The chimney-shafts were now particularly picturesque and curious, and frequently resembling groupes of small columns, with pedestals, plinths, bases, and capitals: they were made of bricks, moulded into forms of rich lozenge-work, twisted reeds, zig-zag, and fleur-de-lis ornaments. The octagonal turrets on each side of the entrance, on the flanks of the building, and at the entrance-gateway, were crowned with cimireversa domes, carved into laurel-leaves, and creeping crokets and finials, surrounded with rampant lions, supporting small banners of arms and vanes, curiously wrought and gilt; most of the edifices which were erected in the reign of Henry VIII., it is to be regretted, are now either in a state of dilapidation or have been greatly modernized; much of their peculiar character is, however, visible in the parts that remain, which may be seen at Hampton Court as well as at Hengrave-hall.* The following mansions of Henry the Eighth's period are still inhabited :Belhurst, Durham, Compyton, Wingate, and Coughton Court in Warwickshire; Wyckham Court, Hampshire; Milton Abbey, Northamptonshire; Down Ampney, Gloucestershire; and Helmingham-hall, Suffolk, the seat of the Countess of Dysart. At this period, in which lived Skelton the poet, the Tudor architecture had become exceedingly florid, which he thus describes in his Boke of Colin Cloute : "Building royally Their mansions curiously With glass windows and barres; Fresh as flowres in May."+ We must look to the reign of Henry VIII. for models reducible to the wants of the present refined age, and of those edifices there are none more applicable than Hengrave-hall, in Suffolk, which was built by Sir Thomas Kitson, in the reign of Henry VIII., begun in 1525 and finished in 1538. The price of labour at that time was, for masons, per day sixpence; labourers, fourpence; carpenters, sevenpence; joiners, eightpence; sawyers, sixpence; carvers, sixpence; painters, sevenpence; and thatchers, fourpence. For boarding and lodging a mechanic the charge was one shilling and fourpence a week per head.-(Gages's History of Hengrave.) INTERIOR OF THE ANCIENT MANSION AND TUDOR MANOR-HOUSES.-The plans of these truly noble quadrangular buildings were exceedingly similar: they comprised an extensive range of apartments, which, in the present altered state of society, would be totally unnecessary; the very names of some of them are no longer familiar in houses of recent date, though built upon the largest scale, and of others the application is totally different. The hall of modern times is most distinct in its appropriation from the great hall of the baronial mansion, which was dedicated to hospitality and pomp. This apartment was the most conspicuous for size, and generally occupied one side of the quadrangle or open court: it rose the whole height of the building, having an open-worked timber roof, enriched with ornaments chosen from the heraldic insignia of the family, and producing an incomparably grand effect. The great halls are all that now remain of the palaces of Westminster and King John's palace, at Eltham, in Kent; each of which is a substantial and interesting fragment, exhibiting a beautiful specimen of this most ingenious and highly ornamented mode of framing the roof. Particularly worthy of notice are also the following halls-Hampton-court, Hadden-hall, Derbyshire; Beddington-hall, near Croydon; Penshurst, and Hatfield, each of whose noble apartments present a uniform arrangement most excellently calculated for the purpose to which they were appropriated; a general description will equally apply to every building of the period to which we advert. At the entrance of the hall was usually a skreen, richly embellished with carving, and supporting a gallery appropriated to the minstrels retained in the service of the noble, who here, accompanied by harp, cittern, and dulcimer, Poured to lord and lady gay The great clock, with the bell, was over the skreen, where the hall-bells in colleges are generally placed at present. In the centre of the hall was the hearth for the fire, which was either kindled against a reredosse, or in an iron cradle. Immediately over the fire was the lantern, in the roof, a beautiful ornament to the exterior, through the apertures of which the vapour escaped. This mode of warming the hall is still in use in some of the inns of court and colleges: the most ancient reredosse is at Penshurst. The upper end of the floor was raised, which constituted the high pace or dais; and here was the large bay-window, the numerous divisions of which were stained with the armorial escutcheons of the various connexions of the family, single, impaled, and quartered; and at this part of the hall, under a rich canopy of state, sat the lord of the mansion and his family. At the same table, on grand occasions, his superior guests were also placed. Down the sides of the hall were ranged the boards on tressels, with the forms or benches for the inferior guests and dependants. The ranks of the guests were further discriminated by their situation above or below the great saltcellar, which was TUDOR-HALLS, ELIZABETHAN. In the reign of Elizabeth, the style of architecture that had prevailed during the time of her father placed, invariably, in the middle of the table. Though retainers were at this period prohibited, numbers of