WHATS THE OLD MAP PICTURE? The picture shown last week is the earliest depiction of the Brewster house in Leiden, situated on a narrow alley formerly known as a stink alley and now called William Brewstersteeg. The Brewster house is the larger one in the center of the picture, connecting on its right to houses that come forward to a front on the Pieterskerk Choorsteeg. The picture is from a map by Johannes Liefrinck dated 1576-78, but the original had deteriorated and is now missing. What we have now is a copy made by Jacob van Werven in 1744 and, according to its own inscription, accurately copied. City officials were so pleased with the copy they gave its artist a large bonus payment. But the drawing of ordinary houses is not verifiably reliable regarding details of size, window placement, etc. The 1600 map by Pieter Bast shown here can be checked for accuracy. Most houses that still exist are shown recognizably, so that one can assume a high degree of accuracy for buildings that have subsequently been altered. The Brewster house as seen in the 1600 map can be discovered nowadays as the last house on the right in the alley, when you enter through the commemorative archway. The house was enlarged, but the end wall of the Brewsters house can be identified from the difference between the old bricks and those added at the end of the 17th century to expand the house. That wall is the last remaining part of the Brewster residence. In Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, the Brewsters lived in one half of Scrooby Manor. The other half (the eastern part) was the home of another Pilgrim family, that of Richard Jackson. Much of the manor has been torn down, but part remains (the Jackson half), which gives an idea of what the manor was when the Brewsters lived there as well. Sue Allan has written a nicely illustrated guidebook to that building. She located numerous documents about the house which I transcribed for her and which indicate that the east part of the house is what is preserved. Most interesting is that she was able to visit the manor and discovered that Henry M. Dexter had correctly identified the location of the archbishops chapel in the manor house, although not all of Dexters ideas about the building correspond with her interpretation of the documents. Pilgrim homes remain elusive and the imaginative reconstructions at Plimoth Plantation provide most of us with a conceptualization of Pilgrim living that over time has changed with shifting assumptions about architecture. WHATS NEXT?
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 02:27:57 +0000
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