English Architecture: The End of the Old World Order, 1530 to 1650 - Simon Thurley

well good good evening ladies and gentlemen um very pleased to be here again this year um and uh taking on the story that I began last year and I'd like to say thank you to some faces in here who I recognize when I started this pilgrimage this Odyssey through building in England um in the year 410 I me obviously I wasn't giving the lecture in 410 but you know the notion we starting in 410 and we've come through uh the Middle Ages and we've come to this incredibly interesting phase um phase that I call um tonight's lecture the end of the old world order this period between um 1530 and 1630 the period if you like between the sort of reformation and the Civil War I think one of the most interesting complicated and fiercely argued about periods not only in English history but in English architectural history and um as previously in this series of lectures I've been given I'll give you my own personal view of uh the development of building in England over this period and look forward um at the end perhaps to hearing some of your uh comments um and questions so in around about 1510 after a really long period of stagnation the population of England started to grow again this was I think largely due to a reduction in plague mortality and uh the population Grew From 2 million in about 1500 past 4 million a century later in 1600 and only 1 only 30 years later PE at 5 million so this was a 130% increase in population um and this very sudden explosion of people after a long period uh of depopulation was an absolutely key factor in a century of what turned out to be very rapid and very fundamental change but there were some other backgrounds to the changes that took place in this century and these were changes in the way people thought there was a new interest of course in classical learning the Renaissance and from 1532 there was the reform of the English church the Reformation now I don't think Renaissance is a very good term to help us understand what happens in English architecture uh in this Century both the terms Renaissance and the terms Middle Ages were actually invented by Italian humanists who were protesting against the narrowness of medieval University education and these terms disguise both the appreciation and knowledge of ancient civilizations that existed before the 14th century and the interest in and importance of ideas of chivalry that existed before the 18th century because of course the intellectual move movement that we know as the Renaissance was about a Revival of classical learning of Roman literary style of artistic techniques and of course eventually of the correct use of the Roman uh architectural orders it was a revolution in learning and in England at least it established itself in the universities and it was expressed most coherently in letters rather than architecture and in this sense um I believe there was no architectural Renaissance in England in the period we are looking at tonight whilst certainly it's true um elements of classical architecture were absorbed adapted and applied only in a minute number of cases was any attempt made to build a building based on the rules of classical architectural grammar for building things to be built like this the Civil War had to come and go the century had to turn and the pageantry and romantic chivalry so beloved of the Tudors and the early Stuarts had to fall from Fashion in fact I think that the Reformation was to be a much more important Force than the Renaissance for architectural change now in the mid 1530s before the Reformation there were about 840 monasteries friaries and naries in England in addition there were perhaps 4,000 chantes and guilds and between them they owned uh probably about onethird of the English land stock and after uh 1536 the vast majority of this was transferred to secular hands most of it in a matter of uh merely 20 years now whilst the um dissolution of the monasteries was the most visible effect of the suppression for the average person their Parish church was where the effects of the Reformation were most immediately um obvious this um is fford prior it's one of my favorite um ruined monasteries because you can see all the um all the facework of the stones has been taken off um and what you're left with um here is just the um you can see where the face work has taken away and all your left is with the core work and this is one of the sites in the care of English Heritage and of course it's a total nightmare to deal with because a building was never designed to look like that you were never designed to um conserve this Rubble um inside but of course uh there were over 800 buildings uh uh like this that were um dissolved but as I say this uh although it's in a sense the sort of most romantic expression of the Reformation it was the parish churches where people Really Got A Feeling what was happened by 1580 the interior of almost every church had been transformed and of course at the heart of the issue was idolatry the visual context of worship which in Broad terms moved from the situation before the Reformation where the pictorial depiction of faith was at the center of a Parish Church to a situation where Faith was transmitted by words and so literacy and liturgy entwined as Church Interiors were filled with painted texts and books and here's a very good example um at Parish church at Cartal in cumus and Antony's with the um Ten Commandments um painted uh and put up on the wall and I think that you can see in this context the destruction of stained glass in the church not only ridding the churches of idolatry but to let light in so that people could read and could read the word a dual focus of the