Learning through the senses
Learning through the senses can mean discovering what people in the past smelled and tasted, discovering experiences that real people from long ago might have known through their food.
With children from Lilleshall Primary and Newport Junior Schools we explored the Abbey at Lilleshall and imagined how the gardens grown by the monks and people living in the Tudor period looked, and what scents they might have known.
Many medieval gardens were divided by willow hurdles, and the Tudor gardens became more complicated with symmetrical designs. The children designed patterns and made gardens from some of the resulting designs. The willow was woven into hurdles in a pattern taught to the children by Richard Thomason who works for the Greenwood Trust in Coalbrookdale.
The pattern he uses was taught him by one of the last living traditional hurdle makers. The traditions have been handed down through the ages and use materials coppiced from local woodland, made in just the way monks might have made them. The pattern of the garden creates paths between scented beds, fit for Tudor gentry to walk between, and the Abbey inspired the children to create great watercolours.
King Henry VIII
A fantastic document in the Archives which was written for King Henry VIII and which carries his Great Seal is a letters Patent granting Lilleshall Abbey and its land to James Leveson, whose family later became Earls Gower and the Dukes of Sutherland. This is just one of the images from this document. We discovered how the dissolution changed the lives of many people in Shropshire and how documents in the Archives help us to learn about Henry VIII and life in Tudor times.
Another Great seal we have at the Archives is this one of Queen Elizabeth I. They both wanted their seals to show their power and on the reverse they are both riding on horseback.
A Tudor Feast
The herbs grown in our gardens were used to create a Tudor feast. Herbs were also used as medicines by the monks. We discovered recipes we enjoyed, some of which were taken from a handwritten 17C remedy an receipt book.
Archive Documents
Other documents you could see at the archives, such as Inventories, show what people owned. This document shows how the Council House was decorated, how the garden was planted and how much everything cost, including how much women were paid for two days weeding! See if you can understand the strange spelling in the transcript, or even recognise words from the original document.
See for yourself
Contact the Archives to see how you and your children can see for yourselves original drawings of Henry, Tudor emblems, Great seals and inventories showing the belongings of the rich and not so rich. There is also a Town Trail and much more information about Tudor Shrewsbury on the Discover Shrosphire website