J. Alfred Gotch

“ The workmanship is excellent. The passages and window-recesses are vaulted in brick and are adorned with many shields of arms, as also are the chimney-pieces. Everything tends to show that the amenities of life were respected, and it is not a little odd that so much care should have been spent upon the embellishment of a dwelling which, although lordly in character, must have been gloomy and uncomfortable, much more so than the spacious manor house at Wingfield. ”

“ Everything, indeed, points to the new delight which people were taking in their homes; how they loved not only fine houses but fine gardens, seizing upon every change of level to introduce a terrace, and charmed with any opportunity to form a handsome flight of steps, such as that at Heath Hall (Fig. 124) , or Powis Castle in Wales (Fig. 130) . It is quite clear that the days were past when men merely ornamented what was essential to safety: they now revelled in their freedom from restriction, and indulged themselves in attractive design for its own sake. ”

“ Wren was too powerful a genius, too much occupied in solving constructional problems, to become their slave. He was too busy surmounting real architectural difficulties to occupy his time in half-hearted attempts to translate Italian villas into terms of English mansions; and some at least of his contemporaries refrained from the favourite pursuit of his successors. In the second half of the eighteenth century architects gave themselves a little more freedom of treatment, while still conforming to the very careful proportions of the classic styles. ”

“ On the contrary, access is made easy and inviting. A flight of steps leads on to a terrace, and thence direct to the main door; cheerful windows fill the walls, arranged not only to give light within and a view without, but also to enliven the structure itself with the ordered rhythm of [145] their glittering panes. The courtyard is handsomely furnished with stately bays running the full height of the walls; a long range of arches faces the entrance, and forms a loggia beneath which is the door to the screens. The external façades are designed with equal care. ”

“ The roof is gabled, it has no cornice of any account; the windows are mullioned, and the dormers retain some of the fantastic curls of the early years of the century. Nevertheless, in the plainness and precision of the whole treatment, in the flat shape of the mullions, and in the ovals of the dormers, the experienced eye can detect the march of Time. When it is remembered that this house was built when Wren was in the midst of his career, it will be realised how distinct were the two streams of design already alluded to—the stately, guided by great artists ”

“ There is no haphazard planning about this house; everything is carefully thought out; the effect of every projection, every window, and every chimney is considered. Yet with all this symmetry and formality, the underlying arrangement follows the old lines. The hall is entered through the screens; it has its daïs, its bay, and its fireplace near to its upper end; from this end are approached the family rooms—the parlour, the chapel, and the principal stairs, leading to the great chamber, the withdrawing-room, and the long gallery. ”

“ The Italianising of English taste had indeed progressed when we find an architectural guide placing not only Henry VII.’s Chapel, but all Gothic work, outside the domain of architectural study. But outside it was, and there it remained until the commencement of the nineteenth century, when the publications of Carter, Britton, and others began to awaken interest in it.
The pursuit of architecture now became an elegant accomplishment, and it fell largely into the hands of amateurs. Books in plenty gave precise rules for its treatment. Any one gifted with a modicum of taste could design a façade ”

“ Numerous small staircases, mostly circular, but some comprised of straight runs in the thickness of the walls, lead up and down in a bewildering fashion. In the centre of the building is an open shaft giving a modicum of light and air to the adjacent rooms. The whole building is a triumph of ingenuity, but a glance at the [83] plan shows that the lighting must have been bad; the great hall, for instance, has only two windows on an outside wall (one being over the fireplace) , and one, almost valueless, into the central shaft; the kitchen has but one. ”

“ The household stores, if put away anywhere, went to the cellar; the food was cooked in the kitchen, there was a pantry where it was kept when not in the kitchen, there was a buttery where the drink was served: the lord, when he desired privacy, sought his solar. The rest of the household presumably never had privacy even if they desired it. It was an elementary state of things, and the story of domestic architecture is made up of the efforts to obtain greater privacy and more comfort. It was a long and gradual development. The hall remained for centuries the centre and kernel of the house ”

“ The Renaissance stands not only for a revival of ancient forms in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but for a vast awakening in all departments of human enterprise, and the final abandonment of mediævalism with all its crude and crabbed methods and ways of thought. ”

“ Seventeenth Century—Personal Design—Transitional Treatment. With the end of the second decade of the seventeenth century there opens a new chapter in English Architecture. Hitherto it had been largely impersonal; now it began to be personal, and its finest manifestations were henceforth to be linked with great names, with Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, and others. The main cause of the change is to be found in the pursuit of the Italian ideal. Up to this time the erection of houses and churches had not been thought of as “architecture,” but merely as “building.” ”

“ The ordinary manor houses, as well as the homes of the peasantry, were built of wood and have in consequence entirely disappeared. It is true that there are many wooden houses (or houses of wood and plaster) still to be found in all parts of England, but they are all of a much later date. It is doubtful if a single specimen of the twelfth century survives. It must also be remembered that not infrequently the inferior rooms of a stone house, such as the kitchen, were built of wood.
The keep, then, is the earliest form of English house built in permanent fashion. ”

“ Haddon Hall, Derbyshire (View in the Lower Courtyard) .
Another great house, dating largely from late in the fourteenth century, is Kenilworth Castle, which, though primarily a place of strength, has much that is interesting purely as domestic architecture. It has been held by kings and great nobles; some of the most celebrated names in English history are linked with its story; it has withstood sieges, when its walls enclosed despairing and disease-stricken men; it has witnessed the most gorgeous pageants of a gorgeous age. Reality and romance have vied to make it famous. ”

