Palaces from the Hundred Years' War to the Wars of the Roses - Professor Simon Thurley

well good good evening ladies and gentlemen very nice to see wall as you'll see we have an an intermittent projector I think it's called and I'm sure that everything has been done to rectify the fault including a wire trailing directly from the projector which some of you can see hanging down there going to the projection room at the back but I'm sure that does work it just is that it switches on and off so we'll see how we see how we get on with it with the technical problems and I also like to say that my am my extremely nice publisher has turned up this evening with a pile of really beautiful books and when I finish speaking I'm going to dash out of this top-secret back door there and I'm going to sit at the table and I'll be able to sign a book for you if you like I wish almost if you've got one but those if you don't have a copy of my history of English architecture delivered in this very room over a period of four years originally and you will I'm sure enjoy the opportunity to buy one this evening well and tonight we are continuing with the second of my lectures about royal building royal residential building in England and last time I described how monarchs have sovereigns moved from living in a conglomeration of individual structures linked together with pentoses to living in something that I think today we would recognize as a royal palace and the an intermittent picture on the screen there is what I ended with last week last time which is Windsor Castle the extraordinary building constructed by King Edward the third a building of extraordinary coherence one that you can see here in its full context this is of course a 17th century viewed his Hollis view of Windsor Castle and bird's-eye view but here you can see come back in the the rooms that the ranges that were constructed by Edward the third which were gathered around two courtyards one here and one here this is the kitchen court down here this is the elevation you were looking at before and these these great rooms here content these great ranges here contain the the rooms of State and these were rooms which the likes of which really hadn't been seen before in this country and by the time Edward the third died in 1377 Windsor Castle was unquestionably the largest most luxurious the most modern residents not only royal residents but residents of any type in the kingdom and these works at Windsor I think were completely and utterly consuming and it's not really very surprising that during Edwards the Third's reign Windsor was very much the center of royal gravity and I'll go on in in a minute just to talk a little bit about that but in the second year of Richard's the seconds reign and here is that famous portrait of Richard the second at Westminster Abbey came a reform that was to shift focus away from Windsor to Westminster and was to establish for the first time a permanent department to organize royal building this was the office of the Kings works a body that was founded in 1378 and was placed under a Clark who was in charge of organizing the construction and the maintenance of the royal estate and a controller as in comptroller who was responsible for financing it and although the headquarters of the Clark who's the man in charge of it all was in Westminster he had extensive responsibilities right there across England where the Kings houses were and so he appointed a gang of regional assistants if you like who are known as purveyors and it was their job the purveyors job to recruit craftsmen and organize the materials locally to repair the king's houses the Clarks and the controller were actually salaried officials and as so often with senior salaried officials in the medieval royal household they not only received money they received a livery that was a grand cloak with a fur collar which signified their status before the Reformation many not all of the clerks of the King's works were in Holy Orders and most famously one wasn't and this is Geoffrey Chaucer one of the laymen who occupied the position between 1480 9 to 14 91 and showing you a picture of Chaucer just emphasizes the fact that these clerks were not architects they were not builders they were priests they were in this case he's gone again a poet they were administrators they were administrators who handled very substantial sums of money sometimes drawn from other departments but usually then moving on through the office of works to undertake more important jobs in the Royal service their office was in the Palace of Westminster I will talk about two more this is Westminster Great Hall this is roughly where Big Ben is now you'll be familiar with with Great Hall this as you walk down through Parliament Square there's a statue of Oliver Cromwell just there yeah and just at that point there where Oliver Cromwell statue was was the office of the clerk of the Kings works it was from that area there that little patch of green now that's that's outside Westminster Hall which was the location from which all the Kings building activities were organized through the 14th 15th and into the beginning of the sixteenth century so if the Clark was not a builder or an architect and if the controller was basically an accountant where did the design skills come from well working very closely with these two administrative chiefs were a number of official Royal craftsmen there was a master crafter a Master Mason a master plumber a master glazier and a master blacksmith and it was these men who possessed the technical skills in