Smashing of glass in these Victorian churches so this um assault on traditional religion uh affected the monasteries it affected the parish churches but something we don't often think of is it had a huge impact on the what I describe as the spatial context of everyday life because the early Tuda landscape was suffused at every level with concrete symbols of Christianity from uh the Early Middle Ages England was littered with tens of thousands of Wayside crosses some in church in churchard some outside Church yards some in marketplaces some just at Road Junctions in prominent spots in the landscape this is a binam in Norfolk not so far from uh where I live and the purpose of these were to keep man's mortal soul in the Mind's Eye and very often like this one at binham they also Mark the progress um of religious processions so that you could follow from Cross to cross But Not only was the countryside littered with crosses there were holy Wells there were pilgrimage chapels there were Wayside chapels there were Bridge chapels like this one in St Ives there were hermitages and all these daily reminders of the place of God in men's lives were in the course of a few years swept away from the landscape this suppression of the monasteries um triggered a revolution in tenure in English towns in York for instance as many as 2/3 of the inhabitants found that their landlords had switched 2third of the buildings in York belonged to church institutions and as the church land was sold these uh buildings were transferred to Merchants Merchants had previously invested their Surplus wealth in Country Estates but after um the mid 1530s they invested their Surplus income in properties and towns and became rentiers became landlords Keen to invest in urban housing and these men were to benefit hugely from rising rental income which was part of this population pressure that I described at the beginning of my lecture and the profits from renting which were very considerable were reinvested by these merchants in new buildings accelerating a process that had begun in the late 15th centur century when in many towns buildings for rental had begun to be constructed more sturdily so after the 1540s stonewalling tile roofs much more common and most uh houses were of two uh or even three stories with big masonry chimber Timber stack chimney Stacks Stone hars and new stairs the uh Merchants rebuilt and modern their own houses between the 1530s and the 1570s too um and here you see quite a well-known house um in Worcester quite substantial um uh uh building um of about um of about 1600 1600 1620 in many of these uh houses open Halls uh were replaced by uh rooms of two stories with chimneys and of course what this allowed was um ceilings to be um introduced and this is actually quite a Humble House in Great Yarmouth uh an English Heritage Property one of the Yarmouth row houses um and you can see how the uh ability to have a chimney and not just have a fire in the middle of your room with smoke going everywhere allowed you to put a chimney in a ceiling in and decorate your um ceiling quite um elaborately so uh the reformation and the change of ownership in um in in cities and towns had a huge huge impact something else that had a huge impact Tri triggered by the Reformation uh was the impact on education because the Reformation overthrew the church's Monopoly on public life and it created a huge demand for Lay administrators and professional men all these huge transfers of land which were triggered by the information required legal literacy amongst landowners and Merchants aspiring new men wanted their children to be literate and numerate the Gentry and the aristocracy wanted to master classical knowledge um as a sort of gentlemanly attribute and the Protestant Godly believed that um education would guard against ignorance profanity and idleness the effect of this was a huge increase in formal education both at a local level and at the universities by 1640 the end of the period we're talking about this evening half of the population of London and a third of rural men could already read and at least 2 and a half% of 17-year-old males were going to University a proportion I should tell you that was higher than any time uh before the second world war so huge number of people going to University so by the 1530s monasteries hospitals chantries and Cate churches uh provided education for perhaps as many as 5,000 children under 15 education never having been a state responsibility meant that providing an alternative to this Arrangement would never be a government prior ity but it was recognized by these classes who I've described before who are very concerned about education that the dissolution of the chantes and uh the monasteries was going to cause a crisis in education and Royal pragmatism LED Edward V from 1550 to create a number of free grammar schools uh with endowments from former Chantry lands initially there were 20 six of these half of which had originally been Chantry schools but this movement continued under Elizabeth the first um and what I'm showing you here is a slightly grainy slide of an Elizabethan School uh in a village called godmanchester just outside Huntington in Cambridge and uh this fine little school was the school where I was sent when I was 5 years old um just to show how grateful I am to Elizabeth the first for continuing this process these Elizabeth Elizabethan schools like the one in goester um were set up not by central government they were set up by what I describe as Civic action uh much like the chantes that preceded them uh they were part of the Elizabethan mentality of charitable giving and uh it's been calculated that at least a quarter of all Elizabethan charitable gifts went