Peeps at Many Lands: England

by John Finnemore

Let us go into the great hall, the chief room of an old house—the room where once the whole family dined together at a long table, the master and his friends above the salt, the servants and humbler guests below. The hall rises the full height of the house, and has a fine timbered roof, and at one end is the minstrels' gallery, a picturesque half-timbered structure, the place where minstrels made merry music at some feast or on the visit of some great personage.

In the hall stands a huge slab of elm more than 23 feet long and some 30 inches wide. It was once used for playing "shovel-board," a favourite game with our ancestors, and when in use was set up on trestles.

In this hall Sir William Compton received Henry VIII., whom Sir William had accompanied to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Sir William, too, had won much distinction at the Battle of Spurs, and was a great favourite with bluff King Hal, to whom the knight owed much of his great fortune.

Next to the hall is the great parlour, the private room of the family when they withdrew from the hall. It is finely panelled in oak, and has a plaster ceiling, bearing the arms of the owners of the place. Beyond the parlour is the chapel, decorated with very ancient carved wooden panels. These carvings are very much older than the house, and it is believed they were brought from an old castle which Sir William Compton pulled down in order to obtain materials for his house.

But it will be impossible for us to go from room to room of this wonderful old house, for there are more than eighty of them—drawing-rooms, dining-rooms, bedrooms, great kitchens with vast old fireplaces, and gained by seventeen separate staircases, which wind and twist their way through the building. It is said there are 275 windows in the house, though an old story goes that no one knows exactly how many there are, for he who tries to count is baffled by a mysterious secret window, which he sees and counts on the first occasion, and can never find again. Its chimneys, too, rise in a veritable forest of quaintly-shaped stacks, and form as puzzling a labyrinth as the windows.

There was a meaning in this tangle of windows and chimneys, for Compton Wynyates is full of secret hiding-places. Hundreds of years ago there was need of them. To-day no man needs to hide himself unless he has done wrong. Then, an innocent man might stand in great danger of a powerful enemy or of an unjust law. So the old houses were furnished with places where men could hide from their foes until an opportunity came for escape.

Again, Compton Wynyates was a Catholic house, and in those times Roman Catholics were punished if they were found attending a Roman Catholic service, and the priest who performed the service stood in danger of imprisonment or, possibly, of death. So places were carefully constructed to which the priest could fly to hide himself when officers of the law came to the house in search of him. Many such secret chambers are found in old mansions, and are known as "priests' holes."

It was a common thing to form a secret chamber in the thickness of a wall, and the first thing required was air, the second light. Air was often given to a secret chamber by a chimney. But such a chimney remained unblackened by smoke, and would soon be detected as not doing its proper work, so it was often built in the centre of a stack of real chimneys, and thus remained hidden. So, too, amid a great number of other windows, it was not easy to detect that which gave light to a hidden room. At Compton Wynyates such is the tangle of windows and chimneys that a person may have pointed out to him the chimney and the window belonging to a secret room, and yet fail to discover the place when he searches inside.

One of the secret rooms at Compton Wynyates was discovered by a child of the house, Lady Frances Compton, in 1770. She was playing in a turret room, and fell against some plaster-work, which rang hollow. Search was made, and a concealed door was found beneath the plaster. The hidden chamber was opened, and tradition says that the skeletons of a woman and two children were found within. No one knows how they came there, but it is believed that at some time of danger they had been concealed there and forgotten.

In the roof of this great building is the famous priests' room or chapel. Here the Roman Catholics of the neighbourhood used to meet to worship in secret. A safer and better hidden place could not be devised. To this day the proof that it was a Roman Catholic chapel remains to be seen. "On an elm shelf below the south-west window are, rudely carved, five consecration crosses, showing that it had been used for the purpose of an altar, and was consecrated according to the rites of the Romish Church. The slab of wood is unique, in that it forms the only known instance of a wooden altar in England."