 Gweithiedu. I'm delighted to have been given this opportunity to speak to you today about our significant new acquisition, the Kalmscock Manor, and one which I'm sure will prove one of the highlights of the collections there. It has been made possible not only because of generous contributions from individuals, but also through funding from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Meany Purchase Grant Fund. Mae'r dyn ni, mae hyn yn dda i ddechrau o'r ddiddordeb yn yma, yn y rhan o'r ymgyrch gweithio, hefyd yn ddod i'r hunan ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb, a'r ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb a'u ddiddordeb ar ysgrifenniad o'r llyfr ac mae'r ddiddordeb yma, y Homstead yn y Ffordd Cotfwild, dylai o Mae Morris, William Morris'r ddwyll iawn, ac yn ymgrwlad o yma yma'r jelynyd. Yn yma'r ddiddordeb yn 2014, Mae'r cyfrifio'r bwysig yma wedi'u cyfrifio'r byw sydd y bydd cyfrifio'r bwysig yma, gyda'r unrhyw o'r bydd ynghylch yn ymddangosol, a'r bydd y gyrfaethau a'r bwrthfyn ar y gwrthafol, ac mae'n ffryd yn cyfrifio'r bwysig yn ymgylch ar y Gweithreith Moris. Mae'n cael ei wneud o'r reisio'r gweithio a'r pwrthfyn i'r ddeiligol iawn, ac mae'n gweithio'r bwysig iddyn nhw. Mae'r gwneud yn dweud i'w bwysig y gallwn i'w ddweud i'r bwysig yma, ac rwy'n nhw'n fwy o'ch ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddotl Llyn Hals, y ffelly o'r society, ymweldwyr, ymgyrch, a'r practicioner, sy'n gynghwyl i'r cyflwyn i'r ddweudio'r cyffredinol sy'n cyflwyn i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Fel yma, dangos fel sy'n ddefnyddio'r Cornwallau, ac ond rhaid creed yn astu ddigon魚 blends yn sidefa aélo, ystyplaying ar forgotd yn dewe. Dyma, ond,ech gallwch Claudiam Hylluddio i'r ddoffa gylio e wedi dod hollhydd bathroom ac efallai yn eu gyfnodd iawn. поed gan Ondr Corynwyr gallaf hyfrifau cyffredinol oes Gwydiannaeth Maer einen yn practiceio gelly ac yn pobli yw'r ddafynTON, neu o widefarnio. i am ymddangosio i'r gweithio'r seithiant. Mae'r sorgfyrdd yn dweud ei ddechrau ar y cant yn ymgyrch, ac mae'n meddwl am gael ein canol o'r parod yn eich gweithio'r gweithio. A'r gweithio'r gweithio fi'n gweld bod ymgyrchol o'r ddefnyddio'r gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r bwysig yn gyfrifio'r sorgfyrdd y 12 gwahogau i'r bwysig i'ch anodd mewn beth. Mae'r tîm yn fudaf am y tîm ddweud gael y cyd-dweud yn ddechrau yma ond mae Yun Mawrys, wedi cael byddwn i gael y fawr gyda'i gael yng Nghymru yn y mynd i William Morris, am ychydig hwn namen nhw, mae yn ddwy'n golygu medio'r cyd-dweud i'r roi ar bus Ogwys, ond mae wedi gyda'r ysgr 分hau ddaeth, a dim ond mae'n dau'r 23 mwyaf, byddwyr yng Nghymru yn ysgrifennu Bryd, neu Rhywodraeth – ym 1885, beans that she held for eleven years untill the year of her father's death in 1896. Under her leadership, the department executed some of the finest embroidered work of today, the most which can be numbered of the Hangings on the Bed at Kelscot manner. She also was very active in the Royal School of Needlework and over the years she developed a particular expertise in historical embroidery particularly Opus Anglicana Mae dweud o fod yn ei ddechrau a gwneud y ddefnyddio iaith a'n 1893 y fawr ar bethau meddyliadau meddyliadau wedi cymryddoch yn wedi'i gwneud efallai y gallu gwaith y byd i'r ffordd, y cael eu sometimeu yn eich ymgyrchu'r enyfion i'r busiau hyn ysgolau y meddyliadau a hynny yn ddefnyddio'r reidio i wspargau i iechyd y ffazer yn mynd i'w defnyddio arniadau ar amgylcheddau. Maen nhw'n gweithio, Jane Weiss was extremely talented in transcribing designs into finished embroideries, something which she was well versed in doing, particularly during the early years of her marriage to William Weiss when the family lived at Red House, and when embroidered panels and hangings such as these, the Daisy hangings, which again are in the Helmscott Manor collection, was so prominent within the decorative schemes of the house. In Linda Perry's opinion, her transcription of Mae Morris' design to the finished piece that you'll see today was a masterpiece in its application of technique in retaining Mae's own drawing style, something very difficult to achieve. So what do we know about the history and significance of this object? Well, the ledger of the embroidery department for Morrisville Company is now at the National Art Library at the BNA, and what that tells us is that Mae designed a great many things over the years that she was director of that department, but only a handful of cock quills are listed as being pieces for retail or commissioned, and only one of those is described as having animals as its subject matter, a commission for Mrs Whiteley in 1893. Mae does appear to have designed another rather more simplified version of our cock quills in 1889 for an American client, which is described as having a small house surrounded by animals and birds, and above which hover an American eagle, which may quite possibly bear some relation to the eagle, which is featured at the top of the design of our cock quills. This piece, unfortunately, has since been lost, or at least it's whereabouts are currently unknown, so it's not being available to us for comparative purposes. But what is evident is that such subject matter was extremely rare within Mae's of. Well, in 1890, the cock quill was one of nine pieces designed by Mae Mawr, to be included in the third Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society show, and it was identifiable from its catalogue description, and the exhibition itself was reviewed in the Illustrated London News, and the quilt was given a particular