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Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and architectural innovation in late-Elizabethan England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

John Gurney
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Extract

Ashley House in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (Fig. 1), is best known to architectural historians for its detailed and informative building accounts, which date from the years 1602 to 1607. The house was demolished in 1925 without adequate record, and scholars have tended to assume that it was built to a quite unexceptional H-plan design and was, therefore, of no great architectural interest.

A recently-discovered contemporary first-floor plan of Ashley House shows that it was in fact a building of considerable importance. The plan (Fig. 2) demonstrates that Ashley was remarkably similar in layout to both Charlton House and Somerhill in Kent, two Jacobean houses justly famous for their innovative, axially-placed halls (Figs 3 and 4). This architectural development, as is now generally recognized, represented a significant departure from the linear house-plans most often associated with traditional, hierarchical household arrangements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 43 , 2000 , pp. 113 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2000

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References

Notes

1 Surrey History Centre (SHC) MS 454. The accounts have been published as Ashley House Building Accounts 1602–1607, ed. M. E.|Blackman (Guildford: Surrey Record Society, vol. XXIX, 1977)Google Scholar. They are discussed in Airs, Malcolm, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History (Stroud, 1995), pp. 60, 100, 123, 151, 198Google Scholar.

2 See, for instance, Howard Colvin’s review of Blackman, , Building Accounts, in Southern History , I (1979), pp. 244-45Google Scholar.

3 East Sussex Record Office (ESRO), GLY 302. A contemporary inscription on the plan confirms that it is ‘the plott of Ashley house’. The building accounts, which contain references to small windows at the ‘upper’ and ‘nether’ end of the great chamber, set either side of the ‘square’ and ‘carell’ windows of the chamber, as well as references to the ‘gable ende over the greate chamber square wyndoe’, also suggest that the first-floor great chamber was, as indicated on the plan, axially-placed: Blackman, Building Accounts, pp. 9-11, 29, 52-53.

4 Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), The Monuments of East London (London, HMSO, 1930), p. 34 Google Scholar; Summerson, John, ‘The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe’, Walpole Society, XL (1966)Google Scholar (henceforward referred to as Thorpe Drawings), pp. 99-100 and plate 96.

5 Summerson, John, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (8th edn, Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 67 Google Scholar, 79; Girouard, Mark, Robert Smythson and the English Country House (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 145, 153Google Scholar; Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nikolaus, London 2: South, Buildings of England (1983), pp. 30, 250Google Scholar, Cooper, Nicholas, Houses of the Centry 1480-1680 (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 124, 135-41, 155-59, 196, 285Google Scholar. I am indebted to Nicholas Cooper for discussing with me the significance of axial halls.

6 Girouard, Stnythson, p. 288. For the date of Newton’s acquisition of Charlton, see London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) E/MWC/14, 16, 17; RCHME, East London, p. 31; Tipping, H. Avray, English Homes, 9 vols (London, 1920-37), 1, p. 328 Google Scholar.

7 Newman, John, West Kent and the Weald, Buildings of England (2nd edn, 1976), pp. 536–37 Google Scholar; English Heritage statutory lists: Somerhill Park, Capel, Kent.

8 Faulkner, Patrick A., ‘Nottingham House: John Thorpe and his Relation to Kensington Palace’, Archaeological Journal, 107 (1950), pp. 66–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Cherry, and Pevsner, , London 2: South, pp. 30, 455Google Scholar; Cooper, , Houses of the Gentry, p. 136 Google Scholar.

10 Blackman, Building Accounts, ix-x; Stone, Lawrence Cf., Family and Fortune (Oxford, 1973), pp. 251-52Google Scholar.

11 MacCaffrey, W. T., ‘Talbot and Stanhope: an Episode in Elizabethan Politics’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 33 (1960), pp. 73–85 (p. 75)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasler, P. W. (ed.), The House of Commons 1518-1603, 3 vols (London, HMSO, 1981), in, pp. 436, 437, 440-41, 441-42, 520Google Scholar; Dictionary of National Biography ‘John Stanhope, 1545?–1621; Blackman, , Building Accounts, IX Google Scholar.

12 ESRO, GLY 303; Cf.Blackman, , Building Accounts, IX Google Scholar, where 143 acres is given.

13 Cf.Mercer, Eric, ‘The Houses of the Gentry’, Past and Present, 5 (1954), pp. 17–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Girouard, , Smythson, p. 287 Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., pp. 287-88.

