During the fifteenth century a further advance was made in the amenities of house planning, and although considerable attention was still paid to defensive precautions, there was nevertheless a great expansion in accommodation, and a more determined effort towards obtaining a distinct architectural effect. A certain symmetry of treatment is almost inherent in architecture. It is to be found in the early keeps, where the shallow buttresses or piers and the windows are to a large extent symmetrically placed. But no attempt was made at that time, nor indeed for some centuries, to give a symmetrical disposition to the buildings as a whole. Ranges of rooms were either built entirely new or added to existing buildings as convenience seemed to dictate, and it has already been observed that this haphazard method of planning was extravagant and wasteful. In the fifteenth century there was a noticeable tendency towards symmetry, which easily led in the sixteenth to that very exact balance of part with part so characteristic of the Italian manner, which was to exert an overpowering influence on English designers. Examples of this tendency are to be seen in the beautiful keep at Warkworth in Northumberland (1435–40, Fig. 45, p. 82); in the ruins of Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, built by Sir William Hastings about the year 1460 (Figs. 47, 48, pp. 84, 85); and at Cowdray in Sussex, also built in the later years of the same century.

The endeavour to achieve effect by an ordered grouping of the masses of a building is a higher proof of architectural skill than merely to ornament with attractive detail its various parts. Such an attempt, although not very determined, had been made at Kenilworth in the closing years of the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth not only was this idea still further pursued, but a softer and more refined appearance was given to the detail of ornament. The somewhat gaunt character which accorded so well with sterner times often gave way to a pleasant play of fancy, and to that careful and painstaking design which is observable in the Perpendicular style. Men began to desire to have fine houses, the fear of damage and destruction was growing less, and the whole tendency was towards increased refinement. The change is visible in the great manor house of South Wingfield in Derbyshire, where there is not only much charming detail, but an obvious attempt to obtain effect by the handling of masses of building, notably in boldly projecting the garde-robes and chimney-stacks from the faces of the walls. Irregularity is still the prevailing characteristic, but among it may be observed a certain striving after rhythmical treatment.

South Wingfield rivals its more famous neighbour, Haddon, in extent; but in some respects it is less interesting, inasmuch as it is more ruinous, and has not the same variety of work to link it up with all periods from the thirteenth century onwards. Wingfield is practically all of one date, having been built by Ralph Cromwell, Lord Treasurer to Henry VI., about 1435–40. A glance at the plan (Fig. 35) shows how ample the accommodation must have been before the house was destroyed. There are two large courts, the outer (or southern), formed of barns, stables, guard-houses and other inferior buildings, the inner (or northern), of the hall, kitchen, and the chambers occupied by the family. This arrangement is an advance in classification, and it is one which controlled the planning of some of the finest of the mansions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Here, however, the courts are irregular in shape and disposition; there is no attempt at symmetry, nor much at alignment. The outer court is entered at the south-east corner, and although the gateway to the inner is fairly central, and is placed almost opposite to the porch of the hall, there is little of that accuracy of planning which marks the great houses of a hundred and fifty years later. Some attempt at alignment there is, for standing in the south court, the eye obtains a vista through the large arch of the gatehouse, across the north court, through the porch and the doors beyond, and so on to the distant woods. There is a curious variation from the customary relation of the great hall and kitchens, caused by the insertion on the upper floor of a large state apartment between the hall and the servants’ quarters. This is an arrangement not usually found either before or after this period. It does not mark the first step in a new departure. The hall stands on a vaulted undercroft, and must have been a fine room; it measures 71 ft. 7 in. long by 36 ft. 5 in. wide, and is considerably larger than the hall at Haddon, which is 43 ft. by 28 ft. It is now roofless and ruinous, but the bay window (Fig. 36), and porch, which still survive, are fine examples of late Perpendicular work, as also is the adjacent gable of the state apartment (Fig. 37). There is nothing to indicate where the hall fireplace was situated. The probability is that it was in one of the long side walls, but even as late as a hundred years after this time fires were sometimes placed upon central hearths, and it may have been so here.

