“The ancient maners and houses of our gentlemen are yet for the most part of strong timber.  How beit such as be lately buylded are commonly either of bricke or harde stone, their rowmes large and stately, and houses of office farder distant fro their lodgings.  Those of the nobilitie are likewise wrought with bricke and harde stone, as provision may best be made; but so magnificent and stately, as the basest house of a barren doth often match with some honours of princes in olde tyme:  so that if ever curious buylding did flourishe in Englande it is in these our dayes, wherein our worckemen excel and are in maner comparable in skill with old Vitruvius and Serle.”

He also adds the curious information that “there are olde men yet dwelling in the village where I remayn, which have noted three things to be marveylously altered in Englande within their sound remembrance.  One is, the multitude of chimnies lately erected, whereas, in their young dayes there were not above two or three, if so many, in most uplandish townes of the realme (the religious houses and mannour places of their lordes alwayes excepted, and peradventure some great personages [parsonages]), but each one made his fire against a reredosse in the halle, where he dined and dressed his meate,” This want of chimneys is noticeable in many pictures of, and previous to, the time of Henry VIII.  A timber farm-house yet remains (or did until recently) near Folkestone, which shows no vestige of either chimney or hearth.

Most of our great houses and manor-houses sprang up in the great Elizabethan building epoch, when the untold wealth of the monasteries which fell into the hands of the courtiers and favourites of the King, the plunder of gold-laden Spanish galleons, and the unprecedented prosperity in trade gave such an impulse