domestics, wearing the silver badge either upon their left arm or their breast, still contributed to the pomp of the festivals at extraordinary entertainments. The task of arranging the guests, which commonly devolved upon the seneschal or steward, was undertaken by persons of rank, nominated for the occasion; as at the feast given by George Nevil, Archbishop of York, at his consecration, the following officers, viz., the steward, treasurer, comptroller, carver, cupbearer, and marshall of the hall attended by eight knights, besides esquires and grooms. The ewer keeper of the cupboard and surveyor of the hall were each filled by barons or knights. The heralds also generally attended the festivals of the nobility, who affect ed almost regal state, and, as well as the minstrels, were allowed to have claims upon their liberality. Their bounty on these occasions was termed a largesse. The floor of the hall was strewed with rushes, and the walls were decorated with the instruments either of war or the chase. The wine at the feasts was handed round in massive silver-bowls; and in houses of the inferior nobility, the display of silver was great; other services were of pewter, piled upon the court cupboard, and placed near the high board in the hall, which answered in their use to the beaufet, or more modern sideboard. Two of these cupboards are now in Stationers'-hall, which, on festivals, are garnished with the flagons, cans, cups, beakers, and other vessels of silver belonging to the company, some of which are remarkably large. There was one of these ancient pieces of furniture formerly in the hall at Skipton-castle, made between the year 1527 and 1542.—(See Whitaker's History of Craven.) The splendid entertainments to which the great halls were chiefly devoted, consisted generally of three courses, and were concluded with a service of ipocras, a kind of spiced wine, followed by a desert of opice and confections. These feasts being frequent, were the means of rendering the old English barons extremely popular, and the poor also were daily partakers of their hospitality and charity. For this purpose, by the hall-skreen stood the alms-tub, from which the steward and almoner distributed a dole of meal to each. Near the hall was situated the great kitchen; at the hatch-door of which the attendant domestic received the dishes for the entertainment: these were placed on a broad shelf on the top of the hatch, and from thence quickly conveyed to the table. Every description of furniture, as well as the utensils of the kitchen, was upon the largest scale, and in the bakehouse the ovens were of an immense size, even amounting to fourteen feet in diameter. Other domestic offices connected with the hall, and necessary for the household of a baron of the rank we have been describing, where their entertainments were conducted upon such an expensive scale, were the buttery, the pantry, the ewrye, the spicery, the pastry, the confectionary, the larder, the scalding-house, the squillery or scullery, the chandlery, and the laundry. The eleemosynary or almonry, as well as the chapel, were all upon the ground-floor. The domestic chapel, as it was only intended for the household, was comparatively small, but was generally embellished with decorations of the most beautiful and imposing description. The altar, with its crucifix of elaborate workmanship, of ivory and silver, its windows, stained with subjects from holy writ, and the walls painted with scrolls, containing legends of scripture. A remarkably spacious staircase, having balusters and string boards, richly ornamented with carvings, and the newels surmounted with small statues or quadrupeds rampant, generally displaying the insignia of the family, led to the great chamber, where the levee of the baron was held, or at other times set apart for the reception of company in a morning previous to their departure for the sports of the field. It was hung with tapestry,* which was of the richest description, far superior to our modern paper, and even of the most costly manufacture. The tapestry contained representations of the costume of the times, warlike instruments, and hunting diversions, pageantry, and buildings. In the large bower-windows (baywindows) of this apartment the company would occasionally retire for private conversation; as these bay and oriel-windows generally looked into the court, the ladies were enabled from them to observe the tilting match, or the preparation going on for the chace. At the entrance of these large chambers was sometimes a skreen, having a curtain, as may be seen in some of the paintings of the time. The chimney-pieces were of the altar kind, of the largest dimensions, and generally charged with armorial bearings, but at other times, sculptured with historic or classic subjects; (one of this description may be seen at Bampfylde-house, Bampfylde-street, in the city of Exeter ;) within them were the dogs for supporting the logs of wood of which the fires were made: some of these dogs may still be seen at Knowle, in Kent, and at other ancient mansions. The great parlour was used chiefly for conversation, as its name implies, and occasionally for a private dining-room: other apartments were for the use of the ladies, who here carried on their various works of embroidery: the walls were wainscotted, and had