of the earlier designs – the St Alban’s type tile and the 6 inch square tile – also show that tiles were being made there before the Black Death. Only 4 out of 14 designs found at Stratfords Cottage match those from Beacon Hill and this suggests different tileries with different markets, though with some overlap of popular designs as might be expected.

2002 Lady Chapel Millennium floor tile project – There have not been any Penn tiles on display to the public in Penn or Tylers Green, following the removal of those in the chancel of Penn Church in 1918. It was therefore decided that they should be built into the Lady Chapel as part of its Millennium restoration. The British Museum readily returned those that had been submitted for an opinion in 1967 and a local appeal produced a generous response, with a very large number coming from the garden of Grass-Side in Church Road.

25 different designs have been used to make up a mosaic on the altar platform and they are set in a surround of Bath stone. A centre of complete, newly made tiles of a typical Penn four- tile design, gives a very good idea of how a complete floor would have looked when it was laid. Mrs Diana Hall, of Wimborne St Giles, Dorset, made these new tiles, following the same methods of preparation, forming, decorating and glazing as the 14th C tilers, although using a modern gas kiln. The colour and appearance of the original tiles has been captured very effectively and the overall effect is both informative and pleasing.

For more detailed information see Miles Green’s book ‘Medieval Penn Floor Tiles’ available from the Penn and Tylers Green Website.

Penn’s Economy and the Black Death

Whilst few villages escaped unscathed from the Black Death, which first appeared in 1348, some were affected much worse than others. In Kimble, for instance, in 1349, all the tenants were dead and the land was uncultivated. In the same year, 77 of Buckinghamshire’s clergy died. There is no contemporary record for Penn, but the Poll Tax of 1377 showed there were only 81 adults in the parish. It is likely that about half the population died in the four successive epidemics.

The 1332 tax return for Penn shows there were three tilers in the parish and that their combined wealth almost equalled that of the lord of the manor. Tile-making must have been all the more important to Penn’s inhabitants because even before the Black Death agricultural conditions were dire. A rapidly increasing population was faced with a climate shift bringing cool, wet weather that destroyed harvests and left populations and their animals starving and vulnerable to infection. Loss of cattle to disease and with them the only source of fertiliser for the fields, led to a cycle of reducing crop yields and severe food shortages.

We have a glimpse of these problems from a tax of 1340, levied to pay for Edward III’s wars with France. Penn was required to pay a total of 20 marks (1 mark = 13s 4d), but the inhabitants claimed successfully on oath that almost one third of the land of the parish, ‘which used to be ploughed and sown, lies fresh and uncultivated because many are so poor and impotent that they cannot cultivate their lands’. Their plea was successful and the tax was reduced to 13 marks. The agricultural depression was still a feature of Segrave Manor, one of the two manors in Penn parish, in 1372, since their accounts reported ‘for corn much of the land lay uncultivated’.

The tower and south aisle of Penn Church, which are dated architecturally to between 1325 and 1350, must have been built before this economic collapse since the money would have to have been raised from parishioners, probably heavily subsidised by the prosperous tilers.

The more detailed records of the tilers all come after 1348 and so relate to a parish with about 40 working men. Three to five tileries with 15 kilns were needed to meet just the royal orders of 1357. If we also consider the many ancillary tasks involved, we must conclude that the tile industry entirely dominated the parish and it is not at all surprising that the tilers gave their name to their part of the parish as Tyler End Green.

So, climate change, pestilence, crop failure and shortage of workers were the dominant features of life in the 14th century.

– ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’!

Miles Green, December 2022

Penn Family Tree 16th – 18th Century

View as PDF – opens in new window

View as PDF – opens in new window

Thomas Carter (c1696-1782)

Thomas Carter owes his appearance in the annals of Holy Trinity to the fact that he was the son-in-law of Daniel Baker & Martha Mellish, the owners of a grand, timber-framed medieval mansion in Penn next to Widmer Pond, known as Tylers Green House, which later became Edmund Burke’s French School.¹

He was a lawyer at Grays Inn in London and came from Wistow in Huntingdonshire². He married Joanna Baker on 16 June 1737. The marriage was not encouraged by her family, but he was a 41-year-old widower and she was then ‘aged 30 years and a spinster’ and was determined that it should go ahead. It took place in London without her parents’ knowledge, probably at the Ely House Chapel Holborn.

Thomas Carter’s Marriage Application. (Click to enlarge)

Sadly, the marriage was not a long one and Joanna was buried on the 9th of September 1749, noted in the Holy Trinity Penn register as the wife of Thomas Carter, Meanwhile, her younger sister, Dorothy, had married John Holroyd who was to become the Earl of Sheffield and add the name Baker when he inherited their Penn estate, which he sold in 1769.