“ At Eaton Hall in Cheshire is another fine example (not, however, in its original position) of somewhat unusual design (Fig. 178) . Here, too, the more elaborate part of the work is high up, where it now shows against the sky; the lower parts are plain, and veil, without obscuring, the view. The pillars instead of being in stone are built up of ironwork. Clever as the idea is, the effect is not so monumental as when the delicacy of the metal is bounded by the solidity of stone or brick. ”

“ Men began to desire to have fine houses, the fear of damage and destruction was growing less, and the whole tendency was towards increased refinement. The change is visible in the great manor house of South Wingfield in Derbyshire, where there is not only much charming detail, but an obvious attempt to obtain effect by the handling of masses of building, notably in boldly projecting the garde-robes and chimney-stacks from the faces of the walls. Irregularity is still the prevailing characteristic, but among it may be observed a certain striving after rhythmical treatment. ”

“ Of the six ground-floor windows in the outlying blocks, the exigencies of internal arrangement require that four should be shams, although they are in the forefront of his architectural composition; and it is probable that some of the upper windows followed suit. The route [229] from the kitchen to the dining-room lies across a lobby, a room, and 50 ft. of open arcade before it arrives at the outer wall of the central house wherein the dining-room is situated. When these and other inconveniences are borne in mind, it is manifest that such principles of design could have no lasting vitality. ”

“ Civilisation had taken many strides since its little neighbour, the Peak Castle, had been built.
It is curious to observe on a plan of the house how much thicker the external walls are than the internal, and how few windows look outwards; they nearly all look into the courts, and of those that look out over the country most are of later date. The plan also shows [50] very clearly how the disposition of the hall follows the orthodox lines. It is entered through a porch at the end of one of its sides; the porch leads into the “screens” ”

“ The early steps in the change of design are of great interest. They appear at first infrequently and tentatively in insignificant ornament; then rather more freely; after a time they affect prominent features such as cornices; then the pediment appears; the pointed arch gives way to the semicircular, windows become square-headed; classic pilasters are introduced, sparingly at first, but afterwards with more freedom; symmetry of disposition in the plan of the house becomes more frequent. Yet [128] beneath all these Italian adornments the body of the house is of the old English type ”

“ Dean Aldrich and Dr Clarke at Oxford, and Sir James Burroughs at Cambridge, were also amateurs, but they appear to have had more claim as designers than some of those whom Walpole extols. The amateur architect of the eighteenth century had, indeed, a long and even illustrious ancestry. Already in Charles II.’s reign Sir John Denham, a poet, had been surveyor of the works to the King. Wren, who succeeded him, was himself an amateur, in the sense that he received no early training in architecture, and that his reputation as a scientist was fully established before he turned his attention to art. ”

“ The angles of the building generally have quoins, the roof is hipped every way, and at the eaves there is a projecting cornice of varying degrees of richness. The chimneys are gathered together in large solid stacks; the roof surface is broken by dormers. The whole effect is simple and quiet. The large spaces of plain walling, the large area of the window openings, the large chimney-stacks are all in complete contrast to the lively windows, steep gables, and detached chimney-shafts of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses. ”

“ A certain symmetry of treatment is almost inherent in architecture. It is to be found in the early keeps, where the shallow buttresses or piers and the windows are to a large extent symmetrically placed. But no attempt was made at that time, nor indeed for some centuries, to give a symmetrical disposition to the buildings as a whole. Ranges of rooms were either built entirely new or added to existing buildings as convenience seemed to dictate, and it has already been observed that this haphazard method of planning was extravagant and wasteful. ”

“ The mullions, too, are not the splayed or moulded shafts of English tradition, but rectangular shafts with faces elaborately carved with arabesques (Fig. 95) . The effect at a distance, where the eye cannot detect the detail, is very like that of a cusped window. So, too, in still later years, where traceried windows were used, as in some of the college halls, the forms of the tracery were ingeniously contrived to accord with the new Italianised detail rather than the old Gothic. ”

“ These smaller houses reflect, though dimly, the stately handling of their more pompous contemporaries. They are generally a complete and symmetrical whole, and if in the course of time their owners wish to enlarge them, it becomes a problem of some difficulty how to do so without spoiling their appearance. The entrance door is in the middle of one front, and is flanked on either hand by three or four sash windows, spaced so as to fall into groups. The group over the door is often surmounted by a pediment, or has some special treatment, as at Rothwell manor house (Fig. 192) . ”

“ It is not difficult for any one to trace a likeness between the house of to-day and that of, let us say, the time of Elizabeth; but the resemblance between an Elizabethan manor house and a Norman castle or a Northumbrian peel-tower is not by any means so obvious, yet the descent of one from the other can be clearly [2] established. ”

“ It has all the characteristics of an early keep; a vast, plain mass of masonry, slightly broken by the long vertical lines of shallow buttresses and angle turrets, and pierced at each floor with small windows—smallest near the ground where most accessible (Fig. 2) . The entrance, as at Peak Castle, and all early keeps, is some feet above the ground, and in this case is approached by a flight of steps; it leads into the first floor, below which at the ground level, or thereabouts, is the cellar or store-room, approached only from the room above it. ”

“ On the great beds of easily worked Oolite which stretch from Somerset and Wiltshire through Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire into Lincolnshire, the work is often both rich and delicate, and has acquired through time and weather a soft grey tint enlivened by the partial incrustation of many-hued lichens. In Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire where the stone is much harder, the work is of a plainer and more severe type, such as may be seen at Derwent Hall (Fig. 117) , and the colour is more sombre. ”