May
2008
FEATURES
William
Godell – Father of Southwold
Ronnie
Waters explains why he believes we should not only be
celebrating this man, but fiercely defending his 500-year-old
bequest to the town.
Ronnie
Waters
Southwold owes an enormous debt to one man. Without his
generosity, the town would be quite a different shape
and an altogether different sort of place. There would
be no Common, the Town Council would have no income from
its property portfolio and our local taxes would certainly
be higher.
Yet most people who love Southwold, even many who live
here, have little or no knowledge of who our benefactor
was or how much we owe him. This article is an attempt
to set the record straight in the hope that it might help
the residents and friends of this town to start valuing
more what they have been given and, perhaps, taking steps
to preserve what’s left of it, and avoid it simply
being given away and lost.
So who was this man? His name was William Godell (or Godyll)
and next year is the 500th anniversary of his death. So
there is no better time to celebrate his gift to us. To
understand who he was and what he did for us, we need
to go back to the Middle Ages.
For much of the mediaeval period, Southwold (or ‘Sudwolda’
as it was then called) was, to all intents and purposes,
an offshore island. It formed part of the Manor of St
Edmunds under the Bishopric of East Anglia, but the whole
Manor had been given away by the Bishop to the Abbey of
Bury St Edmunds.
According to the Domesday Book of 1086, the town was obliged
to pay the Abbey 25,000 herrings a year as a sort of tithe
or tax. However, a century or so later, ownership of the
Manor of St Edmunds changed. The Abbott of Bury had his
eye on Mildenhall, which belonged to the Earl of Clare,
and the two agreed a swap in 1206. Eventually, ownership
of the Manor passed, first to the Duke of York, during
whose tenure our present Church was built in 1430, and
then to Edward IV.
But the big transformation for the better in Southwold’s
fortunes happened after the Battle of Bosworth Field in
1485, after which Henry VII began the great Tudor dynasty.
At the centre of these momentous local changes was a local
man of apparently considerable influence – William
Godell.
Not a huge amount is known about William beyond the fact
that he was probably the most prominent landowner, farmer
and businessmen in the area. There is a map of Southwold
dated 1588 in the Record Office that shows a very small
inhabited area at the southern end of what we now think
of as Southwold, and we believe that Godell probably lived
here with his wife and son. The rest of the locality is
shown as heather moorland and marsh, all of it part of
the Godell estate.
There is a record of a visit to London by William Godell
and a fellow Southwolder of substance, Robert Bishop,
in 1485 – coronation year. It is tempting to surmise
that the purpose of this trip may have been to obtain
an audience with the King to urge him to intervene in
Southwold’s long-running dispute with Dunwich over
control of the Port.
Certainly, soon after this visit, things really started
to happen for Southwold and, indeed, for William Godell.
William came to be appointed as an official ‘wafter’
(victualler) to England’s North Sea anti-pirate
patrol fleet. He also landed another highly influential
role as a member of an élite group known as ‘The
Company of Merchant Staplers at Calais’, which had
a virtual monopoly of Britain’s wool exports.
William possessed a major trading fleet of his own and
the Harbour would have been heaving with his ships. Which
is why he must have been more than content when, four
years later, Henry VII issued Southwold with its Charter,
a key feature of which was that Dunwich had to surrender
to Southwold all its ‘jurisdiction, tital and interests’
in the Haven Port and all its rights to levy ‘customs,
payments and duties’.
As a ‘Chartered Corporation’, the ‘Bailiffs
and Commonality’ of Southwold became effectively
‘Lords of the Manor’ in their own right, with
the power to run the town’s own affairs, control
its harbour and foreshore, and with the right to salvage
wrecks off its coast. As part of the Charter, Henry unsurprisingly
appointed William Godell himself and his colleague Robert
Bishop as the Corporation’s Bailiffs.
On 22nd May 1509, Godell died. In his will, which was
proved a month later, he bequeathed his lands to the Bailiffs
and Commonality of Southwold, with the clarification that
it was theirs to ‘give or sell’ according
to their judgement.
Throughout the 500 years that followed, revenue from the
Godell Trust, in the form of rents and leases, has been
used to fund the town’s exchequer. In 1835, the
Municipal Corporation Act turned Southwold into a ‘Borough
Council’ and, in the subsequent decades, demands
on the town’s coffers were relentless, not least
in defending the town and its fishing industry against
repeated, merciless attacks by the sea. Much of the Trust’s
land was either sold or leased to raise funds. Most notably,
most of the land north of St Edmund’s Green –
the Town Farm Estate – was sold in 1898 to the East
Coast Development Company, which planned to exploit the
new Victorian craze for seaside holidays by extending
the town northwards with holiday homes, hotels and a new
pier capable of berthing the company’s fleet of
pleasure steamers.