to founding um schools the model for these new schools and there were an awful lot of them built uh was probably the school built by Dean kollet uh of St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1512 now this no longer exists but um basically these schools had um a school room very often a chapel attached and usually a house in which the School Master could live here is quite a grand one um from an old postcard uh this is Guilford Grammar School built in 1557 and then extended up till 1586 those of you who've been to Guilford know that if you go through that front door you enter um a little Courtyard with um the main School room on one side and the house for the master and the Usher on the other side and um on the third side there is a small Library the children were taught in a ground floor room sitting on forms from of which of course comes the the phase being in the first form the second form the third form depending on which form you were sitting on each form had the people of similar um age on and the master um would be at the end of the room standing on a shallow um deis and it seems as if uh in this school uh the attic rooms you can see there in the gables would have been um dormitories for borders well this early 17th century um educational boom um equally affected higher education and the higher education at this stage is expanding very rapidly because it wasn't just members of the aristocracy or even Merchants um or the Gentry who went to University because University places were taken up by the sons of really quite humble and poor people in very large numbers uh money poured into Collegiate education just as it had done into the schools and the rich funded no fewer than 500 new scholarships as well as commissioning lavish new buildings and endowments to uh maintain the Don in um lavish style and comfort this was a period of intensive Construction ruction for the colleges of Oxford and for Cambridge and for the ins of Court uh this is a 19th century print of middle temple Hall London's finest surviving Elizabethan interior and this is a case in point and here you see the famous um screen in the hall um this vast space um more or less the same size as the hall um of Hampton Court also vaulted by a great double hammerbeam roof and with this incredibly elaborate um screen is very much symbolic of the um ancient Origins and the authority and the learning of the um in of court but of all these um educational establishments the most um important and the most ambitious was the new quadrangle built at John's College Oxford by Archbishop Lord the Canterbury quad uh the design uh of this uh quadrangle is disputed but it was certainly um his personal Joiner a man called Adam Brown whose name is on the accounts undoubtedly he plundered uh prints and drawings possibly from antp to inspire him and as a consequence this quad has sort of defied attempt to categorize it stylistically because it mixes everything together it mixes medieval fan vaults and battlements and Hood moldings all of which you can see there with Tuscan arcades pediments and um an illed Niche I'd love to find my ah there's the ra the laser so um excellent so you know Gothic battlements these Hood molds uh the very much of Gothic wind Windows here but down below this Tuscan um arcade and this Niche with pediments over it so it's a real melong of um styles but you know I think although it looks a bit strange to us because we've become so used to be seeing sort of Gothic and classical architecture as in Counterpoint as opposition I think to Archbishop Lord and his Architects and their contemporaries um this was admired as a harmonious and Rich composition the uh East and West Courtyard elevations were deliberately emblematic here you can see the busts of the virtues and the Arts proclaiming Lord's belief in Oxford's medieval curriculum and that um frontis piece um based on actually Counter Reformation Church facades in Paris combines the arms of the Archbishop with um an image of Charles I here for Archbishop Lord was the ultimate statement of belief in the Anglican Church a belief of course for which later Lord and his King were to perish so I'm going to move on from um education to talk a little bit about towns uh I've already talked about the rapidly growing population of England and this was to have a very substantial impact on uh England's towns in fact by the 1530s more or less a quarter of the population of the country was living in towns but amongst those towns London's wealth rapidly outstripped everybody else London's money of course first came from its trade in cloth by 1530 it had 85% of the country's overseas trade and by 1543 London's tax contribution was as large as all the other towns in England combined but in the 15th century the main trading place for London Merchants was out in the open in the streets in fact uh mainly in Lombard Street in 1531 in antor London's great northern European rival uh there was uh a new new building constructed for their Merchants a new boss demonstrating the huge benefits of purpose uh a purpose built indoor trading center now although Henry VII was very keen to copy uh the ANP boss it wasn't until 1564 when S Thomas Gresham London's wealthiest Merchant and Royal agent in the Netherlands uh built uh one at his own expense this is the building uh constructed uh between 1566 to 67 under the supervision of um Henry van passion probably to the designs of Cornelius Flores the concept was a 15th century one an arcaded Courtyard but of course the style of the Arches uh was very much um in a classical style there these uh round-headed arches resting directly on top of the columns without um any inature can you just see the way the columns just come straight down