BBC Three Days of Special Exploration Begin Today — Decoding Soulton Hall

Starting today, BBC Radio Shropshire is featuring a landmark four-day special exploring the profound historical mysteries embedded within Soulton Hall.

Heritage consultant James Wenn of Byrga Geniht joins Mark Elliot on air to unpack a remarkable web of Tudor history, examining how this Shropshire estate came to harbor the memory and physical legacy of some of England’s most guarded historical chapters.

A BBC News artilce covered these metters on Sunday 30 August and it can be read here.

Tracing the Flickers of Revelation

This three-day broadcast series builds on a growing public awareness that first flickered into motion when Mark Elliot welcomed Tim Ashton onto his show for the four-hundredth anniversary of the First Folio.

Clips of the episodes will be shared below.

(1) Rhombic Dodecahedron

(2) Stone

(3) Bone

Transcripts are available lower down this page assist with accessibility considerations.

Context

That initial conversation shared, for the first time on new media, the quiet work and growing confidence that deep architectural and historical truths about Soulton Hall were genuine.

This week’s features on BBC Radio Shropshire open those doors even wider for listeners, exploring four key areas of inquiry:

• The Relics of Saint Erkenwald: Investigating how the art historical reading and the archeological evidence when set with biography is reflecting that the estate reflect the dismantled shrine of London’s seventh-century bishop, acting as a covert architectural sanctuary during turbulent religious shifts.

• The Lost Altar of Old St Paul’s: Examining physical evidence and heritage evaluations suggesting that the high altar of Old St Paul’s Cathedral found a safe haven in Shropshire.

• The Garnet Code and Statecraft: Unpacking the mathematical, philosophical, and architectural ciphers of Renaissance figures like Sir Rowland Hill to shield vital ideas from the purges of the mid-sixteenth century.

• Shakespeare’s Consciousness: Exploring how William Shakespeare held a deep awareness of these preserved secrets, drawing upon the intellectual currents, family legacies, and landscape of the region.

Tune In This Week on BBC Shropshire

As these four daily segments unfold starting today, listeners across the region have a rare opportunity to hear expert analysis bridge the gap between private academic study and public discovery.

Alongside these broadcasts, written materials are also emerging to document the findings.

James has recently published a blog about the impact of his previous career in sociology on his work which you can find here.

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Transcript for episode 1

Introduction

Mark Elliot: Soulton Hall near Wem. It is a fascinating house, a Tudor manor house with an incredible history. If you drive past on the road, it is quite flat there, and you just see this huge house sort of rise out from amongst the fields. And this week, we are going to find out why some people think that the altar from the original St. Paul’s Cathedral is in the chapel there, and why there could also be a saint buried in the garden—quite an important saint as well. Obviously, the original St. Paul’s Cathedral burned down in the Great Fire of London, and the altar had been changed during the Tudor period and the shifts that followed.

There are various elements to this that we will discover this week.

But first, Sir Rowland Hill the former Lord Mayor of London: he built the house.

He did it in a very particular way.

This person was rich—we are talking about the time of Henry VIII, and then a little bit beyond Henry VIII even, and into the political and religious changes that followed. He was a merchant who traded in Germany and earned an awful lot of money, and he decided to build a house at Soulton Hall. James D. Wenn studies English architecture and told me about the shapes involved. This is quite interesting because we do not really think about symbolism through shapes, but apparently, this is found in a lot of houses around the world. So, stick with this. You will be able to picture the shape in your mind, and James will tell you exactly what all of these things mean.

Interview

Mark Elliot: We are sitting in a Tudor manor house next to a very old wooden table with a picture—that is Sir Rowland Hill, isn’t it? A portrait of Hill.

James D. Wenn: That is right, yes.

Mark Elliot: And in front of him are some interesting shapes.

James D. Wenn: So, the shapes in front of us are lecture props that I use to explain a very special piece of geometry called a rhombic dodecahedron. Rhombic means each one of its faces is a rhombus—so a four-sided shape—and there are 12 of them. The 12 faces make up the dodecahedron part.

Now, this is a fairly unfamiliar shape today, but it can be found in nature in garnet crystals.

The mineral garnet grows as this rhombic dodecahedron shape, and that was incredibly important to our ancestors, who made all of their royal jewelry in the Anglo-Saxon period out of garnet specifically and almost exclusively. When I studied Anglo-Saxon as an undergraduate at Cambridge, they said,

“We will never be able to find out for certain why they are interested in garnet.

Perhaps it is because of the red color.”

But then my partner, James Serret, who is a geologist, handed me an example of one of these crystals, and immediately I noticed that one half of this shape is the way they made their church tower roofs later in the period.