The next big series of municipal changes started in the
1960s, first with the Royal Commission on Local Government
under Harold Wilson’s government and then with the
Radcliffe Maud Report, which was to spawn the Local Government
Act of 1972. I was serving on Southwold Borough Council
at the time and it looked to me quite possible that, with
the planned two-tier local government regime, Southwold
could find itself without a council altogether and could
become part of a Great Yarmouth District Council.
Uppermost in our thoughts as a council was that phrase
in Godell’s will: ‘give or sell’, and
the fear, of course, was that the remaining part of the
Godell Trust’s estate, most particularly Southwold’s
Common, could be sold off for development by the new regime.
A solution was proposed by our then Town Clerk, the ingenious
Horace Townsend. He suggested that a Charitable Trust
be formed to administer the Common as a recreational facility
for the benefit of the townsfolk – the ‘Commonality’
as Godell called us. And that is exactly what happened.
The Common Trust was registered by the Charity Commission
on 26th January 1971, with the provisos that the charity
had to be completely divorced from the Council and its
Standing Orders, that its chairman was not to hold office
on the Council and that Trust meetings were not open to
the public.
In the event, the Labour Government did not adopt the
Radcliffe Maud recommendations. Nevertheless, in 1974,
we did cease to be a Borough when the incoming Tory government
under Edward Heath deprived us of the Chartered Corporation
status that had been conferred on us by Henry VII. 485
years of history wiped out at a stroke!
Now, all we had become, in effect, was a humble Parish
Council with responsibility for looking after the War
Memorial and the allotments, and very little else. Any
of our property that could be called ‘corporate’
was taken over by the new Waveney District Council. That
included the Town Hall, the Town Farm house (which we
had retained after the sale of the land), the Harbour
and so on. The Parish was, however, allowed to keep its
other properties and, as a sop to our damaged municipal
pride, we were allowed to call ourselves a ‘Town
Council’, with our own Town Mayor if we fancied
having one.
On 8th May 1973, our Council had a credit balance of just
£528.48. Even so, as successors to the original
Bailiffs, we made a very important policy decision in
the spirit of Godell’s bequest. We decided that
our town would continue to be self-financing using income
from our remaining properties rather than by ‘precepting’
for a town rate. Since then, partly by introducing more
realistic leases and partly by selling off three properties,
the Town Council has succeeded in sustaining this self-financing
principle. Unlike virtually all Suffolk towns of equivalent
size, our ‘Commonality’ has never had to pay
a local precept within its Council Tax.
Today, though, we are once more under threat. The Brown
Government’s plans for local government reform could
mean that control of our property and the income from
it could finally be removed from us.
Those of us who served on the Council in the 70s, 80s
and 90s have been living with this possibility for a long
time. Which is why, in 2000, it was decided to form a
Southwold Town Trust. It was established in November of
that year and two Deeds of Variation subsequently transformed
it first into the ‘Southwold Foundation’ and
then into the ‘Southwold Millennium Foundation’.
The Trust made it possible to transfer the ‘give
or sell’ powers of Godell’s original trustees
– the town Bailiffs and their successors, Southwold
Town Council – to the Trustees of the new Foundation.
The stated aim of the Millennium Foundation was to ‘serve
the common good of the town of Southwold’, a goal
of which I think William Godell would have approved. The
Millennium Foundation has recently become synonymous with
the Stella Peskett Hall project. It is, I think, a pity
that, as a Town Council, we are not free to use this Foundation
more creatively to channel our not inconsiderable income
into more projects which can be seen to directly benefit
the community.
Next year, on 26th June, Godell’s Trust will be
500 years old and I believe it is important that we should
recognise the occasion with appropriate celebrations.
As a town, we have always been first-rate at putting on
a good show. It need not be unduly expensive, but it needs
to be wholehearted.
Perhaps the best way forward is to have a formal meeting
of the town at which firm decisions can be taken. It needs
strong leadership and no fence-sitting. We must all be
alive to the prospect that one day, perhaps not so far
in the future, we could lose our democratic right to elect
our own Town Council.
William Godell’s bequest is worth fighting to keep
– and well worth celebrating.
Ronnie Waters
This is the latest in a series of articles
on stellar and tidal phenomena written especially for
the Organ by Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson, President of
the Royal Astronomical Society.
Shakespeare’s
astronomy
The plays of Shakespeare are rich in astronomical
references. Of course that’s in the nature of Shakespeare,
because his plays are also rich in allusions to falconry,
agriculture, medicine or almost any other aspect of Elizabethan
life. But Shakespeare’s astronomy is quite deeply
interesting.
To illustrate Shakespeare’s interest
in the stars, I looked up the index in the Penguin Dictionary
of Quotations and found 99 references to ‘star’
or ‘stars’, Of these 12 are from Shakespeare.
