 OK, mae'r ffaith, oedden nhw'n meddwl, a'r meddwl, mae'n meddwl yn y meddwl, mae'n meddwl am Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Cymau, felly mae'n meddwl y bwysig ar y stonaen ymlaen yma ar y cael 800 o bobl, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio i chi'n mynd i bod yn fawr o'r hefyd ychydig yn fawr o'r holl, yna ddweud yn gwneud. Rwy'n credu i'r ysgrifennu arnynnu. Felly, Stona Park, Oxfordshire. Rwy'n credu i'r ddweud yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddweud, y Chyfl, ac yw'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, rthen Over freight, I'll start by saying something about the historical background, the questions that we faced when looking at the building, the buildings themselves, the chapel itself, the tower and buildings Mae'r unig yw'r unig ymlaen o'r bwysig sydd wedi'i gweithio'r projecol, sydd wedi'u gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r Lothre fund. John Steen, rydyn ni'n gweithio, yn ymlaen i'r list ac rwyf yn 2014-15. Mae'r gweithio'r list, ac mae'n gweithio'r list. SS. Also that�s the list of some of th y peopl who helped. And my thanks go out to all of them and others not not mentioned. I'm sure you all know where stoner is but it is somewhere north of Henley, on Robert Plott�s Map. There is a stoner there, with ychydig o'r llwyddoch yn cyfnod o'r llwyddoch o'r llwyddoch. Felly mae'n gwybod i'r llwyddoch yn cymryd yn y ffordd, sy'n gydig o'r llwyddoch. Ond, dyna'r llwyddoch ar Rycwt, ond mae'r llwyddoch yn cyfryd yn cyfryd. Yn ystod yma, yma'r llwyddoch yn cyfryd, yn ymddangos yn ymddangos, mae'n gwybod i'r llwyddoch yn gwybod i'r llwyddoch. Mae'n meddwl amser yn ychydig o'r llwyddoch, mae hynny'n meddwl ar hynny, ond mae'n meddwl yn ymddangos, a fyddai'n meddwl yn y fforddau. Mae'n ymddangos yn gwneud yr ysgol yn ymddangos, yn y ffordd yn ymddangos. On i'n pwyf yn ymddangos, mae'n meddwl ymddangos. Yn ystod yr amser, mae'n meddwl ymddangos, Very many people have come to the table for such a wide space of how the people can communicate with each other. I hope that some are well. I hope that some are not at least on the basis of current archaeology. But we have some wonderful illustrations. In particular this one of 1687 showing the house as it then was with the chapel ac ydy'r grwp maen nhw'n gweld i'w rhanig hwn y miliadol yn y ddwyll yn gwybod, ac yn ddweud arall eu anghyddau a'r ddwyll. Rhaid i'n gweithio gyda'r holl y bydd y byd yn fwy o dr. W. A. Pantyn a ddim yn ddwych ar y gweithredu i'u Llyfrgell yn Llyfrgell, Witcher Re rebuilding is wneud o Orch'suran strain. Many, many more helpful, showing the chapel down the right corner of the tower, just to the North of it. Showing very well the awkward relationship between the tower and the chapel, the tower itself being more in line with the east wall of the house, ......... ....... ... ... Newyddion i gyllideb trofnod yr hyn... ....... ....... ........ ...... ... ... ....... ....... ....... ysgrifennig ar wahanol, byddai yn y cynllunau ymlaen ymlaenor, y cynlluniau, os oedd yn y lle wrth wahanol, sydd wedi bod yn ychydig, yn cyfnodd ar gyfer y dioseson, ac ymlaenor, ymlaenor yn ychydig, yw'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd, ac o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd, ac o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfeirio i'r ffordd, byddai yn y cyfnodd ar gyfer y cyfnodd, yn ymlaenor, ychydig sydd wedi ar eich cyfarwydd. So mae gennych gyda'r cyfrifodau, ac mae'n diodd yn cael ei cyfrifodau yn cyfrifodau arall i'r cyfrifodau ar mynd i gynnwys i'r cyfrifodau yn y cerddio cyrraedd yn 1482 o'r cyfrifodau sefylltio'r cyfrifodau ac yr unrhyw oes yn gwneud yna age is 1474. Lady Anne Stoner in 1518 was not actually buried at Stoner. The main service, the main funeral service was actually at the church at Perthyn, which is, it's not exactly nearby but it's the, it was the parish church at that time. But there was a, there was a private service at the chapel. And Stoner is, as well as being important in its own right, of course, not only as a building but as somewhere that has seen a continuous Catholic worship since the 14th century, is one of an important group of similar chapels in the Thames Valley and I've mentioned three of them there, the houses at East Hendred. The chapels at East Hendred, of course, is still in use. Those at Stanton Harcourt and Rycourt are in a different position. And of course, there's a great history of the continuation of Catholic worship in the Thames Valley with Maple Durham, of course, being another major house in the area, although their chapels, of course, are a later one. I'm going to tell you a lot about the building itself, but just to start off with some brief review of the documentation. The first mention of a chapel at Stoner is in 1331, actually managed to track down the particular document, but that's for another time. The, the key one for the purposes of this paper is a 1349 document under which Sir John Stoner and that's his effigy in Dorchester Abbey there, which allowed him to