The apartments devoted to the use of the family, which we should expect to find at the upper end of the hall (in this case the east end), did in fact once exist, as may be seen by various indications on the building itself and the adjacent ground, but they have all been destroyed, leaving their extent and nature as a matter for conjecture. They were reached by means of the circular staircase at the north-east corner of the hall (see plan, Fig. 35), which still retains the doorways that led into them.

The undercroft beneath the hall is one of the finest pieces of work left (Fig. 38). It is vaulted with heavy stone ribs springing from columns down the middle, and responds on the walls. The ribs meet at the summit on large traceried bosses, and the junction of the ceiling-ribs with the wall-ribs is emphasised in certain cases by carved grotesques. In spite of the care bestowed upon the work, there is no reason to suppose that the undercroft was put to noble uses; it was in all probability merely a cellar and store place. It is approached from four directions—externally from under the porch, and through the east wall, whence there is easy access to the north-east stair-turret: and internally from one of the rooms beneath the state chamber, and from the bay of the hall (Fig. 39); as the buffet often stood in the hall bay, this staircase gave easy access for replenishing the buffet from the cellar. The kitchen department is well supplied with rooms and with large fireplaces. A straight passage led from the middle of the lower end of the hall direct to the kitchen. It passed beneath the state apartment, and along the side of a small room which was probably the “survaying-place” or serving-room, since the wall is pierced with two large openings, through which the dishes would be passed, and thence carried to the hall. The kitchen itself has three huge fireplaces, in two of which there are ovens. In later years it became customary to place the ovens in a room by themselves, called the “pastry.” Some of the walls and fireplaces in this part of the house are clearly after-insertions, and point to the fact that the original means of cooking were inadequate for the needs of the large household, which found accommodation in the long ranges of rooms most of which are now destroyed.

The wing on the west of the inner court is traditionally assigned to the use of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was detained in confinement here from 1569 onwards, under the care of George, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, whose ancestor, the second earl, had purchased the estate from the builder of the house. An interesting light is thrown upon the sanitary habits of the time by the fact that three weeks after her installation at Wingfield she fell ill; two physicians deputed by the Privy Council reported that the sanitary conditions of her quarters were bad, whereupon her custodian, the Earl of Shrewsbury, retorted that the evil state of her rooms arose from the uncleanly habits of her own retinue. There seems to be little doubt that in Elizabeth’s time the care bestowed upon sanitary arrangements was not nearly so great as in the preceding centuries. An examination of house plans of the end of the sixteenth century shows that the isolation of garde-robes or the grouping of them together in separate towers was no longer carried out; they were often placed with a view to convenience of access regardless of their unsavoury characteristics. In the case of the particular complaint at Wingfield, however, the inference is that they were not sufficiently convenient for the views of Mary’s household, and yet the west wing, which she is said to have occupied, is well furnished with garde-robes placed in the large square projections on this face, two in each on each floor.

The gatehouses have each a large and a small archway (Fig. 40), the large one for vehicles, the small for foot passengers. This double archway was now coming into vogue, and was very generally adopted in gatehouses of the fifteenth century. It indicates, among other things, that vehicles had come into more general use. Adjoining the outer gatehouse is a barn, still in excellent preservation, and offering an interesting example of this kind of building.

Although the accommodation at Wingfield is more elaborate than in houses of earlier date, it is still rather roughly and unscientifically thrown together, involving much waste both of space and material. It is also worthy of note that in spite of its great extent and its magnificent rooms, the only staircases were the old-fashioned circular turret stairs of no great diameter. There was indeed as yet no other fashion to follow, for the ancient newel stair held its own until the time of Elizabeth, when it was suddenly and without any transitional form replaced by wide wooden staircases in straight flights. England has no examples of the magnificent development of circular staircases which are to be seen in so many of the great châteaux of France.

