Elizabeth Kelway, and Caillouet

Visit Athelhampton this autumn, and you’ll see pears ripening in the gardens, and glowing too in the stained glass of the Great Hall.

The pears appear in the arms of Elizabeth Kelway, who around 1530 married Robert Martyn of Athelhampton. Her family’s coat of arms shows four golden pears and a pair of grozing irons, the delicate tools once used by glaziers to shape stained glass. It bears a very strong resemblance to that of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass.

The Kelways were a Norman family who came across in the Norman Conquest: their name is thought to come from Caillouet in Normandy. It's possible that their coat of arms was a pun on the Caillou pear. Originally from Burgundy, this hard, inferior fruit was fit only for baking, but it seems to have been the most generally planted in England through the Medieval and Tudor period, and it was, by all accounts, popular with the royal family.

While it was suited far more for being cooked than being eaten raw, this pear would have suited Tudor aristocratic tastes well: cooked fruits in both savoury and sweet dishes were far more popular than eating raw fruit, which was considered potentially harmful to the digestion.

A symbol of abundance, the pear still occupies a prominent place at Athelhampton today.