type are the most prevalent. The elevations are less full of fancy than those of Elizabeth’s time; the detail is more ponderous and may even be regarded as clumsy. There are many features—doors, windows, gateways—described as “Italyan,” showing how the demand was increasing for detail which was more strictly Italian in character than anything that had hitherto been produced. Thorpe, it must be remembered, was in the heyday of his career in Elizabeth’s time; Smithson in James I.’s. The earliest date connected with Thorpe is 1570, in which year he tells us he laid the first stone of Kirby in Northamptonshire. The latest date on the Smithson drawings is 1632. The two collections afford an admirable panorama of house-building during a period of sixty years—a period which saw architecture free itself from the slackening grasp of mediævalism; which witnessed the new birth of Science, and beheld Poetry gain the sublime heights to which Shakespeare led it, and whither it has never quite succeeded in ascending again.
105. Montacute House, Somerset (1580).
The two-storey screen between the wings is of earlier date (cir. 1520) and was brought from Clifton Maybank.
During this remarkable period were built some of the largest houses which England ever possessed. Holdenby (1580), so far as the house itself went, was larger than the great palaces of Blenheim and Castle Howard. Its fronts were 360 ft. and 224 ft. long, as against 320 ft. and 220 ft. at Blenheim, and 324 ft. and 210 ft. at Castle Howard. But in both the later houses there were subsidiary courts attached which greatly lengthened the total extent. Audley End (1610) covered even more ground than Holdenby, its frontages extending to 470 ft. and 280 ft.; but more than half its area was occupied by a subsidiary court, whereas almost the whole of Holdenby consisted of important rooms. But rivalry in dimensions apart, it must be remembered that the designer of Holdenby had no precedent to look to, no great house to outvie. Hampton Court excepted, his was the first mansion, built for pleasure and for state, which had been conceived on so large a scale. There were also many other houses which, though smaller, were of the first importance. Such were Buckhurst House in Sussex; Burghley House and Kirby Hall both, like Holdenby, in Northamptonshire; Theobalds in Hertfordshire; Knole in Kent. The reason for erecting these large houses, or at any rate for making them so extensive, was stated by at least two of their builders. Lord Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton both said that it was in order to accommodate the Queen that they were led to so much extravagance.
106. Lyveden Old Building, Northamptonshire.
(Early 17th cent.)
But the building fever seems to have been in the air. Almost every nobleman and squire in the country either rebuilt, enlarged, or altered his house. Sheldons manor house in Wiltshire is a charming example of alteration (see Frontispiece). The original house, of which the porch is a part, was built by the Gascelyns in the fourteenth century. The sixteenth-century addition with its rectangular, mullioned windows, was built over earlier walls by the Hungerfords, and to their successors may be attributed the eighteenth-century gate piers. Like many old manor houses, Sheldons has ceased to be the home of the squire, and has become a farmhouse. In half the villages of England there is either a house of the Elizabethan period or the memory of one. Not only did the landed gentry build, but also rich merchants in London and many of the provincial towns. A vast number of these houses have been swept away, but happily a great many still remain of all degrees of importance, from great seats like Montacute in Somerset (Fig. 105), or Burton Agnes in Yorkshire, down to the unpretending manor houses to be found among the steep declivities of the Cotswolds or the gentler undulations of Northamptonshire (Fig. 106). A proof (were it wanted) of the disappearance of many fine houses of this time is to be found in the Thorpe and Smithson drawings, for it is but a small proportion of the houses there shown that is known to be still in existence.