Both Ivy Street and Ivy Place are in the centre of Salisbury.
I’m quite pleased to have reached ‘Ivy’ just before Christmas!
This post will have two parts. The majority will be about John Ivie, who has a significant place in Salisbury’s history. The remainder will be on ivy, both as a plant and as a symbol.
Ivy Street runs between Brown Street and Catherine Street. Ivy Place is a row of houses off of Castle Street.
Ivy Street
Ivy Street is believed to be named after the family of John Ivie, who was Mayor of Salisbury during the year of the plague, 1627.
The Victoria County History says that:
The name of Ivy Street may be derived from the family of John Ivie, mayor in 1627. (fn. 31) Nearby stood Ivy Bridge, frequently mentioned in the 15th century.[1]
John Ivie was a Puritan. He believed the plague was caused by:
“all the drunkards, whore-masters and lewd fellows of the city”
When the Plague reached Salisbury in March 1627 it seems that many of the more wealthy and more powerful citizens fled. Mayor Ivie remained along with a few other aldermen and a couple of petty constables.
Mayor Ivie had already initiated comparatively radical social reforms. He had enlarged the workhouse and ensured that the inmates would be taught a trade. He set up a municipal brewery and a storehouse of food for the poor. ‘Parish relief’ was given as
tokens with the city arms in them.
The tokens should be from a farthing to a sixpence, and this money should be current nowhere but at the storehouse where they should such diet as is fit for them, both for victual of bread, butter, cheese, fish, candles, faggots and coals, and some butchers appointed to take their money for flesh if need be.
So if they will needs be drunk they should either work for the money or steal it. In my opinion if this way takes effect we shall avoid drunkenness and beggary [2]
None of these schemes succeeded in the long term, but the storehouse in particular played some part in helping the City through the plague.
Ivie was elected to the Long Parliament in 1640, but was not able to take his seat because the Corporation had nominated somebody else [3]
On his retirement, Ivie was told that
You have done your country good service, for which we are all beholding to God and you[4]
Ivie wrote an account of his reforming activities called ‘A Declaration’ in 1661. He died in 1665 and was buried in St Edmunds Churchyard[5]
Is Ivy Street named after John Ivie?
As the Victoria County history says, it is possible that Ivy Street is named after John Ivie’s family. I have some doubts about this.
According to the Dictionary of National Biography[6], Ivie’s family was born in Wincanton and he had no children. The DNB speculates that he came to Salisbury to be apprenticed to a relation whose surname was ‘Tyte’. I would be interested to find out how numerous the Ivie family was in Salisbury.
Also I’m unsure whether the ‘career’ of Edward Ivie(see below) might have deterred the naming of the street after the family as such.
I think it’s unlikely that the street is named after Mayor John Ivie himself for two reasons.
First, there was also an ‘Ivy Bridge’ which existed in the 15th century.
Second, I don’t think that roads were named after people because of their good deeds until much later. There are a couple roads named after mayors of either Salisbury or Wilton [7] but these were built and named in the 20th century. People had roads named after them more often because they owned or developed the land.
It’s not impossible that Ivy Street is so-named in reference to the plant.
However, the John Ivie Centre [8] in the Friary is undoubtedly named after the Mayor
Edward Ivie
An interesting footnote to John Ivie’s story is that his nephew Edward was one of the counterfeiters hung at Newgate in 1698 following an investigation by the scientist Isaac Newton . [9]
Newton was, at this time, Warden of the Mint.
Ivy Place
Ivy Place might also be named in reference to the Ivie family.
Ivy Place, I think, is one of the few remaining ‘courts’[10] – groups of houses set back from the city’s main roads. The courts were typically within the chequers (city blocks), but Ivy Place is between Castle Street and the river Avon.
Ivy Place is lovely now, but the ‘courts’ were not pleasant places to live[11] . The Victoria County History, paraphrasing T.W Rammel’s General Board of Health report says that:
The courts which covered the interior of the chequers, having only cess-pit drainage, were indescribably filthy. The sub-soil of the city was saturated to within a foot or two of the surface, and the wells were contaminated by seepage from the privies and grave-yards.[12]
Ivy – the plant
Ivy, is of course, a common plant – usually seen as something of a weed. The Latin name is Hedera
Wikipedia’s article on ivy stresses its ecological importance and implies that it as not as destructive as people sometime think.
The word Ivy is of unknown origin.
The plant has associations with the Roman Bacchus and the Greek Dionysus. Both Gods are sometimes represented as wearing a wreath of ivy on their head. Possibly this is because it is like a vine in form. Bunches of ivy were at one time hung outside pubs. A 1640 epigram reads:
“At Christmasse men do alwayes ivy get,
And in each corner of the house it set.
