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Post-medieval Earthenware Relief Tiles of North Devon -Cynthia Cramp (Newsletter No 10 2005)
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William and Wendy Underwood, NDAS members living at Vielstone near Buckland Brewer have spent many years renovating a fire damaged Devon farmhouse. In the course of the work they discovered a bricked-up bread oven and among the rubble stuffed into it, they found three glazed tiles with Tudor rose and fleur-de-lis designs. Cynthia Cramp, who has made a study of such North Devon tiles, and is about to publish her findings in the DAS Proceedings, has written the following for the Newsletter. A series of North Devon relief tiles was published in 1969,
listing 64 designs and naming the churches where they were found.
(Keen, L. 1969 ‘A series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
lead-glazed relief tiles from North Devon’, Journal of the
British Archaeological Association 32, 144-70). Soon after this Alison accompanied me on a visit to some of
the more distant churches in the area, and on finding some of
the relief tiles present in a church which did not appear in the
previous series, Alison remarked ‘we really should be recording
these, you know’. After this my interest in the tiles, already
kindled, intensified and I did start recording, visiting many
churches and building up a collection of rubbings, tracings and
photographs of the designs found in them, also researching |
These relief tiles are unique to North Devon, their manufacture following that of the medieval inlaid designs. Often overlooked in churches today, sometimes few in number and difficult to locate, their distribution reaches beyond the north of Devon to places.as geographically diverse as West Anstey and Lustleigh, as well as to many churches in the less developed west of the county.
It is apparent that tiles were formerly present in many more churches
than those where tiles remain today. Tiles were sometimes used to cover
or surround graves within the church where the initial use of 16th-century
inlaid tiles would have given way to the later relief designs. Some of
the tiles were reset during 19th-century restoration, many others were
discarded. In at least two instances a number were found beneath the church
floor. Frequently worn and damaged, some
however retain their glaze and the designs are individual, often variants
on known designs.
The subject is fascinating and continuing interest is provided by the occasional finds of tiles, broken or complete, rescued from gardens or from among rubble left after interior alterations to buildings which date from the 17th-century, as, for example, at Vielstone, Buckland Brewer.