The chimneys of Elizabethan houses are far simpler than those of Tudor times. It was in the reign of Henry VIII. that chimneys assumed their most elaborate forms, whether in stone or brick. They were twisted, counter-twisted, minutely panelled, or surrounded by spiral bands of various profiles (Figs. 111, 112), with a profusion of complication that must have taxed the skill of the craftsman of the time, as it certainly does the skill of the draughtsman of to-day. But with the more “regular” feeling which came with Italian detail, this excessive play of fancy died out, and chimneys became simpler in their design, often consisting merely of straight shafts standing on a good base and covered with an ample cap (Fig. 106). Sometimes this plain form was Italianised into a complete column with its appropriate base and cap, and crowned with a short length of the corresponding classic entablature. But whatever form their detail may have taken, the designers of the time ordinarily used the mass of their chimneys as an important architectural feature. They grouped two or three fireplaces together, carried up a great stack of stone or brickwork, and placed their flues in single shafts upon it, thus combining solidity below with a pleasing lightness against the sky.
114. Sydenham House, Devonshire (cir. 1600).
In the larger houses these various features—mullioned windows, cornices, pilasters, and chimneys—were used with a lavish hand. The mullioned windows of many lights were framed in pilasters furnished with their appropriate pedestals, bases, and caps; at every floor level a great entablature with architrave, ornamental frieze, and far projecting cornice made the circuit of the building: above all rose the gables, often straight of outline, but not infrequently fashioned into graceful curves; from gable to gable extended a balustraded parapet; at due intervals along the walls projected great chimney-stacks carrying slender shafts separated from each other by narrow spaces of daylight. The whole was a serious and determined effort at design, widely different from the simple and often fortuitous arrangement of a mediæval house, where the various parts, beautiful though they were in themselves, were not coordinated in the same resolute manner.
In the smaller houses effort was not so conspicuous. The designers drew upon the same sources for their effects—mullioned windows, classic string-courses, steep gables, and fine chimney-stacks—but they were more modest in their use of them, and refrained from employing pilasters, except perhaps to a doorway. Between the simplicity of the small manor house and the magnificence of the nobleman’s mansion lay every degree of elaboration, and a series of examples might be brought together forming a continuous crescendo from a squire’s home like Pilton Manor house in Northamptonshire (Fig. 113), through such houses as Sydenham in Devonshire (Fig. 114), or Moyns Park in Essex (Fig. 115), up to splendid mansions like the home of the younger branch of the Cecils at Hatfield (Fig. 116).
115. Moyns Park, Essex.
116. Hatfield House, the North Front (1611).