Wingfield, it is also to be noted, was carefully built for defence. It stands nearly at the end of a spur of land, and the ground on three of its sides slopes steeply away, rendering access difficult. At the north end, where the ground is in part rather flatter, it is protected by a deep dry moat and a wall. The south side is the most level, and consequently the outer and inferior court was placed on this side. Even supposing that an attacking force gained possession of this court, there was still the mass of its north wing (Fig. 40) between them and the principal part of the house. The only internal communication between the two courts was through an exceedingly narrow doorway leading to a narrow crooked passage. The external walls of the north court are practically devoid of windows on the ground floor; those of the hall and adjoining rooms looked out on to a garden which lay between them and the high wall overhanging the moat. Here, then, as in other houses, the hall was placed in a secure position, and one in which it was possible to make use of large windows. That this part of the house was tolerably secure is proved by the fact that so much of it remains; for when the place was besieged and captured during the Civil Wars, it was the south court through which the breach was made and entrance was effected. It is to the Civil Wars that Wingfield owes its destruction, for, having caused some trouble to the Parliamentary forces, it was ordered to be “slighted,” and was so far destroyed as to be rendered uninhabitable. It passed from the descendants of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and the hall was for a time patched up as a dwelling. Subsequently it was further dismantled in order to build a new house at the foot of the hill. Since then time, as destructive as siege-guns, has wrought further havoc, for no more than “summer’s honey breath” can an unprotected building

But fortunately in recent years the owners have realised this, and have taken what steps they can to arrest further decay.

Another interesting and remarkable house of this period is Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire, which was built by the same Lord Treasurer who built Wingfield. In Elizabeth’s time several of her great officials built more than one large house, and the fact that Ralph Cromwell did so in the fifteenth century, seems to indicate that house-building had already begun to be a pleasure for the great and wealthy, and was not merely undertaken of necessity. It is difficult to say for certain how large the house at Tattershall was originally, or of what its accommodation consisted. There are considerable remains of walls extending over a large area, but the only habitable portion left, if we except the small house now occupied by the caretaker, is the splendid brick tower built after the fashion of a luxurious keep. The reversion to the earlier type is curious, and it seems tolerably certain that, whatever the buildings may have been which have disappeared, the tower was the chief part of the house (Fig. 41). It rises sheer from the ground to a vast height—some 120 ft. to the top of the turrets, and more than 100 ft. to the battlements. It can only be called “vast” speaking in terms of English architecture of the time; dwellers in American cities of to-day where buildings soar to 400 ft., would regard it as puny. It contained, in addition to the cellar, four lofty storeys (of which the second and third are shown on Fig. 42), and above them a flat roof with a rampart walk. Each floor consisted of one large room about 38 ft. by 22 ft., supplemented by small chambers in three of the turrets, and by one or two others in the walls, which are some 12 ft. thick. There are garde-robes on each floor (except the first) and on the battlements; each of the large rooms has a fireplace, and access from floor to floor is obtained by a circular staircase, 10 ft. in diameter. The rooms are approached from the stairs through vaulted lobbies, and on the third floor through a long vaulted passage in the thickness of the wall.

The accommodation is of much the same character and extent as in the early keeps, and although the windows are larger, there are but three two-light windows to the large rooms, except to that on the ground floor, which has four. The workmanship is excellent. The passages and window-recesses are vaulted in brick and are adorned with many shields of arms, as also are the chimney-pieces. Everything tends to show that the amenities of life were respected, and it is not a little odd that so much care should have been spent upon the embellishment of a dwelling which, although lordly in character, must have been gloomy and uncomfortable, much more so than the spacious manor house at Wingfield. It is, of course, possible that among the buildings which have disappeared, there may have been more commodious and cheerful rooms, but there is no record of them; and it is clear from the amount of care spent upon the tower, that it was intended for ordinary occupation.

The jambs of the doors and windows and the tracery of the latter, as well as the machicolations and the coping of the parapet, are all of stone; so too are the chimney-pieces. But the walls are of brick, and, as already mentioned, so is the vaulting of the passages; the whole work being a curious mixture of wrought stone and brick. The brick staircase has stone steps and a stone handrail built into the wall (Figs. 43, 44).

The whole place is an interesting example of a reversion to out-of-date arrangements leading back to the past, combined with a desire for beautiful embellishment which points the way to the magnificence which was to become prevalent in the future.

