A Helping Hand for One of Tresham's Triplets

Restoration of one of England's finest remaining early town halls – the sixteenth-century Market House at Rothwell in Northamptonshire – is to be one of the first projects of the Rothwell Preservation Trust, recently launched on the back of keen local concern for the town's central conservation area.

The Market House was the work of an Elizabethan squire, Sir Thomas Tresham, whose devotion to traditional Catholicism cost him nearly fifteen years in prison and a series of punitive fines, but also inspired him to create a series of remarkable buildings. A few miles from Rothwell lies his unfinished summer house Lyvedon New Bield, and also most idiosyncratic of all, the Triangular Lodge at Rushton. Between 1593 and 1597 Tresham worked out at the Lodge an extraordinary display of symbolism, puns and numerology, to underline his religious beliefs. Punning on his own name – tres, the Latin number 'three', Tresham used the three-sided building (each side inscribed with a frieze of thirty-three letters and thirty-three feet in length) to promote iconographically the Holy Trinity and the Catholic doctrine of the Mass.