'GULES 3 SWANS PROPER'

That is the heraldic description of the Bawdrip arms - and white swans have certainly emerged from beneath our lime wash.   From the 14th century onwards the Bawdrips lived near neighbouring Penmark.  It's not yet certain, but this family could well have sponsored our paintings.

A Somerset family, earliest records find the Bawdrips first at Odyn's Fee, thereafter Penmark Place (seen here as a fine farmhouse, but once a defensive homestead). They were well connected - a daughter Agnes married into the powerful Basset family. Their fortunes soared though when William Bawdrip married Margaret Craddock, mother (by a previous marriage) of William Herbert. Herbert became the most powerful man in Wales, surviving and (mostly) thriving under four monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I.

Piety - or time off purgatory for good behaviour - could have encouraged our Bawdrip's sponsorship. But by 1549 the child king, Edward VI, was determined to dismiss the Saints, including even St. George. Perhaps the pragmatic Bawdrips paid for the Reformation whitewash too? But by then the family lived on church lands in the marshes of Splott, Cardiff, where even today a Bawdrip Road remains.