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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 was discovered in 2001, 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 because a newly adopted planning policy required 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 14th 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 18th 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 18th C and it could well be that 14th 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.

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Penn Tile Kilns

Penn Tile Kilns – How they worked

The Beacon Hill tilery at work. Drawn by Mike Lamont

The Penn tilers of the 14th century were remarkable specialists, particularly those who made the decorated floor tiles.  They possessed an extraordinary store of knowledge and skills about the selection of clays, the techniques of decoration, the making of glazes and the construction and control of kilns to reach a particular temperature.  No one in recent years has been successful in making even half-way acceptable tiles using the methods and techniques available to them at the time.

The shape and size of a kiln were decided by the shape and type of its wares.  A typical medieval floor tile kiln probably consisted of a rectangular or roughly square oven above a furnace area, about 6ft (1.83m) square internally, heated by two parallel flues or fire boxes which were arched tunnels up to 2 ft (0.6m) wide and 3 ft (0.9m) long, sloping gently down from the furnace.  The furnace would normally be below ground level to provide insulation and support and was fuelled by wood, typically oak and hornbeam, fed from the stokehole outside the end of the fireboxes.  A typical roof tile kiln would have exactly the same arrangements but with a rather longer rectangular furnace and oven, say 7ft 6 ins x 6ft (2.28m x 1.83m).

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.

The furnace was spanned with a series of arches five or six inches apart springing from each side wall to a low central wall.  The gaps between the arches allowed the heat to rise up through the oven above, and were bridged with roof tiles to form a level floor on which the tiles for firing were stacked on edge, one on top of the other in an ingenious succession of tiers at an oblique angle to the one above and below.  This arrangement led the fire upward through ever diminishing apertures and distributed the heat as equally as possible from bottom to top.  It was the way in which the tiles themselves were stacked that created the flues that drew the fire through the kiln, and so a kiln could not be fired until it was full.

The different parts of the kiln were built of roof tiles stuck together with clay and the oven walls could be up to 4 ft or even  6 ft above ground level to make room for more tiers in the oven.  There was no side entrance to the kiln and so loading and unloading were carried out by climbing over the top of the wall.  The top of the oven was temporary and constructed for each firing.  It was made of three or more layers of old tiles stuck together with clay, with gaps to allow the heat to rise through the oven.  By placing other tiles over these gaps the draught through the furnace and oven, and hence the temperature, could be controlled.

Control of the temperature was vital.  If it was too low, the tile was under-fired with a soft friable fabric.  Over 1,000°C was needed to flux the glaze so that it melted and combined with the clay body, but at 1,100°C the tile bodies themselves would begin to melt if the clay was not carefully chosen, vitrifying and turning purple, hard, brittle and often warped.  Even with skilled management there was an unavoidable difference of 200° C between the hottest, bottom front and the coolest, top back of the oven and hence there were always some over-fired and some under-fired waste products to discard after each firing.  Without any thermometers, the tilers had to use their experience to judge the temperature by the colour of the tiles at the top of the oven and in the temporary roof.  The smaller the oven, the more control the tilers had over the temperatures throughout it.  Glazed roof tiles needed the same high temperatures but plain roof tiles needed less heat and so could be made in a larger kiln.

When it was raining hard, the kilns could not be used and they were generally only fired in June, July and August.  A typical firing took a week.  On Monday, the tiles were stacked in the oven, on edge and in tiers, and a temporary roof was constructed.  On Tuesday and Wednesday, a slow-drying fire was lit, with an oven temperature of less than 200° C, in order to drive out any moisture in the clay tiles that might otherwise expand and burst.  On Thursday, the temperature was raised to between 1,000 and 1,100° C with a final firing with brushwood faggots to send flames shooting right through the oven to clean the tiles by burning up any bits of ash or dirt on them.  The mouths of the fire boxes and apertures in the roof were then closed to prevent an influx of cold air cracking or breaking the tiles whilst they were still too hot. On Friday and Saturday, when the kiln had cooled down enough, the roof was dismantled and the oven unloaded.  Spoilt tiles that could not be used as kiln furniture were carted away and dumped in disused pits or on fields where we find them today.

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

Miles Green, Village Voice, 2025

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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

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William Penn the Quaker (1644-1718)

Holy Trinity, Penn – Links to Pennsylvania

William Penn the Quaker (1644-1718)

William Penn aged 22.  Supposedly painted in Dublin in 1666 but very uncertain provenance (Pennsbury Manor, Morrisville, Pennsylvania)

Many British, and most US Citizens, know that William Penn was the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania.  Charles II had given him what is now the State of Pennsylvania in payment  of a debt to the Quaker’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, the leading Admiral of his day, and insisted that it be named after the Admiral.  At the same time, a William Penn was Lord of the Manor here in Penn, as his ancestors had been since Norman times (1066 onwards).  His descendant, the seventh Earl Howe, is still by far the largest landowner in Penn.

The question of whether or not the two families were related has arisen throughout the succeeding centuries. The surname Penn was not that uncommon in England at the time and the Admiral’s family came from Wiltshire.  No genealogical link has ever been found, but there is no doubt that at the time the relationship was always mutually claimed and acknowledged.  William Penn the Quaker’s diary records his visiting Penn House, which is about a mile north of Penn church, to see his “cousins”, two of whom were Quakers.

Furthermore, no fewer than five of William Penn, the Quaker’s, grandchildren are buried here in the church, in the vault beneath the nave.  As you walked in, you may have noticed the large diagonal stone set into the floor tiles in the inner porch.  This is the entrance to the Penn vault and it was explored in 1987 by both the current Earl Howe and Miles Green (the church archivist and historian). See photo overleaf of the vault.

The Penn Vault (Brian Cullip 1987)

This part of Buckinghamshire had strong Quaker links and the Quaker’s first wife, Gulielma Springett, was living for two years by Widmer Pond on the edge of the wide common known as Tyler End Green only a mile down the road from the church.  To this day, the first Quaker Meeting House, built in 1688, still exists nearby at Jordans where William Penn the Quaker is buried.

The insistence by two 20th century Vicars of Penn, driven perhaps by the hope of obtaining generous benefactors in the USA, that the two Penn families were related, and that this parish was therefore the Quaker’s ancestral home, created a surprising degree of contention including a case in the High Court.  More recently, the very fine glass screen at the North door was designed to celebrate the family connection of the two Penn families and is not as historically appropriate or accurate as it might be.

The full story of William Penn is an interesting one and the green booklet, “William Penn” by Miles Green, is warmly recommended.

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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.

© Ron Saunders May 2022

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