small top-pannels, curiously carved with shields; the ceilings were also highly ornamented with various devices of scroll-work. (See a print of Boughton Malherbe, in Kent, illustrating the olden time, which shows one of the most beautiful rooms, perhaps, in the kingdom. This was the seat of the celebrated Sir Henry Wotton.) These mansions were most conveniently planned for the immense establishments supported by the nobility of the sixteenth century. The Earl of Northumberland, one of the most powerful barons of that period, and renowned for the battle of Chevy Chase, retained in his service as many as two hundred and twenty-three persons, as appears by the Northumberlandhousehold book, begun in 1512. Splendid as these noble mansions were, like all sublunary things, they experienced a change, and, at last, neglect and decay :-" the gradual change, which our increasing commerce had at this time contributed to produce in society, occasioned a progressive altertion in the system of economy among the great." Country residences, therefore, became more numerous but less extensive in their plan, more agreeable to our ideas of comfort, and less splendid and ostentatious. "We cannot fail to express the pleasure," says one of our topographical writers, "with which our fancy dwells on the ancient baronial mansion, encompassed by a great extent of domain, and approached through an avenue of spreading-trees; the magnitude of the building, its simplicity and grandeur of design, its diversity of form in its various parts on its exterior. are far more calculated to strike the imagination, than the most correct model of the Grecian school."—(M.) The first manufactory of this kind was established at Mortlake, near Richmond, Surrey, in the reign of Henry VIII. when it was introduced into this country.-(Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting.) was still followed, but much simplified, and rendered plainer.* The plan of the building now consisted of three sides of a quadrangle, in the centre one was a porch, making the plan that of the form of, the first letter of the Christian name of the queen. The width of the windows were now carried out to great excess of expansion during this period, so as even to reduce the piers between them to little more than sufficient for the support of the fabric. The battlements and embrasures along the summits of the buildings were now discontinued, and the low obtuse Gothic heads of the windows had sunk into straight lines, and the windows were divided by more mullions and a cross-transum to each: knee-gables still prevailed, and the attic-windows were formed by acute triangular pediments, having brackets and pendants surmounted with pinnacles and finials. The oriel-windows were various, sometimes angular and at others semicircular, and composed of quarries, or small lights, as they had been in the conventual buildings: sometimes the windows were carried up the whole height of the house in the form of bays, and had floral imagery formed in them by intricate leads, dividing the panes into a multitude of lozenge, angular, and other forms of glass. Turrets now began to disappear, but the chimney-shafts were still grouped together as in the preceding reign, though generally devoid of ornaments, except mouldings at the bases and capitals at the top, and the chimneys were frequently placed in the external walls: the best examples of this period are, perhaps, that of Hatfield, Herts; Boughton Malherbe, Kent; Melford-hall, Suffolk; Charlcote, Warwickshire, a place Shakespere had occasion to remember in his day; Ingestrie, Staffordshire; Halnaker, Sussex; and, as a chaste model of a mansion and gardens of that era, Oxneadhall, in Norfolk.+ MIXED ARCHITECTURE, JAMES I. The Gothic architecture had its dawn, maturity, and decline,‡ such was the case, with that of the Tudors. It commenced with Henry VII., came to its perfection of beauty during Henry VIII. simplified in Elizabeth's reign, and totally changed on the extinction of that family. During the reign of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, the interior of the Tudor mansions were exclusively finished in the mixed Italian and Florentine styles, brought into this country by Hans. Holbein, in 1526, a celebrated painter in his day, who was both an architect, modeller, carver, designer, and engraver of silver plate.§ To promote the building of farmhouses and cottages in the time of Henry VIII., 1536, an act was passed which gave to the king a moiety of the profits of lands turned back from tillage to pasture, until a suitable house should be erected. (27 Henry VIII. c. 22.) In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1588, penalties were imposed upon the building of cottages for the agricultural population without having four acres of land attached to each, or allowing more than a single family to live in one cottage; (31 Eliz. c. 7,) and in 1597, it was directed, that all houses of husbandry decayed should, within seven years, be rebuilt, and from twenty to forty acres of land attached to them. (39 Eliz. c. 1.) At this time the number of persons without land was so great, that cottages were building in all directions throughout England. + The internal arrangements at this period, consisted of an entrance-passage running through the house, with a hall on the one