and rest on top of the Arches there's no um no uh molding between them um at all a sturdy Tower uh Rose over the top of the complex um in fact I think I'm actually showing you slightly the wrong slide here but anyway um there was a big tower over it which had um a a clock tower a clock in it which together with a bell marked the end of the day days um trading you see during the last um quarter of uh Queen Elizabeth's Reign um London uh had become the engine of the national economy and the thing that drove that engine and this is going to sound very familiar was shopping because the Royal exchange included two floors of kiosks above these arches um selling luxury goods selling shoes selling watches selling silks gloves ribbons and all sorts of other things and these little shops were very small they were tiny they measured 5 foot by 7 and 1/2t but having one could generate huge profits for their tenants this uh building was a whole new Concept in shopping where have you heard that before the elite customers were no longer forced to walk the dirty Street but could BR browse in comfort and in relative privacy but there were other changes which were equally important to the comfort of the rich that had a very very big impact on London you see from the Early Middle Ages anyone with any means with any money traveled around uh London uh by river but in the 1550s there was a social Revolution which had huge impacts and this was the invention of the carriage now the invention of the carriage was actually the Holy Grail because for centuries people had been trying to devise a vehicle that could move rapidly over quite bad roads without pulverizing the occupants but in the 1550s a new type of carriage appeared in England um and by um 1600 their use was no less than a craze by 1620 by 1620 coach making was one of the most lucrative Industries in the capital this is um a drawing that was done of nonsuch Palace from Life in the 1570s and it shows here in the foreground one of the very first carriages ever to appear in England it was a gift uh to Elizabeth I we know this is an accurate dep of it because we have the Wardrobe accounts that describes all this um these these sort of curly C things and the the feathers on the top and everything this uh uh Carriage was the first um of many that were to transform life um in London before the introduction uh introduction of carriages there were very very few horses stabled in London but from the 1560s for every Carriage there had to be at least two horses and by uh the early 17th century many horses uh many carriages had four or even six horses so the great aristocratic houses along the Strand like Somerset house created separate entrances and yards for their Stables so um here is Somerset house with its Gardens down to the river here's the main Courtyard here's the inner Courtyard and the main Courtyard but this area here approached by its own little Alleyway was contained a massive block of stables look that those are stables and was almost as big as the house itself and it needed to be um for all these horses that were needed and uh this was a revolution in all these big houses they all now needed to build big stables and one just one Elizabethan stable and Coach House survives in London uh it's at Hampton Court it's built in 157 a bit of a giveaway there isn't there um built in 1570 for Elizabeth I um this great Archway here um was built uh to allow the carriages um to go in and these smaller um archways here to allow the horses um to come out um however uh this was all very well if you owned a massive house like Hampton Court or a massive house like uh Somerset house what if you were living in one of the new terrorist houses um elsewhere um in London well um this is a map uh showing um Covent Garden uh laid out of course by um Inigo Jones and what um Indigo Jones um invented in Covent Garden was the solution to what you did with your horses and he's inventing this in the 1630s uh these are the um the Terrace houses uh which you approached from the Piaza behind the Terrace house uh was a garden and at the bottom of the garden um approached by a separate street at the back were your Stables which were known as your Ms and this uh was a very very different solution to what um had happened in France in France if you uh have a townhouse you enter it uh in your Carriage into a little Courtyard from the front in England uh you your your coach comes in at the back and your um horses are kept at the back and that is the origin of the Muse house uh that you see uh all over London a random Muse I'm showing you a picture there invented in the 1630s to deal with this huge problem of a vast number of horses suddenly in a matter of uh maybe 30 or 40 years needing to be um housed in the center of the capital well this um proliferation of C coaches led to a drastic improvement in the road Network around London for 20 to 30 miles around the capital the roads were now excellent so for the first time you could go out to Richmond or to greinwich for dinner and you could return the same evening um and uh this was a very significant factor because what it meant was that if you were an aristocrat you could actually build your your house out in the Clean Air of the suburbs and have a nice garden and you could get in and out on your Carriage on a good road um very quickly and so uh there was uh the invention of a new type of house the Suburban Villa now to begin with these Suburban Villas weren't particularly architecturally distinctive here is a very early one this is Sutton house in Hackney belongs to the National Trust uh built in 1535 um it's barely distinguishable from uh a small um country Mansion but from the 1580s these uh houses began to be built in a different