A handful of tiny paper items discovered at Sutton House in Hackney offer a unique insight into the interests of the girls who were educated there in the 17th century. Carly Hilts spoke to Nathalie Cohen, Isabella Rosner, Kate Simpson, and Abigail Winslow to find out more.
A fox, a hen, human figures – all depicted on scraps of paper so small that they can comfortably
nestle in the palm of your hand, and some no bigger than your fingernail. The story of how these fragile fragments survived across the centuries, and of their rediscovery and recent identification, is so full of moments of serendipity and the right people being in precisely the right place at the perfect time that it seems unbelievable. Yet all of what follows is true – and these tiny pieces have the power to evoke a world that is almost entirely lost to us today: the imaginations of 17th-century schoolgirls.
The setting for these events is Hackney – today indisputably part of London, but 350 years ago the area was still semi-rural, and a desirable place for wealthy merchants and gentry to build their country houses, conveniently close to the capital but still sufficiently removed from urban sprawl to enjoy the open space and fresh air. At this time, the 17th-century social elites were becoming increasingly interested in girls’ education and, building on the precedent of sending daughters to other households for their development, this sparked a flourishing of girls’ boarding schools.
Hackney was a particularly important focus for this movement, so much so that the area was popularly known as ‘the Ladies’ University’. At these academies, middle- and upper-class girls were taught all the practical skills that they would one day use to run their own households – such as reading, writing, arithmetic, and needlework – as well as languages, music, dancing, and decorative arts.
Within this last category, a particularly fashionable pursuit involved carefully cutting out images from pre-printed sheets of designs (often grouped by category, such as birds, animals, and biblical scenes) and using them to decorate boxes and other items. Paper cutting was seen (alongside other activities like embroidery and creating elaborate shapes from folded paper) as a suitably genteel way for young ladies to show off their taste and dexterity, and was a forerunner of the Victorian enthusiasm for découpage. It is described in household manuals of the time, particularly those of Hannah Woolley, who is known to have taught in several Hackney schools. In her A Guide to Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Maids (1668) and The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673), Woolley writes about the ‘cutting of prints, and adorning rooms or cabinets or stands with them’, and offers advice on how to arrange images to their best effect: ‘let the houses and trees be set sensibly, as also water with ships sailing, as you put them on, observe that they have a relation to one another.’
While some of the sheets printed for this purpose are preserved in artistic collections, very little material evidence remains to show how they were actually put to use. Only two examples of objects decorated in this way are currently known (of which, more anon), but vivid new insights have recently emerged from Sutton House, the only surviving example in London of a building that once served as a 17th-century girls’ school.
EDUCATIONAL EPHEMERA
Today hailed as ‘the oldest house inHackney’, Sutton House was originally built in 1535 as the family home of Sir Ralph Sadleir, a prominent Tudor courtier, diplomat, and associate of Thomas Cromwell, who served four monarchs. The property then passed through diverse owners and many different uses before it was acquired by the National Trust in 1938. Many of these incarnations were educational in role, including 19th-century girls’ and boys’ schools, and a church institute – but the key episode for our purposes comes in the 1650s, when the house was leased by Sarah Freeman, a wealthy widow, who opened a girls’ boarding school within its walls. We know of her work and the likely large size of the student population thanks to surviving advertisements and church records, but traces of the girls themselves and the skills that they had learned at Mrs Freeman’s School were much scarcer – until vivid clues were brought to light during renovation works and more recent research.
From the 1950s until the 1980s, the National Trust had leased Sutton House to various trade union organisations who used the property for their offices. When the unions departed, however, the house was taken over by squatters and fell into disrepair. Hoping to prevent further decline of the historic property, the Trust began to consider letting it be converted into flats – discussions that sparked the Save Sutton House Campaign, a local initiative that wanted the building to remain accessible to the community. This group ultimately evolved into the Sutton House Society, working with the National Trust to preserve the site.
The late 1980s saw surveys of the house by English Heritage and MoLAS (now MOLA; Museum of London Archaeology), and at the same time the Trust was working with Sutton House Society volunteers to restore its interior. One of these was Ken Jacobs, the Society’s Treasurer, and in 1988 he spotted a heap of dust that had accumulated on the lintel of a door in one of the first-floor rooms, hidden until that point behind the wood panelling that usually lined the room, but which had at that time been removed. Ken decided to ‘excavate’ the unprepossessing pile, carefully sieving its contents, and found that it contained a number of scraps of paper that had fallen through the floorboards of the room above. These snippets preserved detailed pictures of people, animals, and birds, and there was also a tiny folded star, like delicate origami – but their full significance would only become clear decades later.