design in engineering and in construction that I suppose today we would call architectural and these master craftsmen were responsible for taking the brief that was set by the king or potentially by one of his senior officers translating that into drawings in the drawing office that was really great relocated located here they had drawing offices with big drawing boards in them and sometimes they would have turned these instructions into a little a little model for royal approvement these a master craftsmen were experts in geometry and they've learnt the principles of construction and engineering basically from firsthand experience from a long apprenticeship actually building things with older men they worked as a team the Masons designing the walls carpenters designing the roofs the doors and the paneling the glazier is designing the windows the plumbers designing the the lead work on the roofs etc etc of course they conferred they and they had to do otherwise the building would just fall down but the important point is that each of them reigned completely supreme over the area of their craft in fact it was usually known as their mystery that the area of their mystery so these Master Masons and carpenters the people who designed their houses in in the Middle Ages were men of high ability of high reputation and like the controller and like the clerk of the Kings were they too had the right to wear a livery the master Smith was a little bit unusual because his primary job was to make weapons and he had a very large and complicated set up in the Tower of London but as well as furnishing all the equipping that was needed to go to war he also furnished the needs of the king's houses too and together with his colleagues the plumber the glazier and later on a master painter was added to the office of works all of them had these liveries and they had the status of Squires in the Kings household so these weren't menial people at all these were people who had status and authority now this is a very important moment the establishment of the Kings office of Works and it would be nice I suppose to imagine that the establishment of this the first official architectural and construction department in England was due to some desire to improve the quality of design or the quality of disc instruction in some way but I'm afraid to say it wasn't this was a piece of bureaucratic engineering it was basically a seen as a way of more efficiently organizing the royal estate and we should note note that not all the domestic residences of the King were included in this and the responsibilities of the office of works for instance the their houses occupied by his wives the Queen's and his sons sat outside the responsibilities of the office of works and therefore sat outside the accounting mechanisms which produced the records that tell us about these buildings and so as a consequence although we know quite a lot and I talked quite a lot this evening about what we know about the places in which the King lived we know very little about the houses which the queen owned and frequently very little about what are the houses of which his family lived in but the office of works founded in the early years of Richard seconds reign was a body that continued for the next 400 years and it in fact became the most important body of building professionals in English architecture and this is I think an extremely important point because we in England unlike for instance in France had no royal architectural Academy there was no state-sponsored school of architecture and before the late 19th century no independent formal training organised for architects and as a result the office of works founded in the early years of Richard the seconds reign became essentially the school in which almost every single one of our greatest architects were trained and by extension and this is another very important point this means that the construction and the maintenance of the royal estate and I supposed to a degree the estate of the army and the and the Navy were the practical forcing grounds for English architectural and technological innovation the place to be if you wanted to get on in architecture was in the office of Works and that was the case really from the reign of Richard ii well into the reign of Queen Victoria so let's now move on from the bureaucratic bit which is very important to understand to consider what was actually being built by monarchs in the years between richard ii and richard the third always sounds as if that's a very short period but of course it isn't because that is the period between the death of Edward the third in 1377 and the defeat of Richard third at Bosworth Field in 1485 well thanks to the establishment of the office of works we know precisely how much to the last penny was spent by monarchs through the office of works on their domestic residences in that period and for your interest it was just under 64,000 pounds but in that period there was really only major building work in two principal royal palaces because in the period after Edward the thirds death up to the accession of Henry the seventh monarchs bought houses they sold them they swapped them and exchanged them they confiscated them and there was really a great urban flow of residences that were used by the crown in fact only seven residences remained in constant royal ownership in use in the whole of that long period from Edward the third to Henry the seventh so these were they the seven were these in London and the Thames Valley you obviously had Westminster which we've got on the