Home is the soldier

".......Well said, courageous Feeble! Thou wilt be as valiant
as the wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse."

                                                    Henry IV, Part II            (III, ii)

Despite his rotund self-absorption, Shakespeare's Falstaff has been given the responsibility of recruiting soldiers for an army, to help the ailing King Henry IV fight another outbreak of rebelliousness. True to his overinflated form, Falstaff sees his chance for personal gain: he'll pocket the bribes of the fit and able and recruit instead the weak, the ragged, the hopelessly pathetic. He'll make out like a bandit, figuring no one will be the wiser: he recruits the bedraggled Feeble, Shadow, and Wart.

More dependable soldierly types are depicted in the top row of the carved oak panel above, which adorns a wall in Agecroft Hall's Great Hall. The panel is believed to have been carved in the first half of the sixteenth century, perhaps during the lifetime of Agecroft's owner Robert Langley. The carving style may point to either Italian or German workmanship. It's worth remembering that even in sixteenth-century Tudor England, owning goods that were obtained from abroad translated into status. Such possessions gave owners a chance to sneer at domestic craftsmanship, regardless of its quality. Some things never change.

And oak, as a wood choice, appealed to the English: it was durable as a rock, and carving it well involved considerable skill. On the Sceptered Isle, they seemed to like virtually all of their furnishings done in oak.

Agecroft's carvings include (on the bottom row) what has been called the romayne style, a Renaissance decorative motif featuring heads in medallion-like profile, often carved into furniture and paneling. It's a style first introduced into England from Italy during the reign of Henry VIII; the word "romayne" was current in England at the time as applying to anything Roman or Italian. Whether these four particular figures were meant to have specific identities is uncertain.

Regarding the military types depicted in the top row (even the piper at far right has weaponry), research done at Agecroft Hall suggests the possibility that they represent retainers of a noble house "chosen to serve as defenders should occasion require it." If so, it is a reminder of the inherent violence of the Tudor age, when there was little sense of ease or safekeeping without some form of armed protection.

No doubt Falstaff would have let these men avoid their warlike duties in return for a few clinks of coinage.