mention praising both the complexity and originality of its design, and I'll just read you an extract from that review. In a glass case has arranged a cock quilt designed by Miss Morris and worked by Mrs Morris with a goodly array of animals, bordered with lines from Tiger Tiger Burning Bright by William Blake. Perhaps of all the pieces contributed by the Morris family, this is one of the best and most original. Well, another hundred years went by before the piece was shown in public again, when it featured in the exhibition held at the William Morris Gallery in 1989, which was in fact the first exhibition to be devoted purely to Mae Morris and her work, and the catalogue for that show described it as being amongst the most important works featured. So the design of this exceptional piece can safely be said to date to 1889, or possibly the early months of 1890, the months immediately preceding Mae's marriage to fellow socialist Henry Halliday Sparling, who you can see seated next to Mae in this photograph with Henry Walker and George Bernard Shaw. William Morris, as I'm sure you know, was a committed revolutionary socialist from 1883, and his daughter shared his political convictions as did Sparling. Prior to her marriage, Mae spent extended amounts of time at Kelmscott Manor preparing for her new life, and we know this from her mother's correspondence. Jane, in writing to a friend, observes Mae is a way at Kelmscott Manor alone, learning cooking and how to live on a few shillings a week. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Mae's affection for the place, they then spent their honeymoon at the manor. Given that this was a transitionary period in Mae's life, it is pertinent to question, as Linda Parry has done, whether the quilt's childlike composition could simply be said to be a flight of Mae's imagination, or whether instead it reflects a newly awakened maternal awareness. Fiona McCarthy, in her authoritative biography of William Morris, gives weight to this possibility. When she observes that although there doesn't appear to be any surviving evidence, it is maintained within Morris circles that the Sparlings had a stillborn child. And although we quite possibly will never know whether our quilt is the quilt designed by Mae for her own lost child, what we do know is that it had immense personal significance for her, which is demonstrated by an account from the 1920s. It was in March 1925 that Alfredo Manning, daughter of the sculptor, Hamo Thornycroft, visited Calmscock Manor, and she recorded that visit in her diary. It was then published in 1980 in the Journal of the William Morris Society. And very usefully, from our perspective, she is careful to state that the diary entry was made at the time of her visit to the manor rather than retrospectively, so as well as being highly detailed accounts of her visit, it's also a very reliable one. And she describes taking tea with Mae Miles prior to then detailing the embroideries which have been selected for her by Mae to view. And I'll read you the pertinent extract. Ms Morris showed us some coverlets embroidered with silk, a charming one for a child of a little house, a river, and every kind of animal. Foxes, ducks, a smiling lion, and a weakling elephant, etc. And round them was a border of motos. First plough your furrow, then God will send the seed. Better unborn than untaught, and an Italian one, and a Persian one. So a very detailed description of the piece. In addition, on that visit, she was shown a pair of bishops' gloves, finally embroidered by Mae Miles to a design by Charles Bricketts. Those are now in the V&A. And another bed cover, which was embroidered with honeysuckle, fratilleries, and crown imperial, which, as she noted, were flowers which flourished in the fields around Kelmscott at that date. Evidently, these were particularly precious items to her. She had a house full of wonderful items, which she could have chosen to show her guests, but these were the pieces that she selected. And our cock quilt embodies that very deep affection felt by Mae for Kelmscott, our beloved Oxfordshire home, as she called it. The place that was a constant in her life from the age of nine, on which she felt to be her true home. She was to write, Though my family lived ostensibly in London, we were never really town birds. Country life was always to us the natural and happy thing. And from 1923, Mae made the manna her permanent home when she left her house at Hemsmouth Terrace behind. Well, I'm just going to say a few quick words about the pictorial and textual content of the piece before I conclude. As I said before, research is still ongoing into it, and particularly into the rationale behind Mae's choices, both in terms of the animals and beasts, which she included in the design and the quotations and proverbs. Stylistically, the anthropomorphised, stym, smiling lion, as Alfredo Manning called him, who you can see on the left here, obviously references 17th century stump work. We don't know whether she was referencing one particular piece or not, but for some of the other birds and beasts, we do have far more specific sources that have been identified. So here we have the heron. The top left image is the heron from the cock cover, and beneath it is another heron designed by Mae Morris some 20 years later for the cover notes that she designed for her mother to embroider in memory of her father, which remains at the manna today. On the right, we have Thomas Buick's illustration from A History of British Birds, volume 2, first published in 1804, and of which William Morris owned a copy of the first edition, to