screen there the Tower of London which had residential parts in it and was used and quite regularly as a royal residence and Windsor Castle so Westminster tariff London Windsor Castle in the West we had Clarendon which I talked about last time and Woodstock which is on the on the site of Webb Blenheim palaces now a hunting lodge a very large hunting lodge were housed in Essex at Havering at Havering at bar and in Nottingham sure a another hunting seat at place called clip stone and these seven were really the seven places that remain constant many other places were owned for a brief periods some maybe four 80 90 years but still relatively brief periods and but the fact is is that the core of royal residences was basically sure there were fewer royal houses now why was this why were the number of houses that the Monarchs owned actually reducing well I think there are four reasons for it the first one really starts in the reign of Edward the third himself because from around thirteen seventy Edward the third becomes much more sedentary the relentless moving around between his dozens of houses that slows down he becomes older it becomes gradually actually more senile and he more or less holds up at Windsor Castle and at Windsor Manor which is a building which I'll talk about in a moment which was in Windsor Pass Park next door he very rarely went to Westminster he very rarely went to the Tower of London and what this had the effect of was centralizing government and administration here at Westminster the King was not taking it all around the country with him in those last years of his reign almost all the departments are of state and absolutely all the departments of the household began to have permanent headquarters at Westminster and I've described already how the office of works very very quickly established its headquarters at Westminster so the first reason for reduction in houses is that the Kings head of the third stops moving around and there there's a concentration of official functions at Westminster the second point is that actually when you look at it during the 14th and 15th century the monarchy is actually not very rich and it's not very rich in comparison with what the monarchy enjoyed in the 12th and 13th century and it certainly wasn't rich compared to what the monarchy enjoyed in the 16th century this was partially due and this is a little bit of a circular argument to the fact that there were fewer royal houses and therefore that a smaller portion of royal income came from agricultural rents and from from royal estates a greater proportion of income came from taxation and this basically made English Kings poorer than they had been so the simple fact was that these monarchs in the 14th and 15th century were reliant on taxation and had less money to spend on on houses and so had fewer houses the third reason for this shrinking in numbers of houses was that monarchs as we will hear in a few moments increasingly expected to be comfortable nice now this sounds totally unreasonable but they were no longer prepared to just dust down overnight in a castle that hadn't been used for sort of five or six years which has been quickly tarted-up so that they could stay in it for a few nights they they just didn't want to do that they expected warm rooms they expected rooms which were were properly furnished with tapestries with proper cooking facilities and washing facilities and this standard of luxury could only be provided at a smaller number of residences you couldn't just do that in all these dozens of castles and things that were all over the country and the last point now there's something very bad happening to this laptop here which says my battery power is low open brackets seven percent if you don't plug in your computer soon it will hibernate automatically thank you I see someone coming to rescue me excellent thank you very much so we're on the fourth reason and the fourth reason is that the royal household was getting bigger the number of people who are surrounded the King was getting bigger all the time so if we go back to Henry the first you know in the in the sort of still it was effectively the Norman period the royal household was about a hundred and fifty people under Edward the first it had grown to about six hundred people and by the time we get to Richard the seconds reign where we're starting this evening you're looking at about seven hundred people being in the Kings household and of course what what's this meant that it was relatively easy for Henry the first to gallop around the country emits dozens and dozens of houses with 150 people when you're moving 700 around you actually are not quite so keen to carry on moving between all these places so for all these four reasons what we start to see is a reduction okay and when the picture comes up again ah you will see what what happens you see that there is there is it there's basically an increase an increasing densification of houses in the Thames Valley anyway that was a map showing how the number of houses reduced and and concentrated rounds the the Thames Valley and what's this and concentration increasing concentration of houses in the Thames Valley did was coincide with some major changes in the royal court this actually I just used the term the word court and this is the first time I've used the word court in my last lecture I didn't use it at all and so I think we do just need to ask a question here I mean what is a court and when does a court first appear because of course is a very very important point about how royal palaces are used and