15 Ibid., pp. 131, 145, 153-54, 287-88; Girouard, Mark, Hardwick Hall (National Trust Guide, 1989), pp. 15, 18Google Scholar.

16 Girouard, Smythson, p. 288.

17 MacCaffrey, ‘Talbot and Stanhope’, pp. 73-85; Public Record Office (PRO) SP12/252/45, 46; SP12/ 271/30.

18 Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), with Derbyshire Archaeological Society, A Calendar of the Shrewsbury and Talbot Papers, 2 vols (London, HMSO, 1966-71), 11, pp. 159, 160Google Scholar; MacCaffrey, ‘Talbot and Stanhope’, p. 75.

19 HMC Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (London, HMSO, 1911), p. 454 Google Scholar.

20 Girouard, Smythson, pp. 287-88; Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (3rd edn, New Haven and London, 1995), p. 979 Google Scholar; Summerson, Architecture, p. 79; Newman, , West Kent and the Weald, pp. 536–37 Google Scholar; Andor Gomme, ‘Portumna: Ultramarine Ancestors and Cousins’ (forthcoming). I am extremely grateful to Professor Gomme for providing me with a copy of this paper.

21 The only reference in the building accounts to a ‘plott’ is in connexion with carpenters’ work in the house: Blackman, Building Accounts, p. 56.

22 Sheffield Archives BFM 2/128 (Richard Mason to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 12 March 1594-95); British Library (BL) Add. MS 41,655, fol. 87; SHC MS 454. Mark Girouard suggests that Manor Lodge ‘can reasonably be attributed’ to Robert Smythson: Girouard, Smythson, p. 288.

23 Thorpe Drawings, p. 4.

24 BL Add. MS 45,902, fols 11, 16, 24, 33-33V, 34, 37, 42, 48: Stone, Family and Fortune, p. 258; Rosenheim, James M., The Townshends of Raynham (Middletown, Connecticut, 1989), pp. 8–9 Google Scholar, 13. For Raynham, see Bradfer-Lawrence, H. L., ‘The Building of Raynham Hall’, Norfolk Archaeology, XXIII (1927), pp. 93–146 Google Scholar; Harris, John, ‘Raynham Hall’, Archaeological Journal, 118 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Airs, Malcolm, ‘The Designing of Five East Anglian Houses, 1505-1637’, Architectural History, 21 (1978), pp. 58–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Linda, ‘Some Documentary Evidence for the Building of Raynham Hall’, Architectural History, 32 (1989), pp. 52–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 BL Add. MSS 41,655, fol. 59; 45,902, fols 1-48.

26 BL Add. MS 45,902, fols 19, 45. It should not of course be assumed that this was the well-known Coppin house.

27 ESRO, GLY 223.

28 Smith, Peter, for the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, Houses of the Welsh Countryside (2nd edn, London, HMSO, 1988), p. 242 Google Scholar. Cf. Gomme, ‘Portumna’, for connexions between Plas Teg and Somerhill.

29 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 158-59, 285; personal communication from Professor Andor Gomme. Early examples of central halls parallel with the front and entered from the centre include Bidston in Cheshire and Westwood Park in Worcestershire.

30 Palladio, Andrea, The Four Books of Architecture (Isaac Ware edition, 1738, reprint New York 1965), Second Book, plate 42 Google Scholar. Cf. Thorpe Drawings, p. 29.

31 Blackman, Building Accounts, p. 56.

32 Thorpe Drawings, plate 92; RCHME East London, pp. 32, 33. The interior of Somerhill has now been greatly altered’, see plan in the National Monuments Record.

33 Some more conservative owners might of course still try to reconcile improved first-floor arrangements with a conventional ground-floor plan: see, for instance, Thorpe’s plan of Sir George St Poll’s Lincolnshire house, with its axial great chamber above a conventionally-placed great hall, in Thorpe Drawings, plate 59. The position of the fireplace in the great chamber at Ashley confirms the view that the hall in this house was, like those of Charlton and Somerhill, axially placed.

34 Cf.Friedman, Alice T., House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago, 1989), pp. 46–47 Google Scholar, 149-51 for a discussion of the position of women, and their use of social space, in elite households.

35 BL Add. MS 33,588, fols 44-49V. For an indication of the size of Lady Berkeley’s household see Add. MS 41,306, fols 105V-110.

36 Cf. Mercer, ‘Houses of the Gentry’, p. 17, for first-floor improvements brought about by the introduction of axial halls.