which, of course, Mae would have had ready access. Likewise, the spotted giraffe, or camel leopard, as it's termed in this particular source, and the Ganges stag, appear to have been adapted from illustrations in Ralph Bilby's General History of Quadrupeds, first published in 1791, and of which Morris owned a copy of the second edition. And if I just go back a second to the giraffe, what's quite interesting is that the illustration that you see here is from that second edition. And as you can see, although it is slightly simplified, the embroidered design shows a spotted animal. In later editions of that book, that the pattern on the animal's skin is rather more jigsaw-like, as one would expect. So there's clearly a close correlation between Mae's design and that of the edition owned by her father. It's no coincidence that these creatures, and quite possibly many of the others, can be linked to volumes held in Morris's library a ready and available source of inspiration to Mae, who certainly appears to have made extensive use of it. The quotations and proverbs that she selected with which to decorate the border of the piece are also noteworthy. Many of them are bound by a common philosophy, living responsibly, taking advantage of opportunities for education and self-improvement, and dealing fairly and kindly with one's fellow man, all broadly speaking tenants of socialism and reflective of Mae's political activism through her involvement with the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League at this time. And if I just look a little closer at the first one, better unborn than untaught is taken from Plato's Republic. The full line from that is, it is better to be unborn than untaught for ignorance is the root of misfortune. Perhaps more specifically, given the data at which Mae was designing this piece, it may also be worth considering the possibility that she was making an oblique reference to her father's great utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which was first published in serial form in the Socialist Journal Commonwealth from January 1890. The two other proverbs beneath that reflect those same socialist values. And it does appear that Mae also referenced directly her father's work. The two extracts of Farsi, which you can see here, have been identified as coming from the roubaillate of Omar Kayam, a poem for which Maurice had a particular enthusiasm and of which he had created two illuminated manuscript versions in the 1870s, which of course Mae would have been aware of. In fact, the ongoing research by American scholars, William and Sylvia Peterson, into reconstructing William Morris' personal library, and they visited the man at this summer to look at our books for that particular project, has made it possible for us to establish that with the exception of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which of course relate to the Tiger Tiger Burning Bright line, all of the quotations and proverbs are taken from books owned by Morris. And so it can be seen that the quilt not only encapsulates Mae's creative collaboration with her mother, but also reflects the intellectual and political bond between herself and her father. Well, it remained in Mae's hands until her death, and subsequently was entered into the rather forlorn sale that took place on a rainy day in July 1939, and in which it was described in the catalogue rather perfunctrally as embroidered cockwild worked by Mrs William Morris. We know from annotated copies of that catalogue that the purchaser was one, Mrs Mae Elliot Hobbs of Bradshaw's Farm, Kelmscott, and that she paid £26 for it. Mae Elliot Hobbs is herself rather an interesting person. She was the daughter of a noted Scottish agriculturalist and stock-breeder born in 1872. She was privately educated, and then she went to Germany to study the piano before embarking on a career as a concert pianist, cut short in 1906 by her marriage to Robert Hobbs, who was a farmer at Kelmscott, and breeder of the renowned herd of Kelmscott's shorthorn cattle, which I believe Jenny may mention again in her talk, and who also was the Morris' landlord at Kelmscott at that date. Evidently Mae Elliot Hobbs was very independently minded. She supported women's suffrage. She also served in the First World War with an ambulance unit in France and subsequently was in the Women's Land Army. But as well as that, she had a particular love for and deep knowledge of rural life, and she was, along with Cecil Sharp, with whom you can see her photograph here, Cecil Sharp on the left, an aged Morris dancer to his right, Mae Elliot Hobbs, and then we have Mae Morris and in the wheelchair the rather dark figure is Jane Weiss. This image was taken just two years before Jane Weiss's death. She was a founder member of the English Folk Dance Society. Mae Elliot Hobbs, in her thought, is embarked on a lecture tour of America. This is one of the pages taken from the prospectus for that tour, during which she spoke on farming, English folk dance and song, and, of course, inevitably, Kelmscott. So it can be seen that she was in sympathy with many of Mae Morris' own concerns and the two women became friends. They were both particularly interested in the role of women in rural society and they were the driving force behind the foundation of Kelmscott's Women's Institute in 1916. And for many years thereafter they were also at the heart of the social life of the village initiating, encouraging, participating in and, of course, hosting communal activities. Mae Elliot Hobbs retained the cock quilt until her death. It then passed down through the family until