of course this all depends on what we mean in terms of the definition of the word but historians in the past have argued quite strongly that the court as we would sort of understand it today was essentially an invention of the Tudors introduced by Henry the seventh and then perfected by an Henry the eighth but I think we no longer really believe this and I think that today most historians certainly I would say that a court is a recognizable concept was born in the period that we are considering tonight now let's just be clear to begin with about what we're talking about because there's a difference between the household and the court the household is quite an easy thing to define the household was the structured organization that sustained the everyday life of the king and therefore his every day rule and it contained all the functions necessary for everyday life so it would contain the kitchens the people who moved your carts around horses the Wardrobe all those things were your household the court is a much more amorphous concept because the court had no static membership am it contained all the people who were at that time welcomed by the sovereign as participants in his daily round of life these might be his friends they were certainly as supporters but crucially they weren't functionaries sorting out everyday life they were part of the setting of kingship they were ornaments to the Kings power and so there's a sense in which the court provides the spectacle around the monarch while the household was the machinery that made that spectacle possible I hope you get that distinction between what I'm saying and so a crucial component in the nature of a court is court leanness is courtliness core cleanness as in some refinement of manners and some refinement in behavior to which the members of the court actually subscribe and it only became possible for courtliness to flourish when the Kings closest attendants ceased to be soldiers who were geared for military action because it's at this point that it becomes possible to enjoy a greater interest in the arts I mean tapestry and painting and poetry and sculpture in music and crucially it became becomes possible to admit more women into your everyday life when you're dealing with a war band there are no women there when you have a court it is full of women and men and this is the change the magic change that begins to happen in the period that we are talking about tonight it is perhaps possible to discern as early as the reign of Henry the 3rd some of these things happening but these things become marked and remarked upon in the reign of Richard ii and i showed you at the beginning that great portrait of him in westminster him sitting on a throne with his crown on it and i think that it's that moment when you see richard ii stamping his sort of kingly image under his kingdom in in that painting when you can pinpoint the birth of a court in a sort of modern sense now richard the Third's court was one that expressed an interest in culture it comprised women to a much greater degree than previously it portrayed itself magnificently and it introduced a greater degree of status deference and hierarchy I mean it was Edward the third at the end of his reign who started involved inventing new types of aristocracy Sir Edward the third invented the rank of a Duke but richard ii in in invents all sorts of other ranks he inverted for instance he invents the rank of Marquess so he's introducing hierarchy amongst his soldiers and at this point I would want to show you the Wilt Wilton diptych which you all know in there in the National Gallery that wonderful personal diptych that must have sat on one of richard ii altars now just half close your eyes and imagine it in the back of your mind them on the back of it is the white heart with a crown around his neck Richards the seconds personal emblem on the other reverse side of the panel is his coat of arms establishing his his rank and his lineage and on on the front of it is that their wonderful presentation of the kneeling King in profile absolutely beautiful his presentation to John the Baptist with the two previous royal kings who had been canonized canonized English English Kings had been canonized Edward the Confessor and st. Edmund but the great thing about the Wilton diptych is you know we we don't have as we have one interior of Richard the seconds reign but what the Wilton diptych gives us is it gives us that sense of the richness the luxury the sophistication and something of the mentality of this extremely interesting King as they Richard portrayed in the in in the Westminster reticle wearing his crown we know he did this we've got we've got descriptions of him presiding over banquets wearing his crown not speaking to anybody just looking kingly and important and and imperious presiding over this this court he loved rich clothes very very interested in his personal attire and priceless personal jewelry there's an extraordinary inventory that catalogues that the extraordinary jewels that he had and he loved rich food and and he loved having himself painted he was a very vain man he's very tall he had great long flowing fair hair what I just been describing to you and what I would have been showing you on the Wilton diptych is a fundamentally different environment from that which would have for instance surrounded King Edward the first only seventeen before because Edward the First's household was a businesslike household full of military men and full of administrators it was those people it was the the military who had the greatest