So after that initial discovery, we chased the rabbit hole, which ended up finding that the geometry of the rhombic dodecahedron is actually connected to the coronation.

So why would it go into the coronation?

Why would it be in all the royal jewelry?

Well, the reason for that is that there is a very special property of this shape. If you get a load of identical examples, you can push them all together and there are no gaps in between them. So this is an allegory, a symbol for a perfect society where everyone can fit together in harmony.

Mark Elliot: It is effectively a cube with pyramids on each side, and it is used in buildings all over the world, isn’t it?

James D. Wenn: It is a particular obsession of the English, so it is all over the world, and we find it saturated into the architecture of England.

But yes, that is right.

For example, Washington DC, the District of Columbia, is laid out relative to north, south, east, and west to evoke these ideas that were still really popular in the English-speaking world back at the end of the eighteenth century when America was finding its feet.

The latest civic building that we found that is drawing on this allegory of harmony and virtue is actually the Old Bailey in the City of London. The design of the great hall outside of all of the courtrooms has in its marble paving squares representing the side-to-side and up-and-down silhouettes of the rhombic dodecahedron. But each one of the courtrooms also has a rhombus above it. And what that is saying is that everybody who walks underneath this symbol has to live up to the virtues that are being demanded of them for this social harmony of fitting together—be that a witness, a juror, or a judge.

And really, that is the message in the coronation pavement, too.

Mark Elliot: Why did we stop doing this? — Why is my house not built in this way with the shape all over it?

James D. Wenn: There is one person in particular who is a bit of a villain of this tale—an architect who is known as Le Corbusier—and he said,

“Buildings must not talk.”

And he said of houses,

“They are a machine for living in.”

I think that was him, or possibly one of his colleagues:

“Paint everything white, we just want concrete beams and glass.”

Now, where emotionally that was coming from wasn’t just fashion changing and wanting something new.

This came on the heels of the First World War, which saw industrialized, mechanized slaughter, and people felt that they had been sent into battle for no reason.

That sense of trauma and moral injury—I think we can all recognize it looking back on Remembrance Day.

Artists, architects, the people who had been entrusted with this rich symbol system through time felt it very difficult to continue a tradition where they felt that there had been a big rupture in the social contract.

There is nothing wrong with the allegory, and it still has great value for us today.

I can absolutely empathize with people at that time who felt like the future was going to be a completely brand new blank slate.

Outro

Mark Elliot: I have got to be honest, I had no idea that that much thought went into the shapes of buildings and architecture at that sort of time. And I was sat there in front of this portrait of Sir Rowland Hill—who they say was an inspiration for a Shakespeare character in As You Like It—a very, very rich man who owned a decent portion of the national debt at one point, so really influential.

And James was showing me this rhombic dodecahedron and how they fit together and all of that, and it makes sense eventually, but it is just not how we think now, is it?

We do not use that sort of symbolism in architecture.

That is academic James D. Wenn.

Tomorrow, we will find out why he thinks the altar from the original St. Paul’s Cathedral is in North Shropshire.

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Transcript for episode 2

Introduction

Mark Elliot: And this week, I have been taking a look around Soulton Hall, built by Sir Rowland Hill, who was one of England’s richest men during the Tudor period. He held the purse strings for Henry VIII at one point. Basically told him, “No, you cannot go to war because you cannot afford it, and I am not lending you any more money.”

So, this is a guy with some serious power and serious clout.

Did he though bring back the altar from the original St. Paul’s Cathedral and keep it in his chapel near Wem?

That is the what feels like rather implausible theory that some people are starting to believe might have some credibility.

I asked academic James Wenn to tell me exactly why he thinks what is in the chapel came all the way from London.

Interview

Mark Elliot: We have moved down to a chapel.

Not quite in the basement, is it?But almost, and we can see out into the garden.

But next to us is what looks like an altar.

James D Wenn: That is right.

The window that you mentioned is the only central opening in the entirety of Soulton Hall. It faces the Easter sunrise down what used to be an avenue that sadly died during Dutch elm disease within living memory, and it will be replanted. The room we are in that has this very special nestled central position is about 8 ft by 8 ft by 16 ft in old money.

The volume of the rhombic dodecahedron, this mathematical shape that all of the architecture of the building keeps on riffing off because it is interested in harmony and the properties of that shape as a symbol. This double cube is evoking that because of that proportion.

So the room is important and at the east end of it, this big slab of stone is about 8 ft by 3 ft. So it is the same dimensions as a stone medieval altar/

And it is broken into three pieces.

Now when Sir Rowland Hill was leading London as the civil authority, he was tasked with destroying the high altar of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral and it was such a violent cataclysmic thing to do.

He had to cancel a public holiday to try to stop a riot.

Three people died during this incident.