it was acquired literally just a few weeks ago by the society so we have an unbroken provenance for the piece. I'm just going to finish by saying a few words about how the quilt will now augment the collections at the manor. Firstly, it is, of course, a creative response to the inspirational power of the manor, its history and significance and exploring which is at the heart of our future vision for the site. It also draws together the Hobbs and Morris families and the link between the manor and its history as a working farm. The manor was, of course, built by the antecedents of the Hobbs family, the Turner's and during both the tenure and the ownership of the manor itself by the Morris family the adjacent farm buildings were still used for agricultural purposes embodying the continuity of this isolated community which was of such immense importance to William Morris and which we plan to incorporate into our future interpretation. The piece will provide an imaginative entree into the collections for our younger visitors. We have struggled slightly to achieve that and this is an ideal piece to assist us in doing so and we'll be developing interpretation accordingly. Last but not least, we hope to capitalise on the appeal of this delightful piece by developing and licensing retail products based on it which will, we hope, make practical contribution to safeguarding Calmscott Manor's future. Thank you. I am delighted to be here. Yes, so I worked, my internship was about seven weeks long and I spent two weeks here at the Magna Catering Commission and then I spent about five weeks in Calmscott over the summer and when we arrived we weren't really sure what to expect but I think both of us realised over the course of the internship that there is so much at Calmscott to do and there's so much such a depth of interesting history to look at and we both really enjoyed our time there. So I'm going to start just with a brief overview of some of the tasks that we were given and to have a look at and Jen will be speaking later about the Turner and Hobbs families and we spent quite a lot of time looking at and then we really dabbled in all these areas but I'm going to be talking about mapping Calmscott Manor's interiors and the outside and gardens and also we also mucked in with the day-to-day running of the manor on the open days doing stewarding on the ticket office and all that thing, all those things. So a lot of the mapping of the interior and exterior of the manor really took shape in the form of image research so this house of the manor has been lived in for hundreds of years and the Morris is, you know, they are really only a small fraction of the people who have lived there and one of the things that can be considered when looking at the manor is what part of this time we present to the public is how much information can we give about the people that have lived there and the history of the house itself even within the period of the manor, as Kathy was saying Maymor is considered as her home and she lived there for a very long time and using images to track changes in the interior and exterior of the manor can be very helpful in explaining this kind of period of people living in the house to visitors and it can also influence the layout of the house, what furniture we have where and how it's actually presented. So this is an example of the kind of issues that can come up when looking at image research so we have three different images here from different points in the manor so we've got an image from the Frederick Evans collection from 1896 of the White Room and then we have one that's undated but this is of May Morris in the White Room and then one from 1921 which is later from Country Life and really what's interesting here is that in the middle picture you can see that the red house saddle is in the White Room along with a big round oak table which is being used as a work table none of these things are in the White Room at the moment here it's being used perhaps as a work room, as a living room and now it's a lot more formal in the way it's presented so it's kind of interesting to see how the use of the room might have changed through the years and why is the red saddle now in the Garden Hall and things like that and it's great to be able to perhaps offer these images to visitors to show the kind of development of the house but this image is an example of how frustrating this kind of work can be as this image we found on a piece of paper in some of the files and we're not sure where this is from we're not sure what data is we're not really sure who that woman is in the corner and it kind of shows that some images can be quite limiting and quite frustrating when you can't slot them nicely into the time frame so I'm not going to take you to the hundreds of images that we found but I do want to say that approaching this task we weren't approaching the blank canvas the previous interns, staff members and the wonderful volunteer group that Kathy mentioned earlier had already done quite a lot of work on this but the problem was that there were a lot of images but they weren't in the same place they weren't referenced, some were digital files, some were physical files and really what I spent a lot of time doing as it comes got is collating all these images making sure that we had both the physical and digital file of each one and trying to find out as much as possible about each image and the provenance of it so this is a screenshot from a very large spreadsheet that we put together with as much information as we could get about each different image and hopefully this will be really