The Carters had three daughters, Martha born 1739, Elizabeth born 1742, and Harriet born 1747. The first two daughters never married and remained part of their father’s household for the rest of their lives. Harriet married Sir Henry Clinton (1730-1795) in February 1767 at St Georges Hanover Square. Henry Clinton was a very distinguished soldier who succeeded General William Howe as Commander-in Chief of the British Army during the American War of Independence.³

Harriet died, aged only 25, just eight days after giving birth to her fifth child. Thomas and his two unmarried daughters then moved into the Clinton family home in Weybridge to take care of the children and where they seem to have lived out their lives.⁴ This accounts for the description of Thomas as ‘of Weybridge’ in the Penn Parish burial register.

All the Carters, except Harriet, were eventually buried in Penn, presumably because Joanna was already buried there, and so it is strange that she is not remembered on the Carter wall memorial. This might be explained by the fact that it was not put up for at least some 70 years after Joanna’s death, when her daughter Elizabeth died in 1817. Harriet herself rests in the churchyard at Baumber⁵ Nr. Horncastle in Lincolnshire where the Clinton family came from.

This is not the end of Thomas Carter’s story, as his name appears on a “Centre for the Study of the legacies of British Slavery” website set up by University College London. In 1774, Carter purchased two £50 annuities on the lives of his daughter Martha and his grandchildren Augusta (1765-1852) and William Henry Clinton (1769-1846), the children of his youngest daughter, Harriet. The annuities were secured on a property containing the enslaved people of John Abel Ward on Nevis in the Caribbean.

Later, Augusta was to elope with (and later marry) Henry Dawkins from a Jamaican slave owning family. In the same year Thomas Carter was also party to a deed with 23 other purchasers of annuities, from Agustin Gwyn secured on the Mount Charles estate and Middleton Pen in Jamaica.

The Clarke family of Penn and Penn Church in the 18th and 19th C

Part 1: The two Vicars of Penn

Some twenty years ago, I exchanged information with a Mr Bernard Harris about his Penn ancestors. He has since seen the articles we have put up on the Penn Church website (Google, ‘Penn Church history’) about two earlier Vicars of Penn, the Revd John Middleton, who was Curate then Vicar from 1766 to 1808, and the Revd Benjamin Anderson, his successor from 1808-12. Mr Harris has now surprised and delighted me by providing photographs of his inherited portraits of the Revd Anderson and his wife Rebecca, probably painted when in his earlier role as Vicar of Little Missenden.

Revd. Benjamin Anderson

Mrs Rebecca Anderson c.1810?

Both were men of particular merit. Revd Middleton left meticulous records of important aspects of the church’s history, in particular the digging of the vault beneath the nave for William Penn the Quaker’s grandchildren, and of another vault beneath the chancel where he reported a foundation date inscription of 1177 (presumably as MCLXXVII).

Revd Anderson was a friend of Edmund Burke’s who described him as ‘a Clergyman of learning and merit ‘, and writing to his friend William Windham, the Secretary at War, he refers to ‘Mr Anderson, a Clergyman at Penn whose Observatory and Experimental apparatus I wished much to show you’. Mr Anderson had married Rebecca Clarke in 1761 and they were living in Penn near the church long before he became Vicar and so it is tempting to see the tiled turret on the roof of The Knoll as his observatory.

Marriage to Clarke sisters

I had remarked in my earlier article that the two vicars must have been particular friends because Revd Anderson took the service of induction when Revd Middleton became Vicar in 1787 and Bernard Harris was able to confirm that the two vicars were indeed friends and had in fact married sisters, Mary and Rebecca, the two elder daughters of William Clarke Snr (1700-80) who lived at Penn House for many years.

Steward of the Penn Estate

William Clarke was Steward to Assheton Curzon for the Penn Estate. The Penn parish register of burials in 1780 describes William Clarke as a ‘malster, ‘late of Penn House’, and similarly for his wife in 1797. He was recorded as Steward by 1767 and may have come to Penn in 1756 when Assheton Curzon inherited the estate. William was followed as Steward by his eldest son, Edward, and probably by another son, Charles (born 1745), who was described as ‘of Penn House’ in 1797. Charles Garland, a carpenter and one of William’s grandsons was also Steward in the 1830s and 40s.