status it was his fifty household Knights his royal bodyguard in effect a sort of elite private army these were the people who surrounded the king they weren't courtiers they were soldiers and their friendship and their loyalty had been forged on the battlefield had been forged in blood and it was these Knights that set an incredibly militaristic tone of the Kings entourage and everyone below the military Knights in these earlier households from the pages to the grooms to the cooks and the tailor's they all had a military role to play so whenever the King went to went to war the entire household clicked into their their military role so just for a moment reflecting on the nature of Edward the first household I think helps throw into into sharp focus how different Richard the Third's household was but I don't want you to think that in somehow the English royal household changed in this sort of very dramatic way when other royal households elsewhere across Europe were not because there was a sort of movement across Europe a movement in house royal households across Europe to create a more ceremonious way of life and this was perhaps in reaction to the waves of violent unrest that swept across Europe in the years after the Black Death and of course which were characterized in this country by the Impreza revolt of 1381 I think somehow rulers felt that they needed to distance themselves from the ordinary people these troublesome rebellious subjects and the way they distance distance elves were by creating these courts with incredibly rarefied clothes and fashions and tastes which really set them apart from the people themselves I'm now beginning to run out of things I can say without some slides so this change under describing this this creation of a court had very substantial architectural consequences and we began to see that the foundations of this in the reign of Edward the third at Windsor Castle and I think that the the extraordinary building which I started off with this evening I thank goodness I showed you a picture it before everything went horribly wrong is you know was an expression in many ways of this more ceremonious life that Kings were living and those the great rooms which were were were set up in Windsor were the theater set if you like for this more ceremonious way of going on so just just I just want to talk about wind wind Windsor for a second because winds Edward the Third's conception for Windsor wasn't just a great castle and even if you go to Windsor now you're very aware of the way it's set in Windsor Great Park and in the Middle Ages the park was just one part of Windsor Forest which is an extraordinary large an area of royal owned land that covered a very large part of Berkshire and and some of Surrey and even some of Middlesex in fact and Windsor Castle itself was surrounded by a series of satellite houses smaller houses which allowed Edward the third to retreat from the splendor of his royal lodgings in the castle itself and live a more private sort of life in the in Windsor Manor in East Hampstead house in folly John house in Henley on the heath in which Muir also so these five buildings in the Windsor forests were the places where the king could could could retreat to this is the plan which actually didn't come out very well last time and as determent showed you again very quickly and so this is the Great Hall here's the chapel and the Kings apartments here a great chamber private rooms in a little tower a presence chamber vast bedchamber here with views over the Thames Valley some private rooms the Queen's rooms across here you only need all this stuff when you have got a court that has got ceremony going behind it and this is really the point the time I'm making and quickly before we lose this and that's whack on through these here's the Wilton diptych so and here is John the Baptist here are the two English sainted kings and here is Richard kneeling being a obviously presented here and quickly on the back this is that his personal and album emblem here and the coats of arms so this is the richness and I've been talking about here he has encrusted in jewels and cloth of gold is wearing his crown so this is that the court we're talking about and we're just about to get now to the two maps of Windsor where we will see that here we are so here's Windsor Castle this is Windsor Forest huge amount of land all owned by the king and these things with the sort of circles around them are that houses I was talking about here is a norden's map of 17th century here they are again can you see them so these are the subsidiary houses that Edward the third and his successors were able to retreat into when they didn't want to stay up in the castle and here and this is important because the the management of these houses was taken out of the hands of the office of Works and was put into the hands of the King's Chamber the personal finances of the King and this is the first distinction that we get again in royal history that we're very familiar with the day between the state residences of the monarch and the private ones this is the distinction between Sandringham and Balmoral the personal property of the Queen and Windsor and Buckingham Palace the things of the Queen's in the right of crown and the distinction that is made in the Middle Ages is that is the ones that the residences that are managed by the Office of works which I talked about and that the the residences that are op that and run by the King's Chamber and I'll come on to talk about this in just a moment because because I think it is very important