enlarge the chapel, implying that there was, of course, an earlier one there. And having a license for six chaplins to celebrate mass, there is some doubt as to whether all six arrived in 1349 or indeed survived the Black Death. And the, where these chaplins were, what their accommodation was, where it was, is one of the unanswered questions. Another important document is in 1416 to 17, an account, a building account, well, and other things, which refers to Flemish Workman working at Stoner and a large number of bricks from Crocker End, which is near Nettlebad, just in the same general area. And other, other things, of course, to do with Stoner, the most well-known one, of course, is the publication that Edmund Campion carried out there and initially a secret press of his Dakem Rationes in 1581, and then, of course, his subsequent arrest. After that, of course, the various difficulties over the Catholic persecutions and later the civil war in which there was considerable damage to the chapel, in particular to the tombs in there during that time. Then we have to leap further forward to the end of the 18th century, where we've got in the Stoner Archive a wonderful collection of accounts and letters relating to a major phase of the building between 1796 and the early part of the 19th century, and I'll say a bit about that later on. Well, here we are on a nice sunny day like today. The chapel, as you can see, is a flint structure with a plain tile roof, relatively plain building, the tower behind, brick with a cupola on the top. The structure between the two is a Victorian linking structure, which seems to have replaced an early one. There is one shown in the 1687 print I showed you earlier on, but it's a slightly different affair. One of the questions that we had when we first looked at this building was to do with the rather odd arrangement of stone on the south wall. You can see a band of limestone ashlar coming in here, and then it drops down, and there are some more stones here. In between there is what looks like the end of a wall broken off, bits of stone. As I pointed out earlier on, of course, the wall in the 1687 painting is at the west end and not there. So what was actually going on there? What in fact were the dates and phases of the chapel as a whole? As I said earlier on, what were the priests' houses and what was the purpose of the tower? Indeed, when was it built? So we'll start off with the wall. This is a close-up of both those illustrations showing you the broken stones and the wall coming out from the west end. It was clear when the people working at the chapel to build new drain that the way that trench has been dug cuts across, just at the foot of the picture, where that wall might have been, and neither in the trench nor in the chapel wall itself, a drawing of which is shown at the foot there, is there any evidence that the wall was anywhere other than where that broken set of stones is? Indeed, other people have suggested that those broken stones suggested that the west end of the chapel had been rebuilt. That's not true either because the evidence at the wall plate level there in the lower picture shows no change at all in any of the stonework until you get into work, which was done later to create the vault, which you can see in the chapel inside. So I think we've fairly convincingly dealt with the easiest question of all. The wall must have come out at that point there, and the 1687 picture shows it in a slightly different place, not in the correct place. Just to go around the chapel quickly, the east end is the rather a nondescript picture at the top left. The scar there is a string course, and underneath there is some evidence for the having been a sacristy building built on there inside the chapel, as you'll see shortly. There are two doors at the east end, and those went into that building at one time. That was all demolished in the 1960s. The north wall, as you can see, is plain, completely blind, yet internally there are alcoves that look as though they are blocked windows. Again, there's no evidence for any blocking of windows, and that peculiar expressence in the first edition northern survey map suggests that at that time there was something built against this wall. We know there was something built there in the 20th century, and you'll see pictures of that later on, but as far as we can tell, those windows were not never open. You enter the public entrance to the chapel. It's through the west end doorway there into an anti-chapel or narthex from which two doors, one either side of the painting, up steps, lead into the chapel itself. This is a view from the gallery, looking down. Those are the two doors at the far end that I mentioned. One at least went into the sacristy building at the east end. There you see the vault, the colour scheme, and this is before the current restoration work that was carried out. The focusing is, I'm afraid, due to my poor photography, rather than to the technology, I'm sure. The colour scheme here was done in the 20th century at that time, taking