This article focuses on Bramshill, Hampshire, one of the most important country houses of the early modern period. From 1605 Bramshill was the home of Edward la Zouche (1556–1625), 11th Baron Zouche – a major courtier during the reigns of Elizabeth i and James i – and was reworked in phases up to and just beyond his death. Based on rare-surviving documents from the 1630s as well as analysis of the house’s fabric, this article reconstructs Bramshill’s plan and interiors as they existed in the late Jacobean and Caroline years. It reveals the arrangement of two significant state apartments – for king and queen – and also the lodgings of the owner, his family and guests, as well as service areas. The rich source material additionally allows the furnishings to be analysed. By using Bramshill as an example, the article aims to shed light on English country houses of similar size and date. The early modern period is important as representing an apogee in the history of country house building – reflecting the ambition of owners such as Lord Zouche and the popularity of the royal progress. Visitors to Bramshill in the early seventeenth century included James i, Charles i and Queen Henrietta Maria.

Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

A forgotten aspect of Henry viii’s architectural patronage and of the panoply of early modern European warfare is that of the timber lodging. Through two key case studies, this paper explores King Henry viii’s timber lodgings and demonstrates that not only did they form an important class of ephemeral architecture that successfully employed innovative technologies to make such structures portable for military campaigns, they were also used in conjunction with the royal tents to provide comfortable and secure battlefield accommodation for the king. The paper recreates their construction, functions, symbolism and elaborate appearance, revealing that the earlier timber lodging comprised a two-chambered wooden building which was painted externally to resemble brickwork and which was used at the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai in 1513, while the later timber lodging was used at the siege of Boulogne in 1544. Through a close analysis of the surviving accounts for the making of the 1544 structure, the article demonstrates that it was an extravagant and architecturally pretentious building that combined the martial imagery of late medieval Gothic with refined touches of classicism. The paper also shows that the lodging used in 1544 is both recorded in the posthumous 1547 inventory of Henry viii’s possessions and appears in the engravings of the Cowdray House murals, held by the Society of Antiquaries of London.