now I said at the beginning that there were very few buildings that were actually built in this period we're talking about this evening and you know it's quite a troublesome period in my title I talk about the Wars of the Roses which is shorthand for the the disruption that this country suffered in in the 15th century so richard ii will talk about his buildings in in a moment but Henry the fourth had terrible financial problems Henry four the fifth spent most of his time Duffing up the French he did that very well and Henry the sixth and commissioned lots of things but finished very few and under Edward the fourth a few bits and pieces were built but richard ii of course is is principally famous for the extraordinary building works at Westminster it was he who took the Great Hall that had been constructed by Henry the 3rd and Henry the 3rd had made this the great throne room of England and transformed it into a setting for this glittering court I had have described and what you see here is the result of Richard's decision in 1393 to rebuild West Westminster Hall project was completed in 1401 the massive walls the Norman period were retained and this huge roof was put on the largest piece of carpentry in Western Europe everyone here will be familiar with the fact that it is a hammer beam roof a way of spanning a much much larger span than could otherwise be covered with roof trusses and of course much more magnificent as well designed by the king's master carpenter hugh her hland and at the end of each of these hammer beams just about to come here you see it here was an angel holding the the royal badge the Royal Arms of England and so this roof was a representation of the heavens spread out over the earthly court of richard ii and take your mind back to the Wilton diptych and you can see a theme growing here which I will elaborate because and behind that the king's throne which would have been at the dais end here ignore these steps for the time being can you see there one two three there are six niches there on the back wall of Westminster Hall installed by Richards that the second and these niches hit they are to see the rest of them behind his throat were a bit like a pulpit him in a Cathedral this is this is York York Minster the background again was religious iconography and when we look at the the entrance facade Westminster Hall this is his new facade he put on with these big towers again here can you see this range of of niches containing statues very very much likely this is X that was briefly Exeter Cathedral very much like a Cathedral and so what Richard is is is creating here at Westminster is a building which deliberately uses the power of religious Association to elevate his court and this incredibly important Commission I think illustrates perfectly what I've been saying about the nature of his rule and the elevation of his kingly office above being simply the leader of a war band now I think you can also see this in some of the other buildings that we know he built and one of the places that both Edward the third and Richard the second were very keen on was the palace of Sheen now Richmond upon Thames and the manor of Sheen had come into royal possession in the early 14th century and Edward the third decided he'd build a house there and Richard decided that he would embellish that house further and unfortunately we can only really get to understand anything about it through the building accounts of the office of works but we know that the place was probably moated was entered over a bridge with a great gatehouse there was a hole in a chapel as you'd expect various chambers for the king and queen lots of lodgings for the court and then the word the normal buildings kitchens stables and and the like and Edward the third spent a lot of time there in his old age in fact he died there in 1377 and richard ii made some additions which I think again helped illustrate this change that happened in his reign and the thing that I'm most interested in is he built a luxurious little sort of love nest for himself on an island in the middle of the Thames in front of the palace this place had several rooms heated by fireplaces at his own kitchen he had a new barge made for himself so that he could be rode across from the mainland to this island and a landing stage was made there to help him get there in comfort and he made a bathroom lined with tiles and I think these glimpses of this rather somewhat must be rather an extraordinary little sort of luxurious hideaway in the middle of the Thames help us understand what happened next because when his wife Anne of Bohemia died Richard in a fit of grief maybe a surface partially fit of lunacy also ordered the whole place to be knocked down everything that the island which is called in the night was knocked down the house was knocked down the site was completely razed so we have no chance of visualizing what this was like but what we can do is we can go to Kenilworth Castle today this is the castle that survives now the MIR is now unfortunately grazed by cattle but you can see whether Muir was this is the great lake but on the other side of the the Muir was this which was a little and retreat only you only got to buy water from the castle and this must have been very very similar to the retreats that Richard ii made at shiiin this one is almost exactly and contemporary royal one because john have gone to owned the castle this is this is actually constructed by and henry v but and is exactly the same idea so this is this sense of luxury in the sense of privacy that starts to