advice from people like John Piper, Osbert Lancaster, I think, was involved in this as well. It was intended to reflect the 18th century scheme, so this is essentially what that end of the 18th and start of the 19th century arrangement was meant to look like. Down at the east end, they alter with a marble, green marble front gift of Henry Blondel of Inns, who was a famous collector of marbles, and indeed was the father-in-law of the Thomas Stoner, who, and there have been at least seven of them, perhaps a lot more now, by this time, who was responsible for this work at the end of the 18th century. There you've got a closer view of the doors, this kind of Gothic with a K arrangement that was perhaps going out of fashion by that time, but nevertheless was obviously felt to be the way to go. The windows, stained glass, the windows have a story of their own as well. They were designed by Francis Edgerton, noted stained glass manufacturer at the end of the 18th century. He had a bit of a problem at Stoner because the window openings were enlarged and he had designed the windows thinking that they were to be the pre enlargement size, so I think the border in the left hand window, which is one of the original ones, is a result of that. He agreed that it was his fault and paid for the redoing of the glass out of his fee, so that's one of the numerous instances here of things going wrong that you get in the building accounts. The plaster work I mentioned earlier on, again, it's not terribly clear which of these gentlemen, James Thorpe of London, who was certainly paid quite a significant sum of money for work on the plaster work, but the work seems to have been carried out by a redding craftsman Samuel Carrad, and there is a plaintive note in the documents from Thorpe saying that the fact that the plaster wasn't drying out properly wasn't his fault, it must be something to do with somebody else or the lack of ventilation or something like that, so again you can sort of read between the lines to see the way in which these arguments between builders and architects and others went on when something actually like that goes wrong. Other local workmen were involved, Sleammakers of Henley, Francis Edgington I mentioned on the glass, but other firms, London firms and from elsewhere were involved in producing fittings as well and all the information about this is in the stoner papers. Thomas Stoner took advice, not only was he given materials by his father-in-law, but also advice on what paintings to have, particularly the east window that was his suggestion and somebody else, Thomas Weld of Aston, must have been a family friend also gave advice here, so we're getting a number of people having their own say in matters, but Thomas seems to have been of his own mind quite a lot, he doesn't take all the advice, so to the archaeology of the building we were privileged to have access to the hole of the chapel roof when the tiles were removed and John Steen and I did a very detailed survey of all the timber there and this will form the next part of what I need to tell you about. We didn't actually have to do a detailed drawing thankfully, but due to modern technology this can all be done in a matter of minutes by lasers and things and this is the result, as it says there, more on the land surveys carried out this work. The disturbance at the left-hand side is of course where the tower is and you'll immediately see that there is a difference between the arrangement of rafters at the left-hand side and the main body of the chapel to the right and that is, that's really the main clues to the development of the building because those, that small section of timber at the west end consists of this scissor braced roof. This is an early style, we recognise that and thanks to Dan Miles' tree ring dating, the date of 1347 was obtained very conclusively for the scissor braces themselves. The roof had been rebuilt, particularly in the north side, the part that reaches up towards the tower. Every one of those rafters, that's the ones on the right-hand side of this shot, were replaced in 1505. That's why that might have been the case is another something we'll have to have to come back to but this scissor braced roof was supported by a horizontal plate supported by bracket resting on a corbel. This is the one far west end and this suggested that in fact there was perhaps a crampost roof underneath this is a braced arrangement although the crampost itself wasn't there. The assembly marks on the rafters were a very odd mixture. There was no rationale in terms of numbering from the west in regular manner. Some parts of the roof had certainly been rebuilt possibly in the 1505 reconstruction at the north side and indeed some of the symbols here are not quite clear how they work, the circles for example sometimes appear attached to the numbers and sometimes detached from them but the two scissor braces at the far east and that should say west end had between them in grooves a oak panel and because the whole arrangement at that end had not been