Look at me!
The trouble with history is that it's just one thing after another. Endless dates, monarchs and would be monarchs, all presented by earnest people in Tweed trying to convince us that this stuff is important and interconnected.
Luckily period house enthusiasts have a useful shorthand that simply labels houses as Georgian, Victorian or whatever. We know what we mean, and hopefully most of us can remember that Elizabeth was in charge well before Victoria. But convenient as these labels are, it's fair to wonder if architectural styles really changed each time a new monarch warmed the throne.
So let's start at the very beginning. This, if you want to talk about houses rather than palaces, churches, and the like, means Tudor. Most homes before this were basic shelters, and unsurprising few survive. Ordinary folk lived at the mercy of the Church or the Nobility, but in the 15th Century things changed forever.
The Church's power started to dissolve, literally by 1541 and the final Dissolution of the Monasteries. The Black Death stalked the land, killing so many that those who survived could ask for more than gruel and hardship. Land, in fact. The middle class had started to arrive and as ever, the first thing they wanted was somewhere nice to live.
So by the time Henry VII took both hook and crook to claim the throne in 1485 England was a melting pot, with the possibility of wealth and power for everyone and anyone. This was the start of the Tudor dynasty that ran until Elizabeth's death in 1603. If you know bit about architecture you'll know that our grand buildings changed beyond recognition in just over a century. But what of ordinary houses?
A little light browsing on the internet will tell you Tudor houses had fireplaces with ornate chimneys, newfangled glass and brick, and lots of carved timbers and pointy arches. On that basis Pugin's Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament) was a typical Victorian House. The problem is that if you think "Tudor" a vision of Hampton Court pops into your head, in its day perhaps the finest 'new' building in the world.
In reality, ancestors of more modest means built with what they had to hand. England was still heavily forested, so chopping down ancient oaks and sticking up massive vertical timbers made perfect sense. Cutting them into smaller timbers to make them go further would be madness when you only had an axe to cut with and there was oak everywhere. And even if you tried to make a more lightweight timber frame, nobody had really got to grips with horizontal, let alone diagonal bracing, so it would blow down in the first storm. Plentiful timber also made for fine "Crown Post" roof frames, decoratively carved given that ceilings had yet to be invented. Ornamentation still looked to the Gothic, which to our eyes looks Ecclesiastical, hardly surprising since the Church had built pretty much everything for the last 500 years. Thatch for the roof, wattle and daub between the timbers, shutters or animal skins over the windows and there's a typical early Tudor house. You might even paint it black and white, although many suspect this was left to the Victorians, with brighter colours more popular at the time. Bricks? Glass? Chimneys? You're as likely to see a car parked outside.
As the 16th Century rolled on, especially after Elizabeth made it to the throne, things started really looking up. The English got wealthier, and people travelled in pursuit of riches and trade. Conveniently the Byzantines had pushed the remains of the Roman Empire back from Constantinople to Italy, so the Renaissance was in full swing. Visitors from England realised we were still clinging onto the middle ages and had the cash to do something about it
So at last our windows start to get glazed, and from the east of the country bricks creep in, thinner than we're used to and irregularly laid. Thatch starts to give way to shingles (basically oak tiles), and at last there were fireplaces, chimneys and the occasional first floor. Over little more than a hundred years, homes for the common man had not just appeared but gone from something we would consider to be little more than a barn to a recognisable family home. The finest houses even showed signs of symmetry and design, rather than just being built ad hoc. And as understanding moved on and timber became more valuable, timber framing got a little lighter and curved cross bracing appeared, which wealthier owners used as a chance to make houses more ornate. You didn't expect a society famed for jewelled codpieces to go home to a plain little box, did you?
So we arrive at the end of the Tudors' reign with Hardwick Hall ("more glass than wall") as the Swiss Re "Gherkin" of its time. Will future historians try to understand 20th century domesticity by comparing the Palace of Westminster to the Gherkin? Yes they might, because many Victorian villas have something of Pugin's masterpiece about them, and the unblinking, glazed elevations of many modern houses share a little of the Gherkin's DNA. Similarly, although Hardwick Hall may have had nothing in common with ordinary Elizabethans' homes, it pointed the way forward towards the Georgians' classical obsession. Grand buildings also get documented and preserved, where ordinary family homes reflect more prosaic needs, local materials and designs, so they get forgotten and endlessly altered. This means any "ordinary" Tudor houses that have survived will have upper floors, ceilings, glass windows and more, that would make them unrecognisable to the original builders.
But Tudor architecture, with its massive timbers, thatched roofs and pointed arches already seemed old fashioned to the Elizabethans who had developed a taste for a classical look closer to the Jacobean style that was to follow. Next month we'll see how buildings became ever more ornate, culminating in the Baroque, and Christopher Wren's Queen Anne Country Houses that many still feel are the finest buildings ever to grace the English Countryside.