useful for people to come back to in the future so they can easily trace the images and make them actually usable in the manner so I'm just going to give some examples of things we found and why that might be useful so one of the things that we spent a lot of time doing was trawling through some of the council manner archives which contain a lot of correspondence over the last 50 years and some of the things in that we've now become unaware of because they weren't kept track of so this is an example of some of the bits and bobs we found this is photocopies of sketches dated to 1889 at the outside of the manner from the Middleton notebooks and then here we have two maps of the floor plans of the manner that are dated to 1889 and 1895 I've just circled kind of points of interest which might be useful when trying to explain things to visitors so for example on the floor plan on the left you can see that the two rooms on the edge of the house which they are both shut off but now the white room which at the top we still have that little closet room but in the green room at the bottom that's now all one room it's been knocked through so it's interesting to see for visitors that the house has not always looked the way it does now on the right we've got a floor plan with a photocopy of a floor plan which has Philip Webb and William Morris's handwriting on and they're discussing changes they might want to make to them on there so the bit that I've circled says I want this room which is now tiled with machine made tiles to be flagged so it's quite a nice glimpse into the way that the Morris has viewed the house and the changes they'd want to make to it so another source we used for images was a lot of internet collection searching this is just an example of images we found on the National Portrait Gallery collection and these are primarily of Mae Morris during her time at Calmscott so we've got her in the garden and the third picture in the middle is her using a loom in the green room again a great example of how the house might have been used very much a working house, very much very productive which you might not get a sense of that now it's very peaceful, it's very calm but it was very much a wallet house and the three pictures that are outlined in red are just an example of these new images that we came across this year that were not part of the collection of images already held so the Scott Snells lived at Rent of the Manor in the 1940s and their son, Jocelyn Goodwin, has recently discovered a lot of their correspondence and a lot of his father's artwork and he's actually published a book recently which covers the Scott Snells Pym at the Manor and these are sketches by Edwin Scott Snell which I think are really interesting because they show a different kind of artistic conception of what the Manor is especially this picture on the right which is almost threatening in a way which is definitely not a feeling I think a lot of people get when they visit the Manor but again it's an interesting, a different view of the Manor and how people might have lived in it this next picture is a sketch by Edwin Scott Snell of his wife Stephanie during their time at the Manor Yes, the observant amongst you might notice that the sofa that she's sitting on is the settle that can be found outside in the hall which obviously was on the Manor during the 1940s and the details are very similar indeed so in terms of different uses of the Manor this image is like it serves from the edition of the City of Oxford High School magazine and it's taken on a school trip to Calm Scott at that time where the boys learned about farming and such like so I think this is probably the teachers and another source of images are Miss Love's scrapbooks Miss Love was a very close friend and companion of Mae Morris when Mae was living at the Manor permanently and her, a big stack of her scrapbooks has recently been discovered at the National Library of Wales where a lot of work is going into them at the moment but there are lots of images of the outside of the Manor which can be found here and these are really useful in trying to reconstruct what the Manor looked like especially when putting together things for the HLF bids and things like that and thinking about the Manor as a working farm and how long that went on for and one of the things that we did as well as image research was we looked out for passages of writing and descriptions that described the inside and the outside of the house at various points and this is a letter from Jane Morris to Philip Waith and discussing and tiling the fireplace and she says it's very specific I've only selected an extract from this letter it goes on for quite some time talking about different types of tiles and what Morris himself might like but this is a slightly different view of the Manor from a visitor in 1896 and though she does say the house is lovely for its oldness she is quite rude about Jane Morris and it reminds us that when the Morris has used this house as a young couple there's a phrase Jane says that they were picnicking in the house it wasn't that home, it was very sparse and I think it's nice to see this kind of view of what the house was like when they were living in it obviously a woman of no reputation without her stays and this is an extract from a piece written by Felix who is the other son of the Scott Snows who actually lived in the Manor with his parents they run a small school there for a bit very interesting people but again this is fascinating living there during the war and he says Calysgull Manor did have gas masks hanging ready in the hallway but had