side, and on the opposite a kitchen, pantry, and other servants' offices. In Strutt's Manners and Customs, we have an account of the house of Mr. Richard Fermor, at Eastor, in Northamptonshire, and another of that of Sir Adrian Foskew: both of these houses appear to have had these arrangements of rooms and passage; and even in houses of a more ample extension than these, the division of the ground-plan by an entrance-passage through it, was, I believe, universal and a proof of antiquity. Penshurst, in Kent, once the seat of Sir Philip Sydney, still displays this arrangement, which may be seen by reference to engravings in topographical works. At a later period we see the plan was divided by a long passage running through the middle of the house, that led to the hall, where it was then placed; but about the reign of James I. architects began to perceive the additional grandeur of entering the hall at once; such is Holland-house at Kensington, the seat of Lord Holland. The Gothic architecture, says Horace Walpole, is exclusively ecclesiastical: it was confined solely to religious buildings, and never entered into the decorations of private houses, therefore it does not come under the head of domestic architecture. § In the reign of Henry VIII. and that of Queen Elizabeth, through the medium of Italy, Florence, and France, were In James the First's reign, a complete change again took place in our domestic architecture, the Florentine style now appeared on the exterior of the house as well as in the interior, with a mixture of French and Flemish ornaments, producing a complete amalgamation of three different styles. The gables, by this transition, assumed a totally new form and shape: instead of the triangle they were now trilobed and tortured into convex and concave curves of contrary flexure, but the most general was that of the astragal and hollows, or a convex curve on the top, with a concave curve on each side, crowned with small pyramids. The turrets were finished with bell-formed domes, and sometimes with concave roofs, in the French style, terminating with spindles, cardinal points, and vanes. The chimney-shafts were now become plain, but in clusters turned diagonalwise. The fronts of these mansions had small conventual-windows in the dormitory stories, and wide mullioned windows below; frequently they had bay-windows, made square, projecting outwards, but sometimes hexagonal: they had also frequently a circular oriel-window over the entrance, and sometimes to the wings, extending the whole height of the building. The plan of those mansions was yet that of three sides of a quadrangle; the entrance was in the centre of the middle of the front, where sometimes a polygonal tower projected, and rose the whole height of the building, and below opening into the hall. There were sometimes wings at each end, which came forward at right-angles, having each of them a colonnade or corridor, formed by small Roman Doric columns, resting on high pedestals; from each of these columns sprang semicircular arches, and above them a cornice, on which was a fleur-de-lis balcony-railing, enclosing a deambulatory. The frieze of the cornice was generally ornamented with small grotesque or mask-heads, intermixed with arabesque floral scroll-work generally, formed of iron. These buildings sometimes stood on a raised terrace, approached by steps, and had a balustrade or open dwarf-wall, of perforated stone-work, and on each side of the flight of steps were pedestals or terminals. In these mansions much of that chastness of style which prevailed during Elizabeth's reign had disappeared, and though her style was made a subject of complaint by Lord Bacon, who says, "You shall have sometimes fair houses so full of glass that one cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or cold."+ Yet now it became the very reverse, and the architects went from one extreme to the other, for the windows became so contracted as in some instances to produce a heavy and gloomy appearance in the house. The best examples, however, of this style, and which is again fast coming into fashion, are Blicking-hall, Norfolk; Burleigh-house, Northamptonshire; Aston-hall, Warwickshire; Wroxhall in the same county; Westwood, Worcestershire; and Holland-house, Kensington, near London, the seat of Lord Holland, a fine old specimen, built of red brick.‡ FLORENTINE ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND. From the arrival of John of Padua, and his appointment to the office of deviser of his majesty's imported into England the taste of the artists of each country, which were here employed; hence the resemblance of classic architecture. The French fleur-de-lis ornaments were especially introduced, and, mixed with the ancient style of building, pannels were full of those festoons and other carved work. Terminals, small statues, and balustrades were accompanied by rusticated columns and pilasters of the several orders, having their shafts and pedestals covered with hatched and reticulated ornaments thereon: sculptured brackets, scroll, and cariatides supporting entablatures, were also adopted in the altar chimney-pieces, in the interior, to the porch, and to the centre compartments of the front on the exterior, which may be seen in the doorways at Hatfield-house, Blicking-hall, and Ingestrie, all excellent examples of the age in which they were built; medallions and busts of the twelve Cæsars were also frequently introduced at this period, together with pyramids, globes, obelisks, and allegorical devices, intermixed with shields of arms and family cognizances, forming a style rich and gorgeous in its display of ornaments, but reducible to no definite character.