Fasces - Shire Hall - Nottingham, Nottinghamshire - Frieze Art on Waymarking.com

Frieze above the entrance to the Shire Hall, Nottingham, decorated with Roman symbols of justice, below the cornice and panelled parapet containing an inscribed datestone.

Shire Hall, which stands in the Lace Market area of Nottingham now houses The National Justice Museum (formerly the Galleries of Justice Museum), which is an independent museum and a registered charity. The museum is housed in a former Victorian courtroom, gaol and police station. A historic site where individuals could be arrested, sentenced and executed.

The courtrooms date back to the 14th century and the gaol to at least 1449, the building was used as a police station from 1905 to 1985, and the courts closed in 1986.

The symbol is known as the Fasces, "a bound bundle of wooden rods, sometimes including an axe with its blade emerging. The fasces had its origin in the Etruscan civilization, and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolized a magistrate's power and jurisdiction. The axe originally associated with the symbol, the Labrys the double-bitted axe, originally was from Crete in Greece, is one of the oldest symbols of Greek civilization. To the Romans, it was known as a bipennis. Commonly, the symbol was associated with female divinities, from prehistoric through historic times.

The image has survived in the modern world as a representation of magisterial or collective power, law and governance. The fasces frequently occurs as a charge in heraldry, it is present on an older design of the Mercury dime and behind the podium in the United States House of Representatives, it is used as the symbol of a number of Italian syndicalist groups, including the Unione Sindacale Italiana, and it was the origin of the name of the National Fascist Party in Italy (from which the term fascism is derived)."

SOURCE - (visit link)

Artist: J Gandon Address: Shire Hall, High Pavement, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England, UK. NG1 1HN Web URL to relevant information: Not listed

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Date Logged Log   10/14/2017 Poole/Freeman visited it