no telephone and no radio and that's a hangover from Mae Morris who didn't want to install electricity in the Manor and he goes on to talk about how they had ducks and chickens for eggs and they had a beehive that yielded honey as an alternative to sugar which was rationed they bought a milk cow and named her Amaryllis after a Greek legend and that's lovely because I think tells you a lot about the family but also that it was still being used as a farm it was very much a country house even this later this is a wonderful description of people attempting to visit the Manor during the Scotsnails time that he's quite rude about the Scotsnails and they are artists, dreadful artists these hideous watercolours were hanging on top of Morris' handings and tapestries and apparently the Scotsnails made it quite difficult for people to visit but that was part of the terms of their renting the Manor was that people were allowed to visit and view Morris' works it's fascinating to think that all Morris' tapestries a lot of the bed hangings the embroidery were just out and being used as part of a family home so other documents we looked at we looked at legal documents this is the Will and Cudysel of Mary Morris that's Mary Morris and this is lovely when she mentions certain things being kept in certain rooms and we can see how furniture moved around the house so here we have to her goddaughter she leaves her Japanese cabinet which are into her bedroom whereas in the Frederick Evans photograph of the white room from 1896 you can see the Japanese cabinet there and I think that's what they still are in their house obviously that's 40 years previously so it reminds us that it's a real house and things aren't just left in stuff again this is a description from the contents of Calmsgat Manor that they wrote and all these items were in what was called the passage room which is now the Marigold Room the Marigold Room formed part of a flat that was lived in by those looking after the manor around the 60s which is now an exhibition space we used it when we were working at the manor it's very modernised and pretty much empty part from a few trestle tables and there are all these items that would have been in there and what I think this reminds us is that the Calmsgat Manor that was really a living house and the image the image research we've done and all the documents we've looked at showed an ordinary house that objects move from room to room and I think the next thing to do all this information is to decide what to do with it and how much what period of time do you want to present and how do we organise this information in a way that's useful for visitors so all I want to do is say thank you so much to Kathy and Sarah and the rest of the stuff at Calmsgat for having me with them over the summer I really enjoyed it, thank you very much OK, so my name's Jenny as John mentioned I came to Calmsgat shortly after the conference when my last was in art history at Oxford, I stayed a little longer than Olivia a few weeks so much of the focus at Calmsgat Manor I understand the B centres on William Morris Morris is the intensive of Calmsgat in 1874 but it's a 16th century manor house the property has a history stretching back from nearly three centuries prior to the States oh sorry OK so yeah as a 16th century manor house Calmsgat has a history stretching back nearly three centuries prior to William Morris throughout this period it was occupied continuously by the same family who built it, the Turner family a local family of farmers who became minor gentry when they were granted arms in 1665 in the 19th century the Turner's married into the Hobbs family who were also local farmers the Hobbs family continued to work the farm buildings even after the manor had been leased to Morris right until the farm eventually folded in the late 1920s this meant that Morris always knew Calmsgat as a working farm the influence that this rural farming community had upon his artistic and political views was profound and this image here just shows it's just the year after Morris' death and it shows the farm buildings to the left they're still in use so one of our main research priorities therefore was to try to find out more about the Turner and the Hobbs families whose history is so intertwined with that of Calmsgat so as you see the Turner and Hobbs were a very large, very prolific family using parish records and other sources we began by creating this family tree which was key to getting to grips with all the individuals many of whom confusingly shared the same Christian names and lots of Georges and Tomates the names in blue indicate the presumed owners of the manor there so when I arrived at Calmsgat I was handed a copy of the Hobbs saga this is a 150 page narrative account of the family covering the period from around the time of the enclosures in the 1990s through until the end of the 19th century so this had been written on a typewriter by Mae Elliot Hobbs who was a member of the family as Kathy explained earlier and a great friend of Mae Morris so the work was a goldmine of information regarding the family and their relationships farming practices, social life and occupation of the mother I digitised it and converted the text to OCR and created an index to help with the research but fascinating as it was without adequate referencing it was impossible to distinguish fact from fiction and so I couldn't be sure how reliable it was as a record of the life of the family so accordingly we visited a number of local archives in search of relevant material and as the internship progressed we were fortunate enough to uncover a