470 Years in the Dark: Unlocking the Tudor Cipher and How Geometry and Faith Built a Sanctuary
In a moving 14-minute interview now available on BBC Sounds, heritage consultant James David Wenn of BYRGA GENIHT shared how the “hidden things” of Soulton Hall are finally being brought into the light.
James D. Wenn, Heritage Expert and Consultant
For the first time in over470 years, the doors to the Tudor Prayer Room have been opened, marking a significant moment of both historical and spiritual restoration.
Tudoe Communion Table in the Prayer Room of Soulton Hall
In the mid-1550s, England was a land of deep division and peril. Sir Rowland Hill, the builder of Soulton Hall and the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London, did not build a house for vanity. Instead, he created a coded sanctuary—a place where the “early consensus” of faith and the pursuit of truth could be preserved during the height of the Marian persecutions.
Easter Sunrise in the Aedicule (small chapel) at Soulton Hall. This is the most senior room, containing an altar stone linked to Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
As James David Wenn explained to the BBC’s Paul Shuttleworth, the house was designed as a living testament:
In the mid-16th century, [Soulton Hall] was full of codes… it’s meant to be talking but we haven’t been listening before.
This isn’t about puzzles for entertainment; it is about the intentional sharing of a philosophical heritage.
By sharing these matters that were hidden in Tudor times waiting for better days via BBC Sounds and opening the Prayer Room for Heritage Access Tours, the Ashton family is restoring the building’s original purpose: to be a place of ecumenical peace and sober reflection. It is a reminder that truth, even when hidden for centuries, eventually finds its voice.
You can find the full interview by searching for “Radio Shropshire: Uncracking the codes of Soulton Hall” on the BBC Sounds app, or following this link.
If you wish to see these “hidden things now shared” for yourself, Soulton Hall is now hosting small, respectful tours of the Prayer Room and concealed chapel.
‘Old’ Sir Rowland, Hill – Shakespearian hero.
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Statement Regarding Building Conservation
The interview references damage to the religious infrastructure of Soulton Hall, a matter that has been formally documented and shared with relevant ecclesiastical and heritage stakeholders. While a comprehensive remediation plan is in place, the restoration has been significantly hindered by the conduct of the insurance firm responsible.
A reconstruction of the Soulton Hall Prayer Parlour screen. This sacred focal point, which stood for nearly 500 years, was lost to corporate negligence. We are now working to reinstate this vital link to our Reformation heritage.
The firm’s engagement has been characterized by a failure to accord due regard to the family’s religious stewardship and the spiritual significance of the site. Despite the production of expert forensic reports, the insurers have maintained a dismissive posture that is inconsistent with the standards of good faith expected in the management of a listed buildling of profound importance.
An illustration of the 16th-century Prayer Parlour screen, destroyed by NFU Mutual contractors. Based on the 2025 Wenn Report, this reconstruction will restore the room’s liturgical heart.
The Ashton family remains committed to the full restoration of these elements and continues to seek a resolution that respects both the legal protections and the cultural sanctity of Soulton Hall.
A fuller statment on his matter is provided here.
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Accessibility Note
In our commitment to ensuring that these “hidden things now shared” are available to all, a full transcript of the BBC Sounds interview is made available, below.
This is provided to assist those who may have difficulty accessing audio content or who require the text for assistive technologies.
[choral music over the top of an intorduction clip from later in the interview]
James D. Wenn: Tim turns around on a sixpence, grabs me, and says, “There have been people saying my house is in code. Nobody has been able to tell me what it says. I’m not going to let you go till you tell me what you know.” You’re literally held hostage now in Soulton Hall.
[music fades]
James D. Wenn: My name is James David Wenn. I’m a cultural consultant with Byrga Geniht Limited.
We advise country houses, palaces and churches about their cultural heritage and about the cultural assets taking them forward as well.
Paul Shuttleworth: Firstly, how do you get into this sort of acknowledgement of history based around these particular buildings or indeed the nod to religion?
James D. Wenn: So in terms of my personal background, I read Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University and then did post-graduate work at the University of Leicester in the center for the study of the country house.
So there is a whole academic discipline based around understanding the heritage and the cultural position both today and historically of these stately homes, these estates.
But also there is something to our work which takes it beyond the usual analysis of places. So when I was studying at Leicester University, a lot of the theory was worked out by the late great Mark Girouard about how houses work socially and politically as well as architecturally. But the research that we’ve done within Byrga Geniht is looking at some of the messages written into buildings where people are trying to talk through the architecture and different people have been chasing rabbit holes there. A lot of people looking at Italy and the Italian Renaissance.
What people didn’t realize is that England itself has its own language that’s peculiar.
You can’t learn the language of English buildings by looking at France or Italy.
We have our own particular thing.