-(M.) Bacon's Essays. +Mr. Lysons mentions a window at Colyton, in Devonshire, containing three thousand two hundred panes of glass.(Magna Britannia.) The grammar and mathematical schools at Christ's Hospital, built from designs by the late Mr. Shaw, the celebrated architect of St. Dunstan's church, near Temple-bar, is in this character. buildings,* in 1544, we may date the introduction of regular Florentine architecture into England. Of the previous history of this architect nothing is known but his cognomen; and the style of his works sufficiently designate him as a pupil of that Lombard school, whose numerous designs added so greatly to the picturesque beauties of the city of Venice,† during the interval between the decline of the Gothic in that part of Italy, and the introduction of the more severe Roman, by Jacopo Sansovino. As a founder of a school, tradition has assigned to him many works to which he has no claim; but the noble mansion of Longleat, in Wiltshire, in which the spacious and picturesque windows peculiar to English architecture, are in the happiest manner adapted to the intervals of Florentine Italian design of singular purity of taste, may, from external evidence, be confidently attributed to him. If Italian architecture lost something in its passage from the land of its regeneration, it was not without gaining something in return. The unbroken outlines and simple beauties of the Roman and Florentine schools, were not likely to find much favour in the eyes of nations accustomed to the varied compositions and multifarious decorations of the Gothic; and the northern architects would naturally seek to combine, with the style they were adopting, the most striking qualities of their own. With what success these undertakings were fulfilled in England, such edifices as Wollaton-hall, in Nottinghamshire, and Audley-end, in Essex, may testify;§ especially if their majestic and picturesque towers be compared with the extravagant conical roofs, by which the same effect was attempted in the parallel style of France.|| Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire, in which the Anglo-Italian detail is adopted, having an outline of the most commanding aspect, deserves honourable mention, and for the success with which the architect, Huntingdon Smithson, whose father, Robert Smithson, was the architect of Wollaton, has consulted the genius loci of the place. The names of these architects, and of many others of the same period, who do honour to their country, have been suffered to drop into obscurity by a succeeding generation, insensible to their original modes of thinking, and their intense feeling for the picturesque as well as the grand, or rather regarding as faults those qualities which their own pedantry renders them incapable of attaining.¶ John Thorp left behind him a number of drawings and designs for country mansions, which threw great light upon the architecture of that period, and more particularly as to the internal arrangements; one of these, is a design for Buckhurst-house, in Sussex; and another was for Sir Walter Raleigh,** all of which are in the museum of the late Sir John Soane. The exterior stories of those Vide Edward VI. + Several of the public buildings in the city of Venice are in the Arabian style. In Florence the palaces are built of great rough-hewn stones, not laid smoothly on the front, but projecting beyond the surface of the wall, which fashion of building is called the rustic manner. + Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, is the earliest specimen of Italian Florentine architecture in this kingdom. It was begun in 1567 and completed in 1579, after designs obtained in Italy by John Thorp, who has by some been supposed to be the same John of Padua, so named from his having studied in the city of that name. (Pictorial History of England, book vi. chap. v. p. 45.) § Audley-end was built between 1603 and 1616, by Bernard Jansen, a Flemish architect of great repute; but the model, still preserved by Lord Braybrook, was procured from Italy. And here we shall have the opportunity to notice the common, but erroneous, way of designating all buildings erected during the Tudors as Tudor edifices, because they happened to bear that date, as if a Roman mansion built in England during Henry VIII. or Elizabeth's reign, must be a Tudor edifice. And, on the contrary, do we see the architecture of James I. often classed with that of the Elizabethan.-(B.) || The British Museum is an example in the French style, having been built by a French architect, who has closely followed the character of the chateaus in his own country. Roofs concave, convex, bell-form, and truncated are true characteristics of the French style.-(B.) ¶ Dalway's Observations on Architecture. ** The house in which Sir Walter Raleigh was born, at East Budleigh, near Exmouth, in Devonshire, still exists. It is in the Tudor character.-(See a print in the Penny Magazine, by the author of this work.) |