The Knoll
Interestingly, another grandson, William Jnr (1778-1847), was living at The Knoll in 1833 when King William IV & Queen Adelaide came to the church as God-parents to one of the Howe’s children. The Vicar’s wife wrote that after the service, ‘their Majesties then walked to Mr Clarke’s Garden to see the View which was not of course clear’. The Clarkes therefore seem to have been a very prosperous family and were tenants of the Curzon/Howes, successively in Penn House and The Knoll, for the best part of a century from the 1760s.

View Clarke Family Tree Part 1 as an enlargeable PDF (opens in new window)

Part 2: The Ettys

View Clarke Family Tree Part 2 as an enlargeable PDF (opens in new window)

The Andersons had no children and the Middletons only one, a daughter, Mary, who married the Revd James Etty, Vicar of Whitchurch, in 1796. She died of ‘Consumption’ at the age of 32 and is buried with her parents in the Middleton vault under the Revd Bennet’s large tombstone just outside the south door of the church .

Her husband died in Whitchurch only a few months later, and his will requested that if he was within 30 miles of the parish of Penn, he wished to be interred ‘in the same vault with my late dear wife Mary’¹. He appointed the Revd John Middleton, the Revd David Middleton and his brother Littleton Etty, as Guardians of the trust he was leaving for his three-year-old orphaned daughter Elizabeth. An older daughter had already died in infancy.

Elizabeth (1801-29) survived to adulthood. Mr Harris thinks she may be the subject of the third portrait although it is labelled ‘Etty Shrimpton’. An old and broken ring is known in family tradition as ‘Miss Etty’s ring’, with the claim that it was given to her by the King, as thanks for riding with him at Windsor.

There is also a third portrait of a young woman, described as ‘Etty Shrimpton’.

But the dress and hairstyle of this portrait put it in the 1770s/80s and it could be a much younger Mrs Anderson.’

William & Shelometh’s church charity

Two of the many grandchildren of William Clarke of Penn House, William Jnr (1778-1847) and his sister Shelometh (1782-1858), are commemorated in the church by two painted wooden boards recording their bequests of £100 and £200 respectively, as holdings in stocks to provide income to maintain the Clarke family’s and the Revd Middleton’s tombstones, with any surplus for the benefit of the poor of the parish over the age of seventy. In 1850, The £300 earned a fixed return of £7 10s pa which was then worth over £600 in today’s purchasing power, but by 1992, when changes in legislation first allowed such small charities to be closed, it was no longer a useful sum and one of my first tasks as Parish Clerk was to arrange for both charities to be closed.

Garland descendants

William Clarke Snr’s youngest daughter, Henrietta, married James Garland (1745-1825) in 1770 and the ninth of their eleven children, was Charles Garland, (1784-1846), a carpenter and the third generation of his family to be Steward for the Penn Estate. He lived in and probably built Cobblers on Beacon Hill opposite Slades Garage. He was a fervent Methodist and is likely to have been a strong influence behind building the Primitive Methodist Chapel built in Church Road (East), Tylers Green, in 1840. He is also claimed to have played a leading part in the building of Penn Street church, completed in 1849 three years after his death.

Charles Garland’s Penn descendants include Walter Carden, who built the garage opposite Slades Garage, now known as Winter’s, and whose parents and grandparents ran The Crown for many years. Sir Victor Garland, the Australian High Commissioner to London in the 1980s, was Walter’s cousin and the three of us had an enjoyable lunch together – in the Crown of course. Bernard Harris is also a descendant of Charles Garland, and therefore of William Clarke Snr.

A Country Church
(Sir George Grove, 1886)

Sir George Grove

I stayed for a Sunday lately at Penn, the home of my ancestors for many generations. A little Buckinghamshire village which has been practically unchanged for the last two hundred years. Penn stands in a triangle between Beaconsfield, Amersham and High Wycombe; and as its name implies, it is the highest land in that part of the county. One part of it is still called Beacon Hill; and the fires anciently lighted thereon are said to have been visible at sea. It is the height that has been its safeguard against innovation. The railway station is Loudwater; and from that it is a steepish gradient of some three miles to the village.

Penn consists of a street about half a mile long, a school, a chapel, a few houses and cottages on each side, and, at the further or eastern end, the Church, the blacksmith’s shop and the Institute, which is almost the only modern thing in the place. On either side of the street are some of most delightful fields in England, and thence you may have unrivalled views.

