Early Renaissance Architecture in England: A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500-1625Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
History
Early Renaissance Architecture in England: A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500-1625
There are, of course, the usual classic columns applied with a liberal
hand, and all the horizontal string-courses have classic profiles. The
carving of the friezes is interesting, inasmuch as it is somewhat out
of the common in detail, and its component parts were evidently carved
in large numbers, and used as occasion required, for in many places
where the length of a carved stone was too great for its intended
position it was ruthlessly shortened to fit, and the carving was
mutilated.
So far all the plans have shown a courtyard round which the house was
built, first adopted, no doubt, from reasons of defence, and afterwards
retained because it had become customary. We now come to another type
of very frequent occurrence, in which two narrow parallel wings are
connected by a narrow body, thus forming a figure like the letter H.
It is in effect a curtailment of the older plan by leaving out the
"lodgings" which enclosed the court; but there is no change in the
old idea of placing the hall in a central situation and flanking it
at one end by the family apartments and at the other by the kitchen
and servants' rooms. At Montacute, in Somerset (1580), the original
relation of hall and kitchen is preserved, but the intermediate rooms
have been allotted to modern uses (Fig. 47). It should be observed that
the passage at the back of the hall was formed by inserting between the
wings the porch and part of the walls from an earlier house at Clifton
Maubank in the year 1760. This passage, which is a great convenience to
the house, must therefore not be looked upon as part of the original
plan. The detail of the part thus inserted is of Late Tudor character.
The profiles of the mouldings are Gothic, the carving inclines towards
Italian, the parapets have cusped panels, the pinnacles have the
spiral twist so dear to the Tudor mason, and a battlemented moulding
beneath the heraldic animals which they support (Plate XX.). The
treatment is quite different from that of the house itself. Another
point to remark about the plan is that all thoughts of defence are
here abandoned, and the windows look freely out on all sides. Indeed,
far from desiring to exclude people, the builder, Sir Edward Phelips,
wrote up over his door, "_Through this wide-opening gate, none come too
early, none return too late._" It will also be noticed that in order
to get a truly symmetrical disposition of windows, the bay is removed
from the end to the middle of the hall, which is another indication of
a tendency to depart from the ancient arrangements.
[Illustration: 47.--MONTACUTE HOUSE, SOMERSET. GROUND PLAN (1580).
1. Hall. 2. Drawing-room. 3. Large Dining-room. 4. Small Dining-room.
5. Smoking-room. 6. Pantry. 7. Kitchen. 8. Servants' Hall. 9. Porch.
10. Garden-house.]
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