great deal of the original sources that I believe Elliot has self-utilised in the Hobbs saga as well as many other things besides so among other places we made a trip here to Burlington House to study the many legal deeds and documents relating to Calescott Manor here's some interesting facts in the Hobbs saga were corroborated so this is the will of Charles Turner who died in 1833 leaving the manor to his son but it also corroborates the salatious story related by Elliot that Charles had disinherited his daughter Anne after she ran away in the middle of the night to a loathe with a man he didn't approve of and to be fair he did later add a codisil leaving her anonymity of £50 a year so to begin with most of the sources that we consulted were like the will written rather than visual so we had no way of knowing what the family looked like but then very late in the internship I came across these in one of the archives which turned out to be family photo albums there are actually many more photos than the ones I've shown here these are just the ones that were identified in the albums I was really delighted to discover these because I thought that if they could be incorporated into the display at Calmscott they could really bring the family to life for the visitors as indeed they did for us so on the far left are Elizabeth and Anne Turner they were sisters who were born in the manor in the late 18th century and they were raised there Anne was the daughter who was disinherited by her father Elizabeth was the one who married into the Hobbs family in around 1820 their brother was James Turner who was not pictured he was the last member of the Turner family to live in the manor but he died without children in 1870 at which point the manor passed to Elizabeth's eldest son Charles who was third from the left Charles however was occupied with the farm that had them left to him by his father's family near by Maisie Hampton and as he had no inclination to occupy Calmscott Manor it was he who decided to lease the property to William Morris in the meantime his eldest son Robert who was second from the right there with his wife Fanny he continued to work the farm at Calmscott which was in fact one of several that the family owned in the local area Robert inherited the Calmscott estate from his father in 1893 and continued leasing it to the Morris family it was he who eventually sold the manor to Jane Morris in 1913 although he continued working the farm until the 1920s and Mae Elliot Hobbs was his daughter-in-law so, as I mentioned the Turner's and Hobbs were both farming families and during the internship we uncovered a great deal of new sources that shed light on the actual farming practices mostly the information we found dates from the early 19th century onwards in terms of analysing this information with regard to the farm buildings that currently form part of the Calmscott estate this corresponds approximately to the date that the buildings were built I don't have time to go for everything that we found but just to mention a few things so we came across a number of inventories that provide detailed information of the farming equipment crops and livestock owned by the family such as these here on the left are some dating from between 1917 and 1920 while the one on blue paper in the middle is earlier dating from 1864 but perhaps more colourful than the dry listing of the inventories are the descriptive articles that were published on the Hobbs family farm in local newspapers which gives an indication of how prominent the farm was within the local community so, among other things, the articles describe how the Hobbs family were celebrated breeders of pedigree cattle, sheep and shy horses in later years they also developed a dairy herd they were particularly renowned for developing the breed of cattle known as the Calmscott short horn of which tricks to that on the left as a fine example they were heavily involved in showing their livestock and regularly won prizes as the newspaper could put things on the right show I felt that it was really charming that a short horn was included on the cock cover that Cathy spoke of earlier and I think it just shows the kind of connection that Mae had to the farm and to the livestock there many of the sources we came across especially the legal deeds and documents made references to the names of local fields and areas of land which at times could get quite confusing however the location of these fields was made clearer by the various maps that we uncovered separately which give the names of these fields and in some instances indicates the ownership status at various points in history some of them even give the names of the occupants of the various cottages throughout the village and I really like these because they remind us that the history of the Calmscott estate kind of goes beyond the bricks and mortar of the actual buildings and into the wider landscape beyond so another of my favourite finds was these handwritten recipes and remedies which I believe belonged to Elizabeth Turner before she left Calmscott to Mary in the early 19th century so in addition to remedies for the family there are remedies for livestock too for example to treat lower in a cow's foot or to help with lambing use they give an indication of daily life at the manor and show the involvement of the women in the running of the farm whose role is sometimes perhaps underestimated although I do think some of the ingredients are perhaps a bit dubious I don't know how much we want to use lead in our sense today so our archive search has also uncovered statement of accounts notes on