It was in the Church that I found my greatest pleasure. The chancel was burned down many years ago¹, and was rebuilt (apparently on its ample foundations) in brick, without any attempt at architecture; but the nave, with a south aisle, two large roomy porches and a low tower, massive with large spreading buttresses, all of the fourteenth century at latest, remain pretty much as they always were. The churchyard is large, with many graves, and most of them turfy hillocks. The vicar is aged², and somewhat feeble in voice; but he is quite in character with the whole scene. He reads the lesson like a scholar and a gentleman with most appropriate delivery. It was a pleasure to listen to him. His sermon too! — I reflected how differently I would have listened to it thirty or even twenty years ago, when I had more enthusiasm and less patience and thought more of my own ideas than the feelings of others. This is a confession, but it may not be without its use. I now heard and was satisfied with good sound sense and quiet expression, where before I should have wanted originality and emphasis.

But it was the prayers that touched me the most; for a very different thing it is to say your prayers in an old Church, its walls seeming to enclose an atmosphere of the past, and in a modern one built a quarter of a century ago. In the old Church the presence of our forefathers seems to linger, and the the voice of their supplications to be not quite stilled. The very walls seem to be concious of the oft-repeated ritual and to be sanctified by it. Bits of old tracery peep out like archaic words and phrases in the liturgy. Even the change in style and of the wording on the monuments are like the changes in the Prayer book and in harmony wih them.

The south aisle of my old Church was built later than the rest, and the two clerestory windows which it covers, and which once lighted the nave, still remain there, above the plain honest arches, without their glass, but otherwise sharp and firm, exactly as they were at first.

Zeigler painting 1850, showing old box pews

I sat in a large pew — square with very narrow seats , and with faded maroon curtains round it, which, if I were the squire, I think I should remove. Opposite, in the end wall of the aisle, was a monument, a vase of oval Roman form, delicately sculptured in gray marble, and setting forth that it was in memory of “Roger Mather³, clerk, eleven years vicar of this parish, to whom Asheton Curzon, Esq., was pupil, patron and friend.” How characteristic! The form of the monument, the character of the letters, the turn of the inscription, all spoke plainly of the eighteenth century.

Curzon was one of the great people of the place, and he and Mather, like Walpole and Gray, probably travelled in Italy togther. It is not “whose pupil, patron, friend” — that would have imported a certain familiarity into the phrase; but “to whom Asheton Curzon, Esq.,” etc., this giving all due pre-eminence to the great man! The music was unpretending and good, and the lovely hymn, “The Saints of God”, must have sunk into many a heart beside my own. At such times those whom one has lost, and those whom one is about to lose, take entire possession of the mind, and lift it into another and higher sphere.

After Church we walked into the parsonage and looked at the grand old yew tree, which I have seen on more than one spring smoke like an altar, and which first taught me the meaning of Tennyson’s lines:

O brother, I have seen this yew tree smoke.
Spring after spring, for half a hundred years

On one occasion the old clerk of Penn Church was ill, and the vicar brought in his stable-man to collect the offertory on a sacrament Sunday. The man did not know his way about the Church, and at first missed the square pew of which I spoke. Going back, he returned with the occupant’s half-crown, but could not make the parson understand where he had got it; till at last, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, he whispered, “From the gentleman in the loose box, sir”.

The Bucks Herald, Saturday, October 2, 1886 [From the St. James’ Gazette]

First published in St James’s Gazette on 27 Sep 1886, written by Sir George Grove who inherited his older brother Thomas’ Penn estate in 1897 (see Mansions and mudhouses p.16), and it was apparently repeated in Sir George’s 1897 Reminiscences. He wrote it after a visit to his brother, noting it was “so spoiled by the editor that I hardly care to own it”, but a very full biography by Charles L. Graves, The Life of Sir George Grove (1903), describes the article as ‘one of the most charming pieces ever written by Grove, recapturing much of the spirit of Addison, anecdotal, and touched with a sense of sadness over a lost world and forsaken ideals.’

Sir George Grove (13 August 1820 – 28 May 1900) was a member of the Grove family who lived at Watercraft and Stonehouse in Church Road, Penn. Their name is recorded in the earliest tax return of 1332. He inherited the Grove family estate in 1897 and his descendants held it until they sold up in 1953. In 1883 he became the first director of the Royal College of Music and between 1878 and 1889 he compiled and published a magisterial four volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians which has been the standard reference work for the musical world ever since. It was an enormous achievement and has been updated many times. The most recent edition, just published and known as New Grove II, takes up 29 volumes and 25 million words.
Apart from his distinction as a musicologist he was also an archaeologist, lexicographer, educator and author. Arthur Sullivan was a very close friend and was godfather to his third son Arthur, born in 1864. Arthur Sullivan is popularly supposed to have written “The Lost Chord” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” in the summerhouse of Watercroft. (Miles Green, 2001)

History, Monuments and Memorials of Penn

History, Monuments and Memorials of Holy Trinity, Penn, Buckinghamshire