Thanks to Historic Norfolk’s recent refurbishment and restoration of Becket’s Chapel, we are learning more about the chapel around the time of the Great Fire of 1615.

It has long been believed that Becket’s Chapel, home to the Wymondham Old Grammar School from 1561, escaped damage from the incident, partly because the existing oak roof trusses were thought to be late medieval. However, during the recent refurbishment, internal scaffolding enabled Historic England to take samples from the timbers spanning the Chapel. The results have just been published on the Historic England website disproving this theory.

Historic England’s analysis of the tree rings (dendrochronology) produced a 1613-38 date bracket for the trees being felled. The trusses were likely to have been made soon after felling as wood was usually used ‘green’ (unseasoned). A 1613-14 payment in the Wymondham Town Book (1585-1620) to Frauncis Plomer for ‘certaine okes bought for the rebuildinge of the schoole’ ties up nicely, except it implies that plans were already in place to rebuild the roof before the Fire.

The only other payments made in 1615-16 were for sawing ‘boards for the schoolehouse’. We can’t tell whether these were roof or floorboards but the building was clearly being fitted out. Finally, wealthy yeoman Philip Cullyer was paid £30 in 1616-17 ‘towardes the buildinge of the schoolehowse’. Did he run the project, as he did the building of the Market Cross?

This evidence strongly suggests that the Chapel roof was burnt off in the Great Fire, or that the Chapel was already under repair and roofless and so escaped serious damage. We may never know for certain!