Mark Elliot: Why?

Given they were still going to use St. Paul’s Cathedral, why was he tasked with smashing bits of it up?

James Dwen: So different religious opinions see the idea of a Christian altar through different lenses.

A more traditional view sees it as a sacrificial slab, as a burial slab. It is to do with the death and the resurrection in the eucharist.

The view of the eucharist from the Protestant perspectives that were being brought in during the reformation is that you have a wooden table like a dining table, a kitchen table, and you reenact the last supper feast as communion.

Mark Elliot: Sir Rowland Hill decides, I should probably save that. Is that his thought process?

James D Wenn: Well, let us put it this way: he would have had to be both incredibly brave and potentially incredibly idiotic to have designed a room in this way, in a very readable way to a Renaissance mind if he did not really believe in the risk that he was taking.

Mark Elliot: As a Protestant, why why did he not just think:

“Actually, yeah, that can go. It is wrong.”

James Dwen: The Worshipful Company of Mercers are one of the city guilds. They were the merchants who went overseas. Rowland Hill was one of their greatest members. So he was trading with Germany. He is described in the state papers as being the great occupier of that country, meaning almost a monopoly holder of the direct trade.

And that is where the reformation started.

But he grew up in the reign of Henry VII in the flowering of Catholic English culture. That is the religion of his parents, grandparents all the way back for hundreds of years.

In the Mercers in London, they had just completed this beautiful statue of the body of Christ. It is life size, so the same size, made out of stone as the slab in here. And this wonderful lifelike sculpture was found in a socket of sand during the blitz. Nobody knew that it had been hidden, but this is when Sir Rowland Hill was actually living in the mansion co-connected with the Mercer’s Chapel. So he it must have been done with his knowledge.

Looking at that, there is a bit of a V for Vendetta sense of it safeguarding history.

There is a scene in V for Vendetta where there is a gay man I think played by Stephen Fry who is guarding a Quran and somebody asks him if that is not a strange thing for him to do and he says not a bit of it because all culture is valuable to me as a person of culture.

Mark Elliot: One of the few people rich enough to get away with it as well.

James D Wenn: Rich enough but also experienced because he was trading with Germany when all of these things were going on on the continent at the beginning of the reformation before it ever came to England.

So he had already worked out his position and when it came to his own shores, yes, he was involved in Protestant publishing, but these strong Protestant connections and these preservationist ideas, they could well live in somebody who perhaps is not themselves a theologian — but just wants the best for everybody.

Mark Elliot: I am going to play skeptic and say it is a dark, almost black slab. How do you know it is from where you think it is from?

James Dwen: Well, the short answer is that we do not.

It is one of these things where it is going to be an ongoing object of research.

One thing that is been suggested is potentially to drill through the bricks that are supporting it and if there is a space underneath to send a camera in there to see if there are any of the signs that you often see on Catholic altars like the consecration crosses because if he was semihiding it, he may have revolved it. The really important thing to do is to engage properly with the faith stakeholders, the heritage stakeholders and experts and the local heritage officer who is the proper statutory authority to determine what we can and cannot do. All of these people are no fools bishops of different churches, representatives. We have got a list of names of people who have said that they are convinced and they are very serious people. We will leave it to them to put their name to it.

Outro

Mark Elliot:  It is now a multifaith sort of prayer room chapel there at Soulton Hall and potentially and more investigations will be done.

It could have the altar from the original St. Paul’s Cathedral in the chapel there.

Tomorrow, we will find out if the patron saint of London is buried in the garden.

This all because Sir Rowland Hill, who built the house, is thought to have sort of stored away artifacts that he was told to destroy during the Reformation because, as you heard there, different ways of worship requires different sort of sacred objects and may have ended up some of them may have ended up in Shropshire, which is just quite extraordinary.

Difficult to prove, but extraordinary.

The stories are amazing particularly of Sir Rowland Hill who… people think he inspired the character of old Sir Rowland in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

So the cultural impact, the financial impact of one of England’s richest men at the time and a patron of so many different causes. You can just dig back into the history of that building and that individual and find loads of fascinating tales that history is willing to tell you.

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Transcript for episode 3

Introduction

Mark Elliot: Let’s go behind the scenes at Soulton Hall near Wem again.

It is a manor house that was built in the Tudor period by Sir Rowland Hill, who was Lord Mayor of London and one of England’s richest men—to the point where he owned about a third of the national debt and told Henry VIII that he couldn’t go to war… he wasn’t lending him any more money.

He was also involved in implementing the Reformation under Henry VIII and is said to have saved a number of artifacts from destruction by people who were maybe overzealously implementing the change in religion in England.