way they began to be constructed on a plan that we know as double pile now um to very briefly explain double pile for those of you who don't know what it is this is a just a for example a plan of of uh Wingfield Manor in darbishire and it shows how all the ranges of the house are basically one room deep everywhere that's a courtyard there so everything is basically one room deep everything is built on a single pile a double pile house is when you have rooms too too deep so you have a range there and you have another range next door to it so these uh uh new houses which were built in double pile were much more compact um and meant that you could abandon the sort of linear planning where just one room led to another room led to another room led to another room you could have a much more interesting and complex plan and these Villas because you have to call them Villas derived ultimately from the plans of townh houses where the big tow houses that belonged to the merchants uh were built on these deep narrow burgage plots and the obvious uh solution to building a big house on a narrow uh plot was uh to put your chimney Stacks in the middle and then to build your rooms on either side so your house uh would look like this this is a very large um Merchant's house in kingslin it happens to be my house but that's just by The Bu um there is a big spine wall here which has the flu in um and then the rooms were disposed either side double pile um and this was uh this uh house by, 1400 was already a double pile house and so this uh notion of building your house double pile was taken out from the dense heavily built core of cities and started to be used um on these Villas built by the aristocracy ringing around the edge of London some of you may know Charlton house in grinich built in 1607 to 12 a remarkable survival of this type um of uh new house and here you see a rather smudgy plan of it which I which I apologize for but you can see here this is Great Hall in the house which runs from front to back and all the other rooms are double pile or even triple pile here like this so this house was a much uh more complicated house in terms of plan and they were pioneering a new way of living where you could have different relationships between servants and Masters between landlords and tenants living in these houses was a much cheaper more private more practic iCal way to live with warmer more M manageable rooms disposed in such a way that the family and guests could move around um independently from the servants because these houses had their own um servant staircases um tucked away in them so you have a big staircase there for the family and then you have a servant staircase tucked away now of course um the period that we're talking about is a period in which um printing becomes very important important and printing in fact revolutionized the spread of knowledge and this was particularly important in terms of architecture because For the First Time printing made it possible to distribute thousands of copies of drawings cheaply and quickly and these uh architectural prints started coming into England from the 1460s but uh by the early 16th century there were a number of books and one of these was out outstandingly important for the period that I'm talking about this was a book written by Sebastiano Serio um called the general rule of architecture um regol generali architectu and this was a New Concept a completely new concept um in architectural writing this was a profusely illustrated book showing um the orders of architecture Tuscan Doric Ionic Corinthian composite and this book and the drawings that it contained uh became hugely influ um influential um for the rest of the period that I am um going to be talking about this evening but as well um as many buildings that picked up these orders as a sort of decorative Motif there were one or two and there really were only one or two buildings which tried to use them in a correct Roman Manner and the first of these as far as We Know was Somerset house this is a drawing of Somerset house showing the Strand elevation and the um great triumphal Arch um in the center of it built for protector Somerset with a sort of tier of classical um columns um on it here is an in inside view of the courtyard a watercolor here in the museum of London as the building's being demolished and you can see uh the Archway here with its columns on this was a triumphal arch in the middle of uh London for one of uh the Tuda period's greatest generals protector Somerset um trying to express his power in the classical language of architecture and this um desire to have a frontis piece on the front of your building with the classical orders on uh took a polite building by storm here's another London building Q Palace also can you see here um the orders of architecture um a tower of orders it was called on um the entrance um front built in 1620 but really even in the 1640s the underlying principles of English architectural design were not in any sense strictly classical a building like Q Palace owed as much to the gothic world as it did did to the world of the Italian Renaissance because the English were obsessed by surface decoration by surface richness you can need to look at that building to see the love of interplay of how you make the Surface rich and uh from the 1560s um a huge craze gripped England which was the craze for strap work and here you see this um wonderful ceiling at Aston Hall just outside Birmingham look at that ceiling um look at the paneling on the walls the English have always loved surface decoration right the way back through my lectures I've made this point um and these uh types uh of designs and this is the outside of Brams Hill House were were taken