The paper fragments were carefully stored for over 30 years, together with hundreds of other underfloor finds recovered during the restoration works, including bone dice and dominos, pins and thimbles, nuts and cherry pips, and small circular patches of black cloth that have been interpreted as beauty spots. The collection was never formally catalogued, however – until 2022, when Kate Simpson, a Senior Collections & House Officer at the National Trust (then at Sutton House, now at Osterley Park on the other side of London), took on the task. Describing the work to me as her ‘passion project’, Kate was determined
to make the underfloor finds more easily accessible to researchers, and so she launched a volunteer initiative to examine and document all the archived material from Sutton House.
One of the volunteers to join this team was Isabella Rosner, a specialist in 17th-century needlework and women’s material culture, who was then undertaking her PhD. The very first box that she was given to go through contained the scraps of paper that Ken had found – and Isabella immediately realised what they were, as her place of employment, Witney Antiques in Oxfordshire, had just acquired a box adorned with strikingly similar imagery.
COLOURFUL CLUES
The object in question was a workbox dating to the 1680s, whose sides and lid (as well as two trinket boxes contained within it) were completely covered with brightly coloured paper cut-outs of birds, animals, and religious scenes. Isabella was in the process of researching the workbox when she came to help explore the Sutton House finds, and swiftly spotted their similarities. In the Witney workbox we can see how the Hackney scraps were intended to have been used – but while the Sutton House schoolgirls remain anonymous, we know who was behind the box’s elaborate decorations. It has been traced back to Elizabeth Colleton. The daughter of wealthy plantation-owners, she was born in Barbados in 1668, but moved to England as a small child, and would have been educated in the London area, during which time, in her early teens, she probably decorated the box.
In one of her guides to paper-cutting, Hannah Woolley writes that ‘if you mean to make stories, you must buy [a] good store of figures,’ and Elizabeth evidently had access to an enviable collection of printed sheets, judging by the elaborate scenes that she was able to create on her workbox. Such sheets were mass-produced, sometimes in full colour, sometimes left black and white so that they could be painted at home or in the classroom. Some of Elizabeth’s artistic choices seem quite whimsical, such as painting a unicorn bright blue. More than that, the Witney box offers appealing insights into her imagination: she has produced a huge composition, carefully placing individual images and scenes with a consistent style and creating decorative arcs of birds to fill empty space. While less is known about the Sutton House schoolgirls (other than their likely social class, and the fact that they were probably aged between 11 and 16), we can also catch glimpses of their creative choices: images of a fox and the bathing woman have been carefully hand-coloured, while tiny bits of pink and green fabric have been applied to add vivid hues to a hen.
The workbox – which will be on display at Witney Antiques from 21 October to 23 November as part of their annual exhibition, this year taking the theme ‘Choice and Precious Work: treasures from the schoolroom’ – is the only known example of a 17th-century item completely covered in paper cuttings. Another box exists in a private collection, but only one of its sides is decorated in this way. The Sutton House fragments, meanwhile, are the only examples of loose cuttings that have yet been identified – but, rather pleasingly, they represent both stages of creating decorative designs, as they include entire cut-out images, as well as probably unwanted off-cuts. Two of the scraps do not feature pictures, but words: text that once labelled images of a nightingale and an ‘African bird’, together with the letters ‘Nn’ and ‘Aa’ respectively.
These are thought to have come from a particular kind of collection called
‘abecedaria’, where themed images represent every letter of the alphabet. Although Isabella has scoured surviving sheets held in museum collections, she has not yet identified any that exactly match the Sutton
House images – highlighting just how many varieties of these publications must have once existed, the scale of their loss since then, and the sheer good fortune of the Sutton House snippets’ survival. Today, the lives of the girls who cut them out are largely lost to us, but these fragments offer a tangible link to their experiences, and a reflection of activities that are still so relatable today, as craft activities related to paper remain hugely popular.
The collaborative work that brought the scraps’ story to light has culminated in a display running at Sutton House until December. Abigail Winslow, the site’s current Collections & House Officer, and Nathalie Cohen, National Trust Regional Archaeologist for London and the South East, described how the paper items are used to explore narratives of the items’ rediscovery, and of how the schoolgirls created whole worlds from bits of paper accompanied by craft activities that encourage modern children to engage with and share the experiences of their 17th-century peers. Trust Regional Archaeologist for London and the South East, described how the paper items are used to explore narratives of the items’ rediscovery, and of how the schoolgirls created whole worlds from bits of paper accompanied by craft activities that encourage modern children to engage with and share the experiences of their 17th-century peers.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 416. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
