Samaritan Woman in 1893
Into an inn did the equipage roll,
At a town called Hoddesdon, the sign of the Bull,
Where a nymph with an urn divides the highway,
And into a puddle pours mother of tea.
This extract from the poem “Down Hall” by Matthew Prior, 1664-1721, is the first of eleven verses describing his arrival in Hoddesdon by coach, and of his staying the night at the Bull Inn, and of his departure the next morning to his home Down Hall near Sheering in Essex, in 1715.
The figure of the ‘nymph’ had stood in the centre of the town for about eighty-five years at this time, and had been mentioned by many writers before Prior, and was to be referred to by many others in the 112 years it had yet to stay there. Although Prior referred to the figure as a ‘nymph’, it was known to the people of Hoddesdon as the Samaritan Woman, but it is not known who gave it that name; whoever it was, undoubtedly had in mind the story of Jesus and the Woman of Samaria whom He met at Jacob’s Well, as told in the Gospel of St John, ch iv, verses 4-42. When Mr – later Sir Marmaduke – Rawdon built his house in Hoddesdon in 1622, he provided it with a supply of water by means of lead piping, from a point near High Grounds – now known as High Leigh – about a half mile west of the town in Lord Street. At that time the source of the water was called Goddes Well Acre, but later became known as Spring Close, or Conduit Close.
A nymph of stone, who from an urn doth pour
Into the pitchers of both rich and poor,
Her limpid treasures from the Western Vale.
Whose unexhausted bounties seldom fail;
And never grudging, ever generous she,
With the just element for making tea.
Thanks generous Rawdon for thy kind bequest,
Remotest ages shall the donor bless.
About 1654 a branch pipe was taken to the Grange, where it still – though with a decreased flow – supplies the jet to the fountain on the lawn ; a short time later another branch was taken from the Samaritan Woman to the Thatched House for the use of the brewery. Several other houses on the Thorowgood family property also received supplies. Mr Rawdon’s wife Elizabeth was the heiress daughter of Thomas Thorowgood, gentleman and property owner of Hoddesdon.
In 1679 an agreement was made by the town with the Marmaduke Rawdon of that time by which the water from Rawdon House was to run in a leaden pipe of one-inch bore from the main pipe to the stone image from 6 o’clock in the morning to 8 o’clock in the evening in the summer half- year, and from eight in the morning to eight in the evening in the winter half-year. On the death in 1684 of the above Mr Rawdon, another Marmaduke Rawdon, his son, succeeded to the property, and in 1725 found himself at variance with the inhabitants of Hoddesdon, when it was alleged that he had allowed certain irregularities to creep in regarding the supply of water to the town given by his ancestor. It is likely that by supplying so much water to houses on property owned by William Plomer, his son-in- law, the supply to the townspeople had been seriously curtailed. The dispute was eventually settled by arbitration, and the Award – a lengthy document – found in favour of the inhabitants. This document was con- firmed and acted upon by all subsequent owners of Rawdon House.
For some years previous to 1826 the flow of water from the conduit had considerably diminished, and, partly on account of the waste of water, and, partly because it was felt that the pond into which the water was discharged was no longer desirable, the figure was taken down in July 1826, and the pond was filled in. Another fact was undoubtedly an even stronger reason for its removal; a contributor to a newspaper of the time wrote: ‘It is well known from local hearsay that the disfigurement of the statue which by now had some holes in the torso for the pipes, together with the dwindling flow of water, made the whole thing appear indelicate and suggestive.’
Iron pump c1860
The Samaritan Woman was replaced by an iron pump having fixed above it a large gas lamp, supported by four upswung foliated iron struts; at the same time a capacious tank was constructed in the ground below it.
Those who wanted buckets of water used the pump worked by a large iron handle, but for those who wanted smaller quantities, a tap was provided at the rear.
In the first decade of this century many houses in the town were without piped water, and a familiar sight was that of the boys from Burford Street, Amwell Street, and Lord Street, whose early morning job it was to get their family’s water supply daily. Each boy carried two buckets and an iron hoop; when returning to their homes with full buckets they would place the hoops horizontally between them at the handles, and by walking inside the hoops they escaped being splashed as they walked. Sometimes a man would be seen carrying water buckets by means of a yoke.
Samaritan Woman
After being taken down from its position in the Market Place, the Samaritan Woman was placed in Tuck’s – later Turners, and still later Gocher’s – yard on the opposite side of the road where it stayed for the rest of the century, during which time it suffered much damage through being used as a cock-shy by boys with stones. In 1894, the year in which the Hoddesdon Urban District was formed, a plan was placed before the Council for its consideration, strongly supported by Mr C. P. Christie, by means of which it was proposed to re-erect the figure at the north end of the Market Place, on a small pedestal protected by an iron fence. A booklet was published setting out details of the plan with illustrations. The scheme was abandoned when a well-known sculptor gave it as his opinion that it would be impossible ‘to renovate it to make it worthy of display in a public place’.