from books of prints that were printed in the Netherlands and were applied willy-nilly to the surface of English um architecture all these uh sources of new design derived from print were complementary to the existing decorative vocabulary of English architecture in particular the language of heraldry because what underpinned all these uh buildings was the desire of the owners to express their status and their ancestry this as I say is Brams Hill House and this inside is the screen in the Great Hall this is heraldry gone mad uh you can see they have put uh the shields of every conceivable ancestor who they could imagine including um fascinatingly 12 blank shields for the generations to come so in the minds of these patrons the classical orders and heraldry were the same thing look they these these shields are put onto classical columns because uh heraldry was about symmetry it was about order it was about hierarchy and so was classical architecture symmetry order hierarchy there was no contradiction in their minds well of course the ultimate expression of this mix of heraldry um and U uh forms brought from the continent in terms of Prince uh was seen in the Royal palaces uh the Royal palaces started by Cardinal Woolsey and then um developed by um Henry VII and Henry VII um at uh Hampton Court and later on at York Place uh developed this extraordinary um style which I call chivalric eclecticism so the basis of it is chivalry but you add everything you can think of on top of it eclecticism and this is York place this is my reconstruction sketch of what it would have looked like at the end of Henry VII's Reign um a building that was a sort of fantasy building covered in flags and veins and badges and coats of arms and columns um no square of space left undecorated but very often when we um and and and of course the the the culmination of this style was nonsuch Palace I showed you a picture of it earlier um non such really epitomizes this chalri eclecticism that um grips Henry VII and his courtiers um and and and turns into the sort of extraordinary excesses of the Elizabethan and jacoban um era but when we think of Henry VII um and we do all too often because he's a very popular Monarch um we do think of nonsuch we think of whiteall we think of Hampton Court but just as important were his works of fortification because in 1538 Henry VII became convinced that a Catholic crusade to invade England was inevitable and he commissioned one of the greatest uh Suites of uh defensive buildings that had been that had been um commissioned in England since the age of Edward the first from Loft in the East right the way around the coast of England to Milford Haven in the west he built a series of extraordinary forts a total of 24 new fortifications uh and here you see cber Castle a typical one of these artillery faults because this is what these were these were about artillery these were magnificent killing machines designed to emit the maximum number of cannonballs and musket balls to prevent an enemy gaining an Anchorage for invasion they weren't designed to uh resist um a landbased Siege or bombardment for the sea they were simply designed to have the maximum number of cannons and so each of these layers you see here um was dominated by cannons and the lowest gunports down here there was another layer of Cannon here there's another layer of Cannon there and there would have been cannon on the top it would have been spouting fire um in every direction but Henry's forts um although they never um fired a shot in Anger actually as it as it happened um were with continual maintenance and modification the backbone of England's Coastal defenses throughout Elizabeth's Reign um and through to the um Spanish Armada so um let's move on for royalty and just briefly consider um courtiers the um the rich men of the Kingdom the aristocrats this was the period um of the aristocratic Builder who had made his fortune in public service now speaking as a public servant uh I know this sounds an extraordinary notion that you could ever make a fortune in public service but of course in the 16th and 17th century that's exactly what you did you didn't get it through your salary which was negligible but you got it through the profits of office and of all the great Builders um in the um Elizabethan and jacoban period William cile Lord Burley the Lord Treasurer was the greatest he built a great house in Westminster and two huge houses in the country Burley in northamptonshire and tibbles in um Harford Shire and here is burley designed by one of the leading designers of the royal office of Works he's got the Royal architect to build his own personal house a man called Henry Hawthorne what this house did was emphasize traditional architectural and social values on the outside look a traditional um gate house with a tower of orders um on it and inside was a traditional Great Hall but when you went inside into the courtyard what berley was trying to do was emphasize his uh classical learning his classical knowledge and you can see here and the arcades this arcade is actually taken directly you'll probably recognize it from the Royal exchange see that exactly the same thing without the inure um and the Tower of orders you see here um and lots of strap work decoration very very fashionable interior proclaiming the sophistication of the uh of the the patron now um just to finish off I want to move from these great houses and I'm not going to go through there were dozens of these great houses built in very much this style I just want to move from that to uh the houses of the very poor because what I've tried to do in these lectures is not give a distorted view of building in England just concentrating on the high end