disturbed and this was in the undisturbed slope of the roof this must have been the 1347 roof it had and although the panel itself was undatable its tree rig arrangement suggested to Dan that it was Baltic oak of which we see numbers in that area the famous roof of the Lady Chapel in St Helens Abingdon has Baltic oak as well so this is what the original roof there would have looked like and you can see underneath it there is a later plaster ceiling so that's the story at the west end there and the rather rare feature is the support of the scissor braces by Crown post roof quite a rare feature but thanks to Nat Alcock who was here today and pointed this out to me there are examples there are a number of examples for example the the church at Harwell Oxfordshire Ffolley Berkshire has one of these in one of its transeps but the question is is this an original feature of the roof and the maxed oak example here I think Nat felt that this was perhaps an example of an original one and may be there for given the similarity of dates with stoner perhaps the closest analogy and perhaps an argument for for it being primary the scissor brace roof ended and the main part of the roof was in fact a crown post roof again not all there but these are the colors you can see there going off into the distance with gaps and sitting on top of a color perlin or a crown plate there to keep the the whole thing stable crown posts for those who I don't follow the details of medieval carpentry meant to look like this this is a an example again from the period when these crown post roofs were at their heyday in the 14th century this is an example from just down the road in Henley however the crown post roof at stoner is rather odd for a number of reasons first of all here are some of the assembly marks they're they're chiseled there they're all in order they're they're very well carried out it's a very well constructed roof but it's rather thin timbers and felled as late as 1577 to eight this is extremely late for a crown post roof why did they do that possibly a reason might be because there was one in the earlier part of the roof and they're very thin and they are it's it's very much a peculiar roof to find in at that late date sadly in the work carried out in the 1790s all the crown posts and some of the other features were removed so we don't have the full story there but the it's quite clear what was going on the empty mortises and so on should show it quite clearly what happened in the 1790s was that the whole arrangement was cut out but in order to keep the building up the and keep and to support the plaster vault that you saw earlier on these huge bulks of softwood were introduced these are the these ones here which form this arrangement here with bolted together with these heavy bolts how do i know there from danzig well thanks to tansy collins who's done a survey of bolted timber for a dissertation this mark here this little star is is one of the indicators of the source of the timber and it's these marks not only give the source they give quality they sometimes give the ship's name they sometimes give the merchant's details and dates and all sorts of other things she hasn't looked at this roof yet but there's potential here for maybe working out a bit more about where these might have came come from but at least we know they came from the eastern Baltic the tie beams were cut off they were rather nice tie beams with a nice little chamfer and stop here so you can see it's just sawn off there it's one of John's diagrams showing showing how that was carried out the one of these in fact more than one a number of the tie beams seem to have been reused as perlins to support the plaster vault this the the lengths were were fitted the the bill and this the crown post itself seems to have sat in that in that mort is there and the this arrangement down here is support this is the this is the 1796 plaster vault down there supported by these struts from the from that from that perlin so I think we're fairly clear about what was happening in the chapel roof in fact the chapel the history of the chapel whether there was certainly no evidence of the earlier chapel the whatever had happened in 1347 and of course it relates to the 1349 provision for the six priests and so on the earliest fabric visible in stoner chapel today is that 1347 roof the various other changes I mentioned leading up to the major rebuilding at the end of the 18th century and the insertion of the present vault so that's the easy bit the the difficult bit is the tower it sits it sits within the chapel as you can see there and is clearly from the archaeology later than the chapel it's got five separate stages in this rough diagram here you can see what's happening the lower two stages consist entirely of a brick spiral staircase and then the areas above have a timber stair going up and rooms with windows to them at each of the three main upper stories but also and you can see that I think perhaps slightly in the photograph there there are large openings in the in the brickwork