The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley
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was central to this. Being on an island, England had to use the seas in order to trade. It was not unique in being a seafaring nation, but, it was unique in that trade with countries other than Scotland had to be seaborne. If exports were bound for Calais, they might as well be bound for Bordeaux, too – or for that matter Bombay or Buenos Aires. In this way, once Britain had secured the freedom of the seas after its European wars it was in a position to build up a dominating global trading network.
So in terms of fundamentals, England, on a temperate and fertile island, with rich mineral resources, a powerful sense of national destiny and a strong maritime culture, was blessed with a number of advantages. These contributed in some measure to England being a populous country. Changes in its population have also had a fundamental impact on its history and architecture. In particular, relatively rapid population growth in the century before 1300, between the early 1500s and 1650, and then exponential growth after 1760 have had a wide range of important impacts, many of which have determined the narrative in this book.
A central feature of English social structure is the rights and privileges of the individual over the group or over the state. This leads to a particular view of property rights. Nowhere else in Western Europe could an owner dispose of his property with such freedom as in England; everywhere else the proportion that could be freely sold was limited by law and children had some claim over their parents’ property. In England, even with primogeniture, which became the rule from the 16th century, it was possible to sell at any time, effectively disinheriting the following generation. So English land and buildings were commodities that could be easily transferred, and all property was purchasable. Individualistic property ownership lies at the heart of the history of English building.
On four occasions in English history property transfer took place on a national scale. The first was the plunder of Anglo-Saxon estates by the Normans, in which the majority of English land changed hands; soon after there was another, less traumatic, transfer – the granting of substantial estates to the Church from the Crown and the aristocracy. By 1200 this had created the skeleton of the medieval landscape, comprising a series of great estates owned by Crown, aristocracy, bishops and abbots, a situation that remained until the 1530s, when Henry VIII triggered a third great shift. The Dissolution of the Monasteries saw a reversal of the process started during the early Middle Ages, secularising the ownership of both rural and urban estates. Despite the disruption of the Civil War and Commonwealth, which saw an assault on the lands of the Crown and bishops, the Dissolution set the scene for the whole of the period up to the First World War. After 1918 came a fourth transfer. The great estates of the aristocracy, now no longer economically beneficial for their owners, were largely, but not completely, dispersed, with ownership transferring to smaller operators and being sold for urban expansion.
In tandem with these major changes in land ownership were cyclical management decisions by landlords. From the Conquest to the First World War, landlords chose either to manage their lands themselves or to rent them out to tenants, depending on which was more profitable. So, for instance, between about 1184 and 1215 landlords took their lands in hand, but after the Black Death – between around 1380 and 1410 – lands were rented out to tenant farmers.
The ordinary English people who were involved on a micro level in these changes in land tenure were, from at least the 13th century, individualists. They were socially and geographically mobile, market-oriented and acquisitive.14 They exploited the opportunities presented by the redrawing of property ownership and in due course transformed the practice of agriculture, making England the most productive country in Europe per head.
How English Buildings Looked
Explaining how the look of English buildings changed lies at the heart of this book. But it opens up some big questions. Is changing architectural fashion down to individual whim or an expression of something deeper, a physical representation of contemporary society? Do, for instance, Georgian terraced houses, 15th-century parish churches and Victorian town halls in some way express the society in which they were produced? Is architectural innovation generated by craftsmen and designers or requested by kings, bishops, aristocrats or industrialists? Is the appearance of a building driven by its function or does a desire for it to look a certain way come first? Do engineering advances create new styles or do engineers devise ways of facilitating aesthetic effects? These questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow, but there are some general points that need to be made about how English buildings look.
Roman Catholicism was a globalising force, bringing remarkable stability across the whole of Europe from the 5th until the 16th century. There was a unity of ideas that engendered cultural conformity – and this applies to building, as to much else. English medieval building was in the mainstream of European Christian architecture, if distinctive and recognisable. The English monarchy played an important part in this, on a European scale. Starting, perhaps, with Alfred the Great’s building of Winchester Cathedral, through Edward the Confessor’s and Henry III’s Westminster Abbey, and culminating in Henry VII’s works of piety, the English monarchy was consistently among the greatest architectural patrons in medieval Christendom.
After the death of Henry VIII, who channelled much Church wealth into his own buildings, English royal building became overshadowed by the architectural efforts of courtiers and eclipsed by the buildings of foreign monarchs. It was only under George IV that the Crown started to build ambitiously again; and then it was the Crown, and not the monarch, for George’s work at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace was paid for by parliament. Thus, after the Reformation, although architects who worked for the Crown are important in the story of English building, royal buildings themselves seldom are.
In the 16th century, better surviving documentation means that we can begin to understand what people actually thought about architecture. This has led many to see a fundamental change in people’s attitudes to building during the Tudor period. However, as this book will argue, John of Gaunt was probably no less interested, or informed, about building in the 1370s than was Henry, Prince of Wales, in the 1610s. Only we know more about Prince Henry’s interests as they have been written down. It is thus a fundamental premise of this book that people like to build and the rich, in particular, like to know about building, as it gives them pleasure and status. After all, only really rich people can build really big buildings.15 Some of the wealthy people significant in the story of English architecture are known as individuals; many are not. One of the important characteristics of English building is the consistently growing class of wealthy urban merchants, shopkeepers and professionals who demanded new types of building. Their rural counterparts were important, too, in certain periods driving innovation more urgently than the big landowners.
Burghley House, not some misunderstood attempt to imitate foreign buildings or styles but a native way of building.
Some patrons travelled and wanted to imitate what they saw abroad; some even sent their architects to learn new foreign techniques. This does not mean that English architecture is just a poor imitation of designs developed elsewhere, neither properly understood nor executed. The old view of Gothic architecture was that it was copied from France, but imperfectly, and that as classical architecture came to be admired the Elizabethans muddled it up and ‘got it wrong’. These views underestimate the insular traditions, as well as the inventiveness of English craftsmen and designers. New architectural languages were not simply copied – that was seldom, if ever, the intention. In reality, ideas, motifs and elements were absorbed and recast as new ways of building were being created.16
On a number of occasions new architectural languages were imported in a measured form that was then embellished and decorated. This reflects an underlying preference for ornamentation. The severity of Norman Winchester Cathedral (fig. 44), for instance, soon gives way to the exuberance of the nave at Durham Cathedral (fig. 51), something, perhaps, more florid and native, while the introduction of austere classical forms at Longleat House, Wiltshire (p. 212), turns into the encrustations of a house like Wollaton