But why do they, then, use that Bacchus weed?
Because they mean then Bacchus-like to feed.”[13]
It has also, for a long time, been seen as a plant that represents ‘woman’. The folk song “The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy” has
Holly and his merry men, they dancen and they sing;
Ivy and her maidens, they weepen and they wring.[14]
Holly is referred to as ‘she’ through out the song.
An old ritual in East Kent, apparently, revolves around ‘The Holly Boy and the Ivy Girl’[15]
For me, this identification of holly as masculine and ivy had feminine has been lost, or deliberately blurred by the time of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. The song contrasts holly with ivy, as it contrasts Jesus with Mary – but it’s not entirely clear that holly is Jesus and ivy is Mary.
In more recent popular culture the Bacchanalian associations of Ivy – attractive, but wild and lawless – seem to have merged with the associations of femininity.
There are a couple of examples – one is the Batman’s adversary, Poison Ivy.
In the Batman comics, Poison Ivy started life as Pamela Lisle. She is poisoned with some ancient Egyptian herbs and becomes a villain. She is immune to all poisons and toxins, and, according to Wikipedia:
Ivy’s first kiss was poison, the second its antidote. When they first meet, Ivy’s toxic lips planted a seed of toxic rapture in Bruce. But when she later kissed a dying Dark Knight, Ivy unknowingly cured her intended victim and established a budding romantic tension between them.
Poison Ivy was portrayed by Uma Thurman in in the 1997 film ‘Batman and Robin’.
A second ‘Poison Ivy’ is the Lieber and Stoller song, ‘Poison Ivy’. The song was originally a hit for the Coasters, but it was successfully revived in the British charts in 1980 by the Lambrettas.
There was a film in 1992 ‘Poison Ivy’, in which ‘A seductive teen befriends an introverted high school student and schemes her way into the lives of her wealthy family.’ [16]
Given that the ivy has an association with femininity, seduction and wrong-doing, and it’s snake-like quality, I can’t help wondering whether there is a connection between ‘Ivy’ and ‘Eve’. There almost certainly isn’t, if only because I’ve not seen any suggestion of it anywhere else.
Poison Ivy Rorschach
Finally on ‘ivy’, a brief mention of one of my favourite musicians – Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps. The Cramps mixed some aspects of American punk with rockabilly music. The Cramps started life with two lead guitars and no bass, but Poison Ivy was always the lead guitarist, and perhaps the leader of the band. Her playing was heavily influenced by Link Wray[17], and ‘the Duchess’ from Bo Diddley’s band.
Image from Amazon
I was and am a huge fan, and was very sad when the lead singer, and Ivy’s partner, Lux Interior died in February 2009.
At the time of writing, ‘Surfin’ Bird’, one of the original versions of one of the Cramps’ signature songs, is ‘in the running’ to be Christmas number one.
Footnotes
- Salisbury – St Thomas’s parish | British History Online [↩]
- BBC – Legacies – Myths and Legends – England – Wiltshire – John Ivie – a plague of reforms – Article Page 4 [↩]
- An Election to the Short Parliament – Slack – 2007 – Historical Research – Wiley Online Library [↩]
- BBC – Legacies – Myths and Legends – England – Wiltshire – John Ivie – a plague of reforms – Article Page 5 [↩]
- Paul Slack, ‘Ivie, John (c.1580–1665)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66527, accessed 14 Dec 2010] [↩]
- Paul Slack, ‘Ivie, John (c.1580–1665)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66527, accessed 14 Dec 2010] [↩]
- For example, Olivier Close, Salisbury and Macklin Road, Salisbury [↩]
- Success for John Ivie students (From Salisbury Journal) [↩]
- At least, the implication in the piece that I read was that he was hung – the Oxford Dictionary of National Biog article: (Tim Wales, ‘Ivie, Edward (d. 1698)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2006; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67822, accessed 14 Dec 2010) says that he was arrested in May 1698, interrogated by Newton in the August and ‘died’ in September of the same year [↩]
- Salisbury – City government since 1836 | British History Online [↩]
- It’s interesting that ‘Court’ is a favoured word when new roadnames are chosen – for example, all the roads in the Spire View development are ‘Courts’. On the other hand it’s probably many years since we had a new ‘Street’ [↩]
- Salisbury – City government since 1836 | British History Online [↩]
- Ivy [↩]
- The Contest of the Ivy and the Holly [↩]
- Holly-Boy And Ivy-Girl [↩]
- Poison Ivy (1992) – IMDb [↩]
- I wrote about Link Wray in the post about Link Way [↩]