The next most prolific, at 5 each are Milton, Byron, Wordsworth
and Shelley, with Keats on 4 and Coleridge and Tennyson
on 3 each. At first sight the Shakespeare quotations are
simple metaphors: ‘one particular bright star’,
‘cut him out in little stars’, ‘you
chaste stars’, ‘Two stars keep not their motion
in one sphere’ or they are astrological references:
‘it is the stars, the stars above us’, ‘there
was a star danced’, ‘yoke of inauspicious
stars’ and ‘the fault, dear Brutus, is not
in our stars’. Similarly astrological is another
famous quotation from Julius Ceasar ‘When beggars
die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze
forth the death of princes’, but that is more interesting
because it connects to definite phenomena of the night
sky, comets. A more lurid version appears in Act 1 scene
1 of Hamlet, when Horatio says:
‘A little ere the mightiest Juliius
fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As, stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun..’
And that is where Shakespeare shows the superiority of
his observation and imagination over those later writers
who like the stars. He knows about comets, the constellations
and the motion of the sky:
‘The wind-shak’d surge,
with high and monstrous mane
Seemed to cast water on the burning Bear,
And quench the guards of th’ever fixed pole’
the violence of the storm encountered by
Othello on his way to Cyprus indicated by the fact that
the Great Bear, which never sets from UK latitudes, seems
to disappear below the waves (amusingly, not quite such
a good metaphor at the latitude of Cyprus).
‘Heigh-ho! An’t be not four
by the day,
I’ll be hanged; Charles’ Wain is over the
new chimney
And yet our horse not packed’
- the porters in the inn-yard in Henry IV
part 1, realizing they are late from the position of the
Wain, or Plough, in the sky.
Julius Ceasar says ‘I am constant
as the northern star’, so Shakespeare knew the night-sky
rotates about Polaris, the Northern Star, although Ceasar
himself is unlikely to have said this because in his time,
due to the precession of the equinoxes, the pole was not
particularly near Polaris.
I mentioned Shakespeare’s references
to the stars controlling our fates and these seem like
the conventional astrological view of the period. But
there is one very dramatic counter to this, in Lear:
‘This is the excellent foppery
of the world … we make guilty of our disasters the
sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains by
necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves
and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars
and adulterers by enforced obedience of planetary influence.
… I should have been that I am had the maidenliest
star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.’
This is an amazing assault on the astrological
fatalism that we hear from the mouths of so many of Shakespeare’s
characters. Of course it comes from the mouth of the villain
of the play, Edmund, so does not necessarily represent
Shakespeare’s own sceptical view.
And there is one remarkable hint that Shakespeare
knew about the new astronomy of Copernicus, in the names
of those two treacherous friends of Hamlet, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. These are not random names, but are
in fact the names of two of the ancestors of the great
Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, who was a contemporary
of Shakespeare. Tycho was in correspondence with the leading
English Copernicans like Thomas Digges, who had in his
1576 pamphlet A perfit description of the caelestiall
orbes, taken the Copernican system to its logical conclusion
and asserted that the stars extend to infinity. One copy
of Tycho’s portrait ended up in the possession of
Thomas Digges’ son Leonard. Now the Digges and Shakespeare
families were connected. Leonard Digges praised Shakespeare
in a poem in the Folio edition of 1623.
Shakespeare lived near to the Digges’ home when
he was in London and after Thomas Digges’s death
, his widow Anne married Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare
appointed overseer of his will. This has to be how Shakespeare
got the names for these two characters in his Danish play.
Did he know about the Copernican system ? Well that’s
another story
Past Stars’n Tides articles can be
found at http://astro.ic.ac.uk/~mrr/starsntides/
It's
the WINE TALKING
by
Leslie J. Brinton of 'In the Pink' 01986 872579
I think a number of readers share my weakness
for a light fruity white Burgundy for late spring refreshment:
if the price is a bit old-fashioned, so much the better.
The 2006 vintage from that part of France is just coming
on stream and the Montagny Vielles Vignes, Blason de Bourgogne
(£6.57) fits the bill elegantly.
From New Zealand, the famous Sauvignons in that 2006 vintage
are, on the other hand, reaching the end of their useful
life. One with some attractive gooseberry nuances still
on offer is from Nobilo. Now owned by a large conglomerate,
the firm for many years was a close-knit family concern
and, indeed, once upon a time, Steve Nobilo himself came
to Walberswick to talk us proudly through his wines as
we sipped them to accompany Felicity’s cooking at
Marys Restaurant.
The wines no longer have that frisson of excitement for
my palate, but the congenial Nobilo 2006 Marlborough Sauvignon
Blanc is worth £5.75 of anybody’s money.
Both bottles are at Tesco.
Leslie J Brinton