which are now closed in both in the east facade here and here these and in the west here and here and these cannot have been for anything else other than for doorways at least some of them may have been large windows but but at least three of them look as though they were doorways very high level so some form of gallery perhaps going around there some form of access to to the various rooms we'll come back to that later on there's the base and the staircase going up in the tower there's a detail of the east face of the tower the present staircase is not very and the timber in the tower is not very helpful because as you can see here on the right hand side the staircase cuts across an earlier window so how one got up or down those upper floors when those windows were usable must have been in some other way and there's no way of telling now where that was may have just have been a ladder of course at the very top we've got on the left hand side the upper brickwork and you can probably just see here that there is some use of black or these gray header stones I'm not getting this thing to work it out but here there is a suggestion of diaper work in the in the brickwork glazed headers used in a diagonal pattern and you can see also that there's been a large opening there that's been blocked in and a later window sat in I don't think that large opening could possibly have been that shape originally but because it's been blocked in we'll never know the clock is fairly modern there it is done on the other side and I can't I'm not going to say much more about that except to say that at the very top the cupula again is a bell the the cupula and the bell don't appear in the 1687 illustration they don't appear in an 1825 illustration either so they are probably sometime in the mid 19th century and they've been refurbished now as part of the the recent work right going back to the the 15th century documents that might help us in working out what's going on in the tower um this is the account um of talk wherefield um in as you can see in the probably in the top there there's his name wherefield here and uh thomas stoner uh next to it and this is the account that is well known it refers to the um the the build the making of bricks uh at Crocker End by a chap called John Warwick it refers sorry Richard Michael Warwick sorry um and carriage of bricks um and various other things the um thomas carpenter seems to be building a dove cot and the final um item in that um account is for uh doing something to the tower and given that it's somebody called thomas plumber one assumes that this is lead leadwork on the on the tower uh and but what it does do is is tell us that there is a tower of some sort there in uh 1416 um the the bricks uh do form a bit of a problem um 200 000 bricks uh is far too many for the tower um we calculated something like 40 000 at most for the tower um so if they came to stoner then some of them must have been used for something else and of course those of you who know stoner park will know that there is an awful lot of brick there from all sorts of periods and um so it they may have gone the rest of them may have gone for something else the other odd thing in this is the 15 pounds for carriage of bricks from crocker end stoner the the carriage cost 18 shillings per 1000 bricks so he's only getting 16 700 bricks carried for 15 pounds so a very small proportion of the bricks in this account so we don't fully understand that and john is working on a transcription of this and i hope that maybe we'll we may find something else to help in this later on so watch this space Fleming's of course the Flemish brick making and brick working in the Thames valley area and the the the children's near in the hen the area of course is well known the 1437 complex of alms houses and school and so on ul is a very clear example that's the the bottom left shows the brick work over the doorway they are compared with a similar example in belgium there isn't again in the tower anything to that is typically Flemish about about it but of course that doesn't doesn't mean to say that they weren't used on the on the brick work in the tower when they came over so there is there are a number of issues with the tower which we haven't really got to the bottom of and there are some questions some of which you might be able to answer later on when i've sat down particularly the diaper brick work which if it's off 1416 puts it some 20 years earlier than what i think may well be the earliest diaper brick work surviving at tattershaw and there are others of course at eaton and elsewhere but but again if anybody knows of any other examples i'd like to hear from them the dating of the towers there was a there was a timber which did date from a period in the perhaps the late late 15th early 16th century but given that that staircase had been moved and that perhaps even the chapel even the tower has been extended upwards which is another possibility at that time we can't really tell it's it wasn't sufficient there weren't enough timbers datable timbers to to to be conclusive did the rebuilding of the chapel roof in 1505 have anything to do with this it is possible that the in fact the most obvious thing is that there there was a when the tower was built that they left a valley gutter between the tower and the chapel roof which let the water in as these things do and the timbers rotted and had to be replaced in 1505 i think that's the obvious reason there is later a roof built over that which currently stops water getting through so it it clearly was a problem after 1505 as well so i think we can take it that that's the most obvious thing it is possible of course that it dates that part of the tower but i'm not sufficiently convinced of that as i like to put it forward but one of the interesting things about this tower is what is it for it clearly had some relationship to the priest's houses because the the both the current tradition and indeed as i'll suggest in a minute the the priests would probably have lived in that angle between the chapel and the house they certainly did live there in the 19th and 20th centuries and probably did so earlier on so it obviously had something to do with them my feeling is that it might have been a tower from which they descended into the chapel so as not to disturb the family during the night for example if they were carrying out services then or saying prayers or something like that and because and i think that the only way until the sacristy building was built the only way into the chapel was either down the tower or from the west wing the west doorway so perhaps again we can discuss this afterwards how did this complex work and what might those upper rooms have been for were the vestries or something like that which brings us to the priest's houses themselves certainly that area in the north corner between here between the house and the chapel this line here must be the priest's houses as they were at the end of the 19th century and probably where the earlier ones were as well at least Henry there in this sort of semi in this northern location semi shielded from the house in a tower at Rycote and Stanton Harcourt never in the main house question mark were the priests in these chapels always kept in separate accommodation again if Henry's got any examples or one way or the other i'd like to be interested to hear of those and this here to the north was was traditionally known in the family as the cloister and obviously with good reason this is the 19th century or well 20th century picture of the 19th century how priests houses at the north side of the chapel there you can see this from country life you can see these buildings here the whatever they may have looked like um these um flat ish monopitch roofs are certainly not medieval and that chimney stack is is fairly fairly modern these were demolished however there's one of them's gone by the 1960s and the remaining one has only got a single pot on it and is um the boiler house for the heating system that was installed in the chapel at that at that time there was another trench dug by the team building a new drainage system for the chapel going right through that area at the north and there were some shallow brick foundations found that's the that's them near the ranging rod there and the sample of the brick as you can see it's a it's a relatively modern brick with a frog in it so it's not a medieval brick the foundations are not medieval foundations they wouldn't really have held up very much by way of a structure anyway a boiler house yes but substantial accommodation for uh priests whether there were six or fewer um unlikely so sadly that was not conclusive in in in helping us decide where those would have been so um that's the sort of uh picture that we've got of the um priest houses um somewhere in that area and how did they link to the tower how did they get up to these walkways and how did how was the building used so that's been a sort of romp through uh the work that was done at the chapel um a couple of years ago now and the results some of which are pretty conclusive particularly in terms of dating the timber work on the chapel and the way in which that relates to the 1349 license the tower um something probably there by the by 1416 something to do with the priests but exactly what was going on we don't know and then this astonishing rebuild in 1578 with this archaic uh roof style and the major refurbishment uh into its almost its present state in the end of the 19th century 18th century rather i'm afraid that i haven't got any pictures of what it looks like today but the work that's been done um will ensure i hope that um it'll certainly survive for centuries to come the dam problems are about to be dealt with by drainage and a new floor which is now um a stone rather than concrete which should help at us and um i'm sure that and since it is in in very good hands that it'll it'll uh it'll last a few a few lifetimes so i'll stop there and thank you very much for listening and i look forward to hearing the answers to some of my questions thank you