be important for these monarchs now there was a second palace built at xin after richard ii death and this was actually built on the site of the demolished building and begun by henry v in 1414 and was continued until his death in 1422 and it was then finished by Henry the sixth and it's gone but we do know what it looked like and this is a painting of Henry the fifths a palace it was burnt out under Henry the seventh and these turrets and twiddles on the top were added but the basic structure of what you see here is the Palace built by Henry the fifth at Xin and you can see it here in a 16th century drawing by vin Garda and in just one moment when it returns to the land of the living you will see the way that the were it was a very complicated plan with lots of windows looking out lots of bays and bows and battlements and we have managed to get a plan of it and you can see here look how credibly complicated this plan is here with the courtyard in the center in visualizing what this place was actually like you could go to this castle here is it walk with in Northumberland here which is built a little bit before Henry v builds Sheen but is stone as was the machine and was built on this very sort of complicated plan you see here the plan you can see how complicated it is and you can see inside here how the how the rooms are incredibly ingeniously actually laid out so this building had walk with I think was a very similar retreat to the one that was created by Henry the fifth at Sheen the man who's in charge of building Sheen was the King's Master Masons Stephen lot and I think Sheen was his masterpiece his we have his will when he died in 1418 we learned that he had rooms actually in Sheen in the Royal Palace and in those rooms we know from his will he kept a chest which contained all the detailed drawings that had been used to build this extraordinary to build this extraordinary Palace which we're just going to have on the screen again in a second here and interestingly he bequeathed those drawings to his fellow Mason Thomas Mapleton who was the person who was to succeed him and I think that this you know gives us an insight into the sort of the architectural genius that that created this place but the level of personal interest shown by Henry the fifth who we normally associated being a very sort of militaristic King in building this palace is indicated by something else between 14 14 and 14 19 the Kings spent eight thousand pounds on building Sheen and another two thousand pounds on building two religious houses next door to it you can see the remains of one of these religious houses from this side here that that was built by Henry at the same time so that was 8,000 pounds on the house and 2,000 pounds on the on the religious houses seven thousand three hundred and sixty-three pounds of that expenditure came from the King's personal fund the chamber and did not come from the office of works and what this means as I explained earlier is that the king henry v was controlling personally the expenditure in building this beautiful building and i would use this as another piece of evidence to show the change in the nature of the interest of monarchs in what they were building and the way they were living so while the period that we've been looking at this evening is not notable for a large number of important buildings it is I think very important for these fundamental changes that took place in the nature of the royal household and primarily we can see the development of what we can recognize as a court and with it an elevation of the personal status of the king and in this an architectural aggrandize Monteux of royal buildings we see this at Westminster Hall we see this in the personal personal luxury that was created Sheen and and also at Kenilworth now it wouldn't take very long this evening to jump on a train from Thameslink and nip down to Eltham Eltham was a palace that was enjoyed by both Edward the third and Richard the second although if you go there today you won't see a great deal of their work what does survive however is the most important remaining architectural work of the Lancastrian Kings which you see on the screen here which is the Eltham Palace Great Hall this was built in the 14th 60s and you can see here how Edward the fourth takes a direct quotation from the from Westminster Hall building a roof that is I mean really incredibly and similar obvious nothing like as big but this building I think really is the building in which we can see surviving building which we can see for the first time the fusion of the monumental public magnificence of monarchy with an increasing emphasis on the private and personal space occupied by the king and as we will find out in my lecture next week this is the next time this is the great theme that was developed under Henry the seventh and Henry the eighth the ability to create intense personal magnificence with intense private pleasure thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 14,957

Keywords: architecture, architect, english architecture, london architecture, royal architecture, architectural history, british architecture, palaces, castles, mansions, royal houses, royal building, royal construction, richard, edward, plantagenets, lancastrian kings, medieval architecture, medieval building, medieval history, medievla art, gresham built environment, built environment, buildings, gresham, gresham lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture

Id: yT4Jha6oayM

Length: 50min 56sec (3056 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 02 2014