James D. Wenn is a country house expert and heritage consultant who believes the remains of the patron saint of London are buried in the garden there—which seems ridiculous, doesn’t it?

But there is a story that makes it sound a little bit more plausible.

I went into the garden to look at the monument there to Saint Erkenwald.

Interview

James D. Wenn: What we’re looking at is a temporary sculpture made of farm girders—so made of triangular steel sections that used to hold up a barn.

And they’re welded together into a pyramid over steel sheets. And those steel sheets are hidden by a layer of bright white quartz gravel surrounded by some black railway sleepers that were again part of the same barn.

So this is the working farm at Soulton protecting the security of the archaeological spot where we believe the relics of Saint Erkenwald were brought by Sir Rowland Hill, the superstar Lord Mayor of London who built Soulton Hall.

Mark Elliot: In terms of Erkenwald, he is effectively deemed the sort of founding figure of London.

When does he become a saint, and what’s his story?

James D. Wenn: He became a saint pretty much immediately after he died in the 600s.

He’s a prince.

Like a lot of [early bishops] (presumably second or third sons).

So if you were a prince, you could go into the church and be quite senior at this date. His family were the East Saxon royal family, and the Diocese of London at that time was the entirety of Essex, Middlesex, and the City of London.

Mark Elliot: His tear saved a man who was unable to get into heaven, is that right?

James D. Wenn: So this is a miracle that is preserved in a Middle English poem called Erkenwald that was actually written around here locally in North Shropshire.

But within the story, they’re building St. Paul’s for the first time.

And they found a body that was in a coffin with writing that they couldn’t understand, and the body was as if it had only just fallen asleep.

So they were astonished and called for the bishop—called for Erkenwald—and the body woke up and spoke to the bishop saying:

“I’m not a saint”

(which is what medieval people usually thought when there was a body that had been uncorrupted):

“but I was very virtuous. But because I was a pagan, I never heard the word of God.”

And so, in a tiny-winy Doctor Who sort of way, he has already been judged and has been missed because he hadn’t heard the word of God.

And so Erkenwald retrospectively baptizes him with a tear, invoking the Holy Trinity.

The body turns to ash and everyone cries out in joy.

And all the bells of the city ring out.

Mark Elliot: So, you can see how potentially his body would have gotten here. How did you find it, and how do you know it’s him?

James D. Wenn: Reading the hall revealed that it was hyperfocused on honoring this little patch of ground right in the center of the garden precinct.

Mark Elliot: So, it’s all pointing to this spot.

James D. Wenn: It all points to this spot.

So, the first thing that we saw when I said to Tim Ashton:

“There will be a point in your lawn just here that’s in the middle that they appear to be really interested in. I can see nothing—there’s nothing to be seen, it’s just a flat lawn.

But I think we might have to investigate that.”

And his face went white and his jaw hit the floor.

And he said:

“—- But there is something there!

You can only see it in the middle of a summer during a drought.”

(like we’re having at the moment):

“Because when the grass begins to burn, lines appear”

[This is] because the grass that has more to feed on and has more water grows greener, and then when it’s starved, it goes yellow more quickly.

And he showed me a photograph because they had been transfixed by a puzzle that there was a square right there in the very middle of this garden that had nothing to do with any of the garden plans going back hundreds of years that this house has been in the family, all the way back to Rowland Hill.

But nowhere in any of the records was there ever anything there.

So they’re interested archaeologically.

Rowland Hill biographically was associated with the shenanigans around the removal of Erkenwald’s relics. We were on the case of what it might be.

Tim, who did a master’s degree in soils at Harper Adams University, is a farmer who’s farmed the estate for years.

He brought in contacts in the agriculture industry at the very cutting edge—the soil seismology program doing geophysics to look at the 3D makeup of the soil. This is developed for farming, and he brought that team in from Exeter University and they scanned it without being told where or what was of interest at all.

And they found right in that spot, underneath the square, signals that are the same kind of shape, and they go down into the earth and then they bottom out at about 1.5 meters from what we can look at on some initial readouts.

So all of that’s going through peer review and the university is going to publish what they found. There are a lot of very senior church people across different churches who completely agree, and there are other people who would like to see more material evidence. But I think for a very materialist skeptic, it would be extremely difficult to positively verify something. We think in the acid soil here, there might only be chemicals left. In any case, there are no descendants—he was a celibate priest, and it was so very long ago. We’re talking 1,400 years, give or take.

I think everybody’s agreed: the important thing is that now everyone is talking about Erkenwald.

Outro

Mark Elliot: … That was heritage consultant James D. Wenn there in the garden of Soulton Hall near Wem.

So it may well have the altar from the original St. Paul’s Cathedral in the chapel there.

And it may well have the patron saint of London buried in the garden.

Extraordinary.

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