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On the floor near the fireplace sits a bellows, for encouraging the fire. Spenser would likely have had a smithy on his Kilcolman estate, which would have employed similar tools. Iron-working debris predating Spenser’s occupation and presumably from…

The date stone over the door to the Great Hall commemorates the wedding in 1594 of Edmund Spenser and Elizabeth Boyle. Date stones with the initials of the owners of a house were common in England and Ireland and followed the fashion in other…

This desk, with a pouch and various papers and letters on and around it, indicates Spenser’s background as both a messenger and a secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland Arthur, Lord Grey (from 1580-82). The letters are sealed with red wax. In the…

One never knows who might come calling. Behind the curtain in the Parlor is a gun loop, a hole through which a gun can be fired, and which provides a clear shot at the front door leading into the Great Hall. Spenser lived at Kilcolman under constant…

The lute was a popular renaissance instrument similar to the modern-day guitar. Eric Klingelhofer’s excavations of Kilcolman in the mid-1990s uncovered a tuning peg for a lute or similar stringed instrument. The find was located in a stratification…

The spiral horn from the narwhal was sometimes mistaken in the Middle Ages and Renaissance for a more fantastic object, a unicorn horn. Spenser’s New English contemporary on the Munster plantation, Sir William Herbert, lists a ’unicorn horn’ in the…

This oil portrait is copied from a painting currently owned by the Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo, North Carolina. It is a variant of the famous Ditchley portrait and was probably painted in the 1590s by the studio of Marcus Gheeraerts the…

This oil portrait is copied from one currently hanging in the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It is thought to have been painted in the 1590s. There is no evidence that Spenser owned such a portrait. He did, however,…

Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, would likely have lived at Kilcolman with him from the time they married, on June 11, 1594 (the date identified in his wedding poem, “Epithalamion”). If so, she would have managed many aspects of the household…

Many well-to-do Elizabethans, like other Europeans, would have had tapestries on their walls, both for decoration and for the purpose of keeping their rooms warm. Many tapestries were woven in France and the Netherlands. We do not know the true…