One good thing came out of this; the interest aroused by the plan made the Hoddesdon UDC aware of the historical importance of this example of seventeenth century sculpture, and they rescued it from the butcher’s yard and placed it in a building at Rye Farm. And so the years passed and its existence was almost forgotten; the Great War of 1914 came and went.
The depression which followed, made rigid economy the order of the day, and many post-war plans for Hoddesdon remained in pigeon holes, but in 1934 the Council was able to go ahead and build the new Council Office which it so badly needed. Not everyone however had forgotten the Samaritan Woman; Colonel E. I. Christie, a son of Mr C. P. Christie who had hoped to get it re-erected in 1894, headed a group of people who felt that a prominent place for the figure could be found in the layout of the forecourt of the new building. Mr Giddings of the of Hoddesdon, a very competent sculptor was invited to undertake the restoration of the historic figure, which, after its sixty-eight years in a butcher ’s yard, and forty-one years at Rye Farm, was found to be in a very bad state, covered with the dirt of 109 years, the head severed from the body, the nose broken from the face.
The Samaritan Woman at the rear of the Council Offices
Various holes had been made in the body through which odd pipes had been inserted. The result of Mr Giddings’s work was most pleasing, and it appeared as though she would now begin another long period on display to the people of Hoddesdon, but the sinister events of the years immediately preceding the 1939 war, and the national emergency, threw much extra work on both Councillors and Officers of the Council, and the Samaritan Woman was placed temporarily at the rear of the Council Office. Another move became necessary when the Council transferred its offices to Bishops College, and in 1986 the statue was placed in the garden at the side of Lowewood.
During the years prior to the Second World War, Mrs Elliott of Bridge House, Broxbourne, carried out much valuable research, mainly concerning the artistic place of the Samaritan Woman in seventeenth-century art, and in an endeavour to discover the name of its sculptor. This led her to visit many examples of the sculpture of that period, and to correspondence with many interesting people. As a result of her correspondence with Professor Geoffrey Webb, an eminent authority on the subject of sculpture in relation to buildings, Mrs Elliott visited the ‘Venus of Bolsover’ in the courtyard of Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, which was erected for William Cavendish, the great Duke of Newcastle at about the same time as the Samaritan Woman in Hoddesdon, viz c 1631. As with us at Hoddesdon there was no documentary evidence as to who carved the figure, but Professor Webb did mention three names of sculptors who might have done so, Nicholas Stone, Maximillian Colt and Edward Marshall.
It was in 1938 that Professor Webb sent a copy of Mrs Elliott’s correspondence to Mrs Arundel Esdaile – whose family gave its name to our Esdaile Lane – the greatest authority on English sculpture of the seventeenth century. In her subsequent correspondence with Mrs Elliott, Mrs Esdaile mentioned the three sculptors named by Professor Webb, and discussed the possibility of one of them being the sculptor of the Samaritan Woman.
She wrote: ‘Marshall’s work has only been seen in illustrations by the writer; it is however a splendid thought that the mason-contractor of St Paul’s Cathedral might have been the sculptor.’ In this case he was probably the master-mason of Marmaduke Rawdon’s house, as Mrs Esdaile also said ‘The architect of Rawdon House would probably be the author of the Samaritan Woman.’ It is disappointing that Mrs Elliott’s researches did not reveal the name of the author of Hoddesdon’s famous statue; it looks now as though we shall never know his identity, but I feel that it could be said that the finger of probability points – perhaps a little uncertainly – to Edward Marshall.
It is pleasant to know that there is a happy ending to the story of the Samaritan Woman, and that after its years of usefulness, and its years of exile, it is again to ‘pour water from her pitcher into a pond’. The Hoddesdon UDC approved a plan by its Engineer and Surveyor to have an ornamental pool made into which the figure, connected to a supply of water, is again giving aesthetic pleasure to the townspeople after a lapse of 143 years.
The HUDC has further agreed to place an inscribed plaque on, or near the figure, giving a brief outline of its history over the 338 years of its existence.
With the opening up of the land to the south and west of the Council Office, and the building of the Clinic and the Police Station, and with the laying down of grass and pavement, and the planting of flower beds, this famous old piece of sculpture will be seen by a larger number of people than at any time during the past thirty-four years.
Now that Rawdon House is no longer the home of the Canonesses of the Order of St Augustine, they have offered through their agents, to convey to the Hoddesdon UDC free of charge, a parcel of land relating to the Conduit House and Conduit leading to Rawdon House. The Council accepted the offer with thanks, and agreed to be responsible for their maintenance.
It will be seen that reference has been made to the Samaritan Woman in English literature by two poets, one in the seventeenth century, and one in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Samuel Henley, are, 1740-1815, first Master of the East India College at Haileybury from 1805-1815, in reference to a passage by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale, act v, scene ii: know he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by like a weather bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns,’ wrote ‘Conduits representing a human figure were not uncommon; one of them, a female form stands at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire.’ He could have added ‘of many kings’ reigns’; in 1810 it would have been eight kings and two queens, today it would be thirteen kings and four queens.