because in the period I'm talking about tonight there were some major changes one particular change I want to H highlight in if you like the low end U as I explained in my previous lecture between 1400 and about 1530 England was do Ed by low population people were scarce and land was plenty Villages shrank and landholdings increased in size rents were lower uh and tenure was more secure and in fact most Villages were smaller in 1520 than they had been in 1530 but this trend was reversed in the early 1500s by this rise in population that I've talked about and this population growth uh resulted not only uh in growing Villages and towns but in growing um Prosperity uh particularly in the countryside because the countryside was uh having to find ways of feeding the towns and this made the countryside uh large parts of the countryside much more profitable so during the 17th century almost all houses in the countryside were working Farms um and this increased profitability resulted in a lot of them being rebuilt and the big thing that happens um in this period is an advance in the control of smoke now I've already mentioned this briefly when I was talking about towns but first by the introdu introduction of smoke hoods and then by the construction of chimneys and fireplaces it was possible to revolutionize the design of ordinary houses now it is actually pretty surprising that the Romans clever as they were inventing everything you can possibly imagine never invented the chimney it's very odd that they didn't do that um and we think probably the first fireplaces and chimneys appeared in their houses of sax and royalty but really up until um the reign of Henry VII a fireplace and a chimney was a rarity and a luxury cons confined to um uh to to high status dwellings but the the the rash of rebuilding that took place um from Henry VII's Reign onwards allowed lots and lots of houses to to profit from this technology because it was technology and here is a random picture of somebody's house um but it is actually a little Tuda house quite a humble Cottage you can see its um its beams on on the ceiling there um with a fireplace and a chimney and because your fire wasn't in the middle of the floor and the and the smoke was going up through the roof you were able to put ceilings in and because you were able to put ceilings in you were able to have a second floor and so these are two um uh houses from the wield and downland Museum uh before and after before when your smoke was going out to the roof that's all you could have but afterwards with your chimney stack in the middle uh you could have rooms above and the house on the right which was a sort of of house that was developed in the south of England uh during the years uh from the sort of 1530s and 40s onwards became the blueprint of ordinary houses in England right up to the the 19th century um a house built around um a spine which had a a chimney stack in the middle of it with rooms by the side um and a door um in the front well um just to to um see if I can make some conclusions out of that again breathless uh uh conspectus of what was being built in this 100 years throughout this period I've been talking about the period from the dissolution of the monasteries until the Civil War ideas of chivalry of Knighthood and the power of Gothic architecture really dominated building in England in many spheres the period from 1530 to 1630 was one of exuberance and of extravagance and I hope that many of the examples of buildings I've shown you this evening have has captured that a period of voracious and conspicuous consumption and spendthrift um patrons from the reign of Edward v 6 it was almost as if all the architectural energy and all the flamboyance of the church was channeled into secular buildings and this was I think the fundamental change that we're grappling with here from an architecture that was continually renewed and invigorated by the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular modes to an architecture that was entirely secular being fed by new streams of decoration mainly coming from abroad well in my next lecture on the 2nd of November I will show how in the hundred years after the restoration English architecture went through another fundamental change driven in the main by the Ava availability of a whole new library of architectural books books that began to standardized style and reduce the quirkiness and invention that has characterized the Tudor and early Stuart buildings that we've looked at tonight thank you very much well ladies and gentlemen I do have um eight and a quarter minutes to answer um any questions or hear any comments or suggestions anyone has so there's roving mic as usual anyone like to kick off um could you comment on the connection between musees for horses and Muses for hunting birds and what's the origin of the word muse yes well that is a a good and interesting question because as as you rightly um suggest the the origin of the word um was uh a muse for Hawks and um Henry VII had uh at grinich where he kept most of his hunting birds a big Hawk's Muse um it was rather remarkably uh accessible almost directly from his bedroom um so you know he must have had a very high value um against them the the Royal Muse in in whiteall uh was actually up near Charing Cross um and uh in the later 16th century when it ceased to be a muse for Birds it was taken over by horses and so a building that was called The Royal Muse uh became a building that staed horses uh and subsequently the word muse stuck to horses um rather than Birds um and of course the National Gallery is the building that's now on the the site of that so you're quite right originally the word muse related to birds but ends up because of