Another interesting mixture of the ancient and the modern is to be seen at Warkworth Castle in Northumberland. This was a very old foundation retaining much early work in its walls and gatehouse, but about the same time when the Lord Treasurer was building Wingfield, i.e., 1435–40, one of the Percies, Henry, the son of Hotspur, rebuilt the keep at Warkworth. It stands on a steep mound at one end of the castle enclosure, overlooking the little town (Fig. 45). It is planned in the form of a large square with a great bay projecting from the middle of each side, and within this symmetrical outline are ingeniously packed all the rooms which then went to compose a complete house (Fig. 46). It has cellars and a great hall, with buttery and kitchens at one end, while from the other, access is obtained to the chapel and great chamber. On the same floor, occupying odd spaces where they could be contrived, are a few smaller rooms suitable for bedrooms. Numerous small staircases, mostly circular, but some comprised of straight runs in the thickness of the walls, lead up and down in a bewildering fashion. In the centre of the building is an open shaft giving a modicum of light and air to the adjacent rooms. The whole building is a triumph of ingenuity, but a glance at the plan shows that the lighting must have been bad; the great hall, for instance, has only two windows on an outside wall (one being over the fireplace), and one, almost valueless, into the central shaft; the kitchen has but one. It is not therefore surprising to find that after some thirty years had elapsed, a new great hall and kitchen were erected on another part of the castle close. Most of these latter buildings have perished, but enough remains to show that this second hall had the large windows of the late Perpendicular period, and must consequently have been a far more cheerful apartment than anything in the keep.

The “worm-eaten hold of ragged stone,” as Rumour designates Warkworth Castle in the Second Part of King Henry IV., hardly deserves that description so far as the keep is concerned, for the stonework is in a state of excellent preservation, and the lion of the Percies is still rampant in full vigour high up on the wing facing the town. The view (Fig. 45) indicates how careful the builders were to place no large windows near the ground, while showing at the same time that they paid great attention to the appearance and careful execution of their design. The side illustrated faces into the castle yard, where most secure from attack, and is more cheerfully lighted than those which face the town. It is obvious in all these illustrations of fifteenth-century buildings that the old haphazard methods are gradually giving way to a desire for more rhythmical arrangement.

One of the last houses to be built with any serious intention to have it strongly fortified must have been the “Castle” at Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, of which some interesting ruins remain. It was surrounded by a moat, and had a gateway protected by a drawbridge, a portcullis, and two projecting towers (Fig. 47). The recess into which the drawbridge fitted when drawn up, is plainly visible (Fig. 48) as are the holes in the wall through which the chains worked. When thus elevated it completely closed the gateway. Behind it was the portcullis which slid up and down in a groove. There is a recess in the wall of the room over the gateway into which it fitted when raised. The projecting towers are furnished with circular openings of about 6 in. diameter for the purpose of admitting the muzzle of a cannon, thus replacing the long vertical openings or oillets which were in vogue when arrows were the principal missiles. There are not many examples of such provision for the use of artillery, but among them may be mentioned Hurstmonceux Castle in Sussex, of about the same date.

The remains are not extensive, but they are enough to show that the building was arranged with strict symmetry round a courtyard (Fig. 49); another curious instance of the mixture of ancient methods of defence with modern effort after architectural effect. The chief material employed is brick, but the dressings are of stone with bold, simple mouldings. Ornament is very sparingly introduced; there are indications of diaper work in darker bricks, and these are also employed to trace a heraldic maunch in the walls of the towers, this being the cognizance of the Sir William Hastings who built the castle about the year 1460. Owing to its ruinous condition the place throws but little light on the domestic arrangements of the times. The gatehouse was clearly occupied by the guards; the corner tower evidently contained living rooms; both buildings are well supplied with latrines, or garde-robes. In all probability the great hall stood in the side opposite to the entrance. The chief interest of the house lies in its symmetrical plan and in its well-marked means of defence.

With the close of the fifteenth century the necessity for anything like strong fortification disappeared; a new era was approaching in which men were to build for pleasure, comfort, cheerfulness, magnificence. The dark ages were past, the Renaissance was at hand. This, therefore, will be a convenient point at which to break off for a time the story of the growth of the house, and turn our attention to some of the features which lend interest to such dwellings as we have been considering.