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The Tradescant’s House, called the ‘Ark’, in South Lambeth which was pulled down around 1880. Thornbury.

 

The church was deconsecrated in 1972 and now contains the Museum of Garden History, which has collections of garden tools, ephemera and a library, the notable connection being that the churchyard has the tomb of John Tradescant senior (c1570-1638) and John Tradescant junior (1608-1662) who were renowned gardeners, collectors and importers of exotic plants during the Stuart period.

John Tradescant senior became head gardener to Robert Cecil at Hatfield House in 1610, then found employment with Robert’s son, William, at Salisbury House in the Strand, worked for Robert Villiers at New Hall until Villers’ assassination in 1628, and was shortly thereafter appointed Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms at Charles I’s Oatlands Palace. He travelled widely through Europe, Russia and Algiers collecting plants and rarities, and his son made three trips to the American colony of Virginia in 1637, 1642 and 1654 with the same object.

Tradescant bought a house in the parish of St Mary in Lambeth during his time of employment by Charles I, and at this house, which he called the ‘Ark’, he assembled his collection of botanical and zoological specimens and other rarities. Chambers relates : ‘..we learn that it was indeed a multifarious assemblage of strange things—stuffed animals and birds, chemicals, dyeing materials, idols, weapons, clothes, coins, medals, musical instruments, and relics of all sorts. We here enumerate a few of the strangest articles—Easter eggs of the patriarchs of Jerusalem; two feathers of the phoenix tayle; claw of the bird Roc, who, as authors report, is able to truss an elephant; a natural dragon above two inches long; the Dodad (Dodo), from the isle of Mauritius, so big as not to be able to fly; the bustard, as big as a turkey, usually taken by greyhounds on Newmarket Heath; a cow's tail from Arabia; half a hazel-nut, with seventy pieces of household stuff in it; a set of chessmen in a peppercorn; landskips, stories, trees, and figures, cut in paper by some of the emperors; a trunnion of Drake's ship; knife wherewith Hudson was killed in Hudson's Bay; Anna Bullen's night-vail; Edward the Confessor's gloves.' 

In another description of the collection, Isaak Walton writes : ‘You may see there the hog-fish, the dog-fish, the dolphin, the coney-fish, the parrot-fish, the shark, the poison-fish, the sword-fish; and not only other incredible fish, but you may there the the salamander, several sorts of barnacles, of Solan geese, and the bird of paradise; such sorts of snakes, and such birds’ nests, and of so various forms and so wonderfully made, as may beget wonder and amazement in any beholder and so many hundreds of other rarities in that collection, as will make the other wonders I spake of the less incredible.’

John Tradescant junior died in 1662, and on the death of his widow in 1678, the collection passed to Elias Ashmole, who had helped Tradescant produce a catalogue. Ashmole subsequently donated the collection to Oxford University, whose governing body had agreed to erect a purpose built museum, which Ashmole went up to Oxford to inspect in August 1682. The museum opened in May 1683 in Broad Street, and survived until 1860 when its collection was dispersed. The name ‘Ashmolean Museum’ however persists in the new, much grander building established in 1845, and objects surviving from the Tradescant collection were brought together in the Tradescant Room of this Ashmolean Museum in 1978. The original Ashmolean Museum continues as the Museum of the History of Science.

The original Ashmolean Museum, Broad Street, Oxford