And people have fallen out of touch with those meanings. We’ve really chased that down. And some of the outputs of that is understanding a building like Soulton Hall which in the mid-16th century was full of codes. It’s meant to be talking but we haven’t been listening before.
Paul Shuttleworth: How do the connections with the particular venues take place? So does Soulton Hall reach out to you and say help or do you go, “I think you’re sitting on something really interesting here. Can we explore?”
How does that sort of relationship of connection with what you do and some of those buildings occur?
James D. Wenn: It’s a real mixed bag. So, our very first client was in Essex, a place called Braxted Park, and the owner of Braxted, Duncan Clark, reached out and said, “I have an underground temple, and I don’t know what it means. I’ve heard on the grapevine that you’re somebody who’s an expert in country houses. Come and help me.” So, that was an example of somebody reaching out.
Soulton actually was entirely serendipitous.
So, I was up there as part of Thegns of Mercia, which is a living history Anglo-Saxon group. We went up there to do Beowulf at the Barrow. And when I was there, I turned up in the van with the other members of the Thegns. And well, honestly, I started swearing because in all my training in the country house world, everyone had pinpointed there was a missing link in Tudor buildings. Mark Girouard had pointed this out, wrote about it at length in his great monograph on Elizabethan Houses. There will be a cubic house somewhere that is the grandfather of all of these other buildings. And I was just looking at it going there for a completely different reason.
So as soon as I walked in, I didn’t know who Tim Ashton was at the time, who’s part of the family who owns it. I started saying this to my colleagues in the Thegns.
Tim turns around on a sixpence, grabs me and says, “There have been people saying my house is in code. Nobody has been able to tell me what it says. You sound a lot like you know what it’s saying. I’m not going to let you go till you tell me what you know.”
Paul Shuttleworth: You’re literally held hostage now in Soulton Hall.
James D. Wenn: Well, it’s a great place to be held hostage if you’re going to be.
Part of the story of the building as we understand it is that it was built by Sir Rowland Hill, the Rowland Hill up the pillar at Hawkstone Follies. He was the Lord Mayor of London and Sheriff during some of the most difficult moments in the Reformation. And there is a priest hole in the building.
So there’s this sense that he’s maybe sheltering people from sticky situations through this period.
Paul Shuttleworth: It almost sort of sounds like a sort of missing element of The Da Vinci Code in terms of what you’re trying to do and unpack.
How easy was it to get in and not be led by what you were hoping to see versus what you actually see? Because often the romanticism wants to take you in a path and you want to make the evidence fit what you want to find. How did that match with what you were actually seeing and actually interpreting?
James D. Wenn: Well, The Da Vinci Code is quite an amusing thing to link to and quite a lot of people say that.
But the difference is that this is true.
Sit with that for a second. I think it begins to answer the question because at each point when we observe something very often, and we tend to joke about this now, is that the ego part of you or the romantic part of you wants to be fully in control of understanding what’s going on and therefore if something doesn’t make a great deal of sense you tend to dismiss it and then come back with your tail between your legs later on and say, “Well actually that was incredibly important.”
Getting to the bottom of what things mean is often a case of comparing with a vast number of other buildings both in books and gazetteers and also physically visiting places to understand what they’re doing. Most of these buildings are in conversation with each other. Features develop through time. So a great example of this at Soulton is that above each door into the big brick cube that Rowland Hill built, there is a pattern in the brickwork where black bricks are used to make a square quartered poised square. So you imagine a square up on its point and then you’ve got an X through it. So you’re looking at four diamond-like squares.
When you do this, this is the appearance, the portrait as it were, of a rhombic dodecahedron.
This interesting 3D shape that they were interested in specifically in England in the Renaissance and before that as well.
Now that could be an accident of bricklayers making a nice pattern,.
But it’s when you find it in other places in contexts that are also academically and philosophically charged.
So — there’s a row of them all the way down Silver Street in Cambridge on the side of Queens’ College.
So, it’s when you build up a bigger textile of cultural examples, you can start to say, well, it’s a repeating pattern, but we’re seeing it being repeated in a very deliberate way in very specific contexts where people are interested in conveying their academic chops and that begins to build up some confidence in being able to read the building.
So the prayer room which is now open to the public for the first time in the basement of the house—understanding that room requires a number of different pieces of evidence to come together both the tradition of the place but also reading the building in the context of other buildings.
So generally in country house settings a chapel will be somewhere or a prayer room will be somewhere that is between the private polite state rooms and the parts that estate staff, servants, the public visitors might be able to get to. So it’s a kind of an interface because the point of the chapel, the point of the practice of religion, is the whole community coming together. So the physical location of these rooms is always somewhere on the threshold between those two zones. So you don’t have all of the estate staff coming through the state rooms and you know think of an 18th century country house of beautiful Wilton carpets or something.
You find the chapel is always somewhere where everyone can get to it and that’s the case at Soulton.
But also the whole building is built symmetrically.
In a way that is pointing to these two little rooms on the very bottom floor.
Honoring them, facing east with a whole avenue leading up to the only central opening in a very symmetrical building. All the doors are made off-center in a way that they shouldn’t be to point to this one window, this one central feature, meaning that the important thing is there, which is a sunrise at Easter coming up this avenue. So, it’s a clever design that’s saying this is the important place.
A very spartan, very plain space, but the power of the building geometrically is saying this is where something special happens.
And in the religious turmoil of the period, being in a room that is honored but plain that you then bring your Bibles and prayer books into that might be banned at various points as the religion is toing and froing.
In that really pressurized atmosphere — the most sacred place you could be — is somewhere that is almost that pared down.
And it’s amazing to bring the experience of that space to people again today.
Paul Shuttleworth: Your face is lighting up as you talk about it with the enthusiasm of sharing that information.
How did it feel like the first time to stand in that room and these emotions that you’re sharing with me now?
To be in that space where those things have happened and to be standing on the same floor that that actually happened in?
Was that quite an experience for you?
James D. Wenn: Well, that’s a really interesting question.
And I think goes back to what we were saying before about the process of discovery because these rooms are already quite familiar to me even as a consultant coming in before we realized their full significance: and the Ashton family—so Tim Ashton who is working with me closely on this—he grew up there. I can’t remember if he was born in the building. I think he might have been, but you have somebody who’s grown up there, spent their whole life there, and some of these rooms are where you’ve stored a Christmas tree, or something like that…
Paul Shuttleworth: or played with your cars or whatever it might be…
James D. Wenn: Exactly.
I think the uncanny feeling, the emotional depth of it isn’t the moment of first being in there.
It’s the moment that the penny drops that you can’t unsee the significance.
So part of that emotion is almost in a panicked way looking back through time and saying, “Did I act in the right way in here? I didn’t realize I was in this culturally and spiritually important place.” Being there living in Tim’s case, maybe storing a Christmas tree.
Was that appropriate?
Was that okay?
And that’s I think the weirdest part of the emotions of discovering it in terms of what it is to be in a place and how it feels.
Of course for visitors now the spaces have been recently restored to a certain degree, or conserved I should say. So there are two rooms that we’re talking about. There’s this very small room which we call the Aedicule.
This is a double cube room.
So an important geometric shape in English culture. So you think of the double cube rooms at Wilton House, the Banqueting House in Whitehall. It’s a philosophical way of putting a room together that’s always been really important. This is 8 ft by 8 ft by 16 ft and it has 12 beams in the ceiling and has four big blocks of stone facing east.
These are above a really large slab of stone that people are getting their head around whether this might be the altar stone from the Old St. Paul’s in London.
Sir Rowland Hill was Sheriff of London in 1542 to 3 which is when the shrines were being broken up and Henry VIII was taking all the gold and jewels from them, but he was Lord Mayor of London under Edward VI in 1549 to 50 and it was under his authority as the senior civil power in London that the altar stone was taken down from Old St. Paul’s. So people have been entertaining: is this that actual stone?
The room to the north of it in the northeast corner, the prayer room, has a fireplace-like construction in it where the big chimney stacks go up the building, but it has a ceiling. So it’s not a fireplace. And the floor in there is tiled in a checkerboard pattern with a big black border. And it’s been repaired a few times, but it’s all honoring a sense of people sitting around the middle of the room, which is how Protestant prayers happened in that age. And the room used to have a window to the east, like the Aedicule next to it. Also a window to the north. The window to the north was blocked up in 1668 when the terrace that might have had advice from Christopher Wren was plonked in with the new door case that’s very familiar at Soulton which celebrated a wedding at that time.
So the dressing of this room as a polite room, a parlor, a prayer room is predating the 1660s.
And you go into that room, which has essentially been mothballed since. And it is this plain whitewashed room. And Tim actually is bearing the scars, the chemical burns from re-washing that room himself to bring it up to somewhere where it can be enjoyed by the public on Historic Houses tours. One of the things that is different about the room, which we’re hoping to return to its original state, is
[choral music returns]
A number of years ago there was some water damage.
And the person the insurance company sent out decided to destroy a wooden screen over this niche.
And from all of the memories of the family and the evidence that we’ve been able to put together professionally as heritage consultants, we’ve reconstructed a plan as it were of what this screen was. And it is essentially identical to the big chapel screen at another Tudor house not very far away up in Cheshire at Little Moreton Hall.
So we’re hoping to make a replica of that and install that at some point. So there are some plans for the future to enhance people’s reading of that space.
[choral music fades and ends]
Tudor Prayer Room in Soulton Hall