experimental fertilisers bills and receipts relating to the maintenance of the farm buildings letters, deeds and documents relating to land ownership and much more but unfortunately there's not really time to go through everything here and it's really fascinated by these items but I believe there's still much work to be done in terms of creating a narrative of the history of Calmscott farm although I think that Elliot's Hobb saga goes some considerable way towards doing this While researching the Turner and Hobbs families we also spent time consulting census records which led me to a number of the projects that I worked on whilst at Calmscott the census records show not only the members of the family who own the manor but the living servants they employed also The occupation of the head of the household is stated which means that in the case of the Turner and Hobbs families the acreage of the farm they worked and the number of men, women and boys they employed as labourers is likewise given Like the women, the servants and employees are sometimes underrepresented group who are nonetheless indispensable to the running of the estate and therefore inextricable from its history I thought that comparatively little work had been done on this subject at Calmscott so I decided to work on compiling a spreadsheet which would bring together in one place everything that is known about the farm workers and the household staff employed by the families the Turner's, Hobbs and Morris's who occupied the manor So far the spreadsheet identifies around 30 individuals who over the years were directly associated with Calmscott manor and farm plus another 25 or so who were employed by the Hobbs family when they owned the manor but did not live there The sources for this are quite varied and while some are quite certain like the census records others still need to be verified So with regard to the farm labourers for example these new people click the things on the right there they know the farm hands who worked for the Turner family and won prizes for plowing and for sheep shearing The annual plowing match is a local tradition that continues in Nechley to this day and actually was taking place last time when I was at Calmscott which is quite nice and gives delightful anecdotes of all the farm workers and local villages celebrating the harvest home in a large south road barn on the Calmscott estate and it's really lovely to think of this building being at the centre of the community The saga also mentioned many workers by name Tom Price for example who's in this photo who was the groom to Charles Hobbs who leased the manor initially to Morris It was really charming to discover his photograph just tucked in loosely at the back of the photo albums I showed earlier which I think sort of indicates the esteem with which he was held by the family The earliest reference to a member of the household staff that I came across so far was in the will of Thomas Turner dating from 1729 in which he left 30 pounds to his servant Mary Carter which is quite a sum of money in those days In another instance I found a letter in the Calmscott Manor internal archive sent in the 1970s from a lady now living in Australia telling how her great-grandfather Richard Basson was a steward on the estate of James Turner who was the last of the Turner to occupy the manor before the Morris is Sometime later, in another archive I found a statement of account from a solicitor which happened to mention that James Turner James Turner's mans servant had been in attendance with him and the servant's name was given as Richard Basson which is quite nice In the 1841 census we see that the Turner family employed three servants whose names were given as Harriet Farmer Ann Hicks and Mary Farmer The latter two were just 14 years old The following census records show a similar pattern of employment by the Turner's although their names were always different so they had a high change over The first census taken during the years of the Morris tendency in the 1870s shows that the Morris is for absent but records the servants who had been left behind as caretakers Francis and Mary Harding and their six month old baby, Olive as well as a 14 year old maid named Mary Oakley The following census, well in 1901 confirms the presence in the manner of two servants whose faces are familiar to us from their inclusion in Marie Stillman's painting of the manner which is now hanging in Jane Morris' bedroom so that's emily panting their feeding the doves and Henrietta Carter under the walkway I've also included this photograph on the top left of William Giles who was the Morris's gardener This is a gentleman who inherited William Morris' coat on display in the manner I found the photo in the manner archive together with a letter from his granddaughter explaining the anecdote of the coat It was when leafing through Olivia's image files of the manner that I saw this other photograph of a gentleman in the garden which I believe is also William Giles So the benefit of creating a spreadsheet to bring all this into one place was that we can sort of draw together all these disparate references and I hope that it will prove to be a useful resource for future interpretation of the sort of life downstairs at Calescott Manor So in conclusion I really enjoyed my time at Calescott and I certainly feel the internship gave me ample opportunity to develop my research skills The staff and the volunteers were extremely friendly and welcoming and it was a privilege to work alongside people who are so passionate about art and art and so engaged with its history So thank you very much