A DAY IN SAFFRON WALDEN ..........

The other day, I went to a town about 40 minutes away from me, called Saffron Walden.

When the Doomsday Book was compiled in 1086, Saffron Walden consisted of 120 households. It's a little larger now !

The Saffron crocus was being grown here in the late 1300's and by the early 1500's was the centre of the saffron industry in this country. Saffron was in great demand for the woollen industry and brought wealth to the town.

This is part of the market square. The town market is said to be one of the earliest markets, starting around 1141 and the town grew up around it.

Malt was another commodity which Saffron Walden successfully traded in the 1870's. Conical shaped roofs of the malting's dominated the skyline and there were once as many as 15 pubs in the town of which only a few remain today, the above pub, The King's Arms, being one of them.

The Sun Inn.

Pargeting is the ornamentation of plastered and rendered building facades that would otherwise be smooth. The term was once also used to include internal decoration.

Pargeting ranges from simple geometric surface patterning to exuberant sculptural relief of figures, flowers and sea monsters. English plasterwork became increasingly elaborate in the 16 century and there are some lovely examples in Saffron Walden. The Sun Inn being one of the most elaborate.

The original raw material is called Parge.......... a mixture of sand and lime with a binder like hair. Many additional ingredients are recorded including urine, loam, soot, tallow, road scrapings, cheese, dung, blood and salt !! YUK !!
It's a bit of a worry of how and where they got some of those ingredients from !!!!

A quaint old English town with a great deal of history.... and, I've only just scratched the surface of the history of Saffron Walden.

Jackie