this swap over um relating to horses there's a gentleman there yeah yes uh how was uh English architecture regarded by the Europeans well that's an extremely uh extremely interesting um question and in my view um the architecture of this period is written uh has been written by historians up until very recently very apologetically they look at what's being built in Italy they look at what's being built in France and they look at houses like Burley and they um say oh this is terribly barbaric compared to what brunoli was building this is really very Northern and sort of old-fashioned and uh I I think that um they've missed a very very um important point which is the that uh Lord Burley and his um companions weren't trying to imitate uh architecture in southern Europe they were doing their own thing and we shouldn't judge these these buildings uh against buildings in France or Spain or Italy we should judge them uh for what they are and a number of Scholars writing recently and uh it certainly includes me but includes Mark Girard and one or two others have been forcibly making the point that these buildings stand up uh for themselves um in terms of their quality and their coherence and their um aesthetic qualities but it has to be said if you were um an Italian walking into this Courtyard you would uh think that you had been on a hallucinogenic drug because it doesn't look anything like uh the use um of the classical orders you might sort of pick out bits and pieces that you'd sort of recognize there but I mean what do you make of that you know I mean it is quite extraordinary so um when uh foreign visitors come they are all very much impressed by the size uh the scale the ambition of these places um and they are very much impressed by the Interiors but they when they come to describing the exteriors words fail them because just as with modern art historians they haven't we haven't found a language that is adequate for describing this style of architecture so they couldn't do it at the time and I invented a a term this chalc eclecticism to describe the words of Henry VII but What word could describe what you're looking at there it's very difficult to to work out so it's a very interesting question you've asked her uh just up there there lady I think just to follow on from that then is there a more of a continuity with northern Europe like um the Netherlands or the Baltic states yes uh there there very much is uh more more of a continuity and uh definitely uh details like this which I I showed you at the Royal exchange and here um have direct parallels um in uh in in northern Europe and I think the the way to look at it and my view isn't uh so much that uh what was happening here was a direct copy of what was happening somewhere else but what was happening in northern Europe was that the merchants who were living in uh London and living in antp lived in a common cultural mure uh and they uh shared uh common uh aesthetic experiences they had common cultural educational background they were looking at the same books um and they were building thing things that were um in some ways uh very similar and I think that when you look at the Mercantile buildings and particularly things like the Royal exchange and the the houses of the merchants my own house in Kings Lin these houses have very very direct um parallels with the houses of the of Northern Europe particularly the houses of the the Hansa the htic league I think when you're looking at the houses of the aristocracy you're looking at something that is very different and much more original and much more um unique to to England yes I was just thinking of the 19th century um often term Barack um I know it's credited to carav vaju who is accredited with turning from mannerism sort of verbal mythical classical into writing your face barck you've also got the music the Brock but you've also got the architecture which I always think it's crazy Paving but in the sky Steeples inspires and we seem to be you know lugging behind somewhat yes I me I think that one of the things that I've tried to do in these um lectures is try to avoid art historical tags because I actually think that none of them really fit England very well I was very damning about the term Renaissance earlier um and in my next lecture on the 2nd of November I'm going to be very damning about the term Barack because I don't think that it helps us understand what is being built in England in the early 17th century and this is this uh terrible problem that we have in this country that um so many of the uh art historians and Architectural historians who write uh about these buildings and about our history do it in relation to what is happening in southern Europe when southern Europe quite frankly has got absolutely nothing to do with what's going on here and so I do think that that uh one of the things I'm trying to do in in the work that I'm doing that and I'm writing a book on all this stuff at the moment is trying to find a new Lang language a new way of expressing the changes that happened in English architecture without being bound by talking about Romanesque you know uh Gothic Barack post modernism you know goodness knows what other the labels are how successful I am being and will be you will have to judge thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 39,724

Keywords: Medieval History, English Heritage, Heritage, History, English History, Medieval, Architecture, English Architecture, Medieval Architecture, Simon Thurley, Thurley, History lecture, History talk, Gresham College, lecture talk, Gresham Professor, Visiting Gresham Professor, education, free education

Id: OBSmYzoHNXc

Length: 59min 27sec (3567 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2011