the arms and quarterings of the great family of Shrewsbury were open to the destructive influences of the weather. This was in 1789, yet in 1785—only four years previously—a sketch by Colonel Machell shows the banqueting hall as roofed and glazed. At the close of the eighteenth century a great part of the banqueting hall—between the lovely oriel window and the porch—fell down; about a quarter of a century later a tower in the south-east angle of the inner courtyard (at the back of the present farmhouse) collapsed utterly. The statement often made that no less a person than the much maligned Oliver Cromwell was present at the fall of the manor house in person is, of course, a fiction used by some for the greater entertainment of visitors to the house. Nevertheless, it is a curious coincidence that by the power of a Lord Cromwell these magnificent buildings were raised from the ground, and that by the power and will of another Cromwell they were razed, in places, to the ground, but two hundred years separating the two events, and including much history of more than local interest. The actual buildings form one of the most beautiful examples of fifteenth century domestic architecture to be found in the kingdom; hence Wingfield is far better known to the architectural student than to the historian. Of the present state of the walls, the less said and seen the better. To look at them recalls the lines from _Idylls of the King_ (Geraint and Enid):— “All was ruinous. Here stood a shatter’d archway plumed with fern And here had fall’n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from a cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers: And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now are silent, wound Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy stems Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms, And sucked the joining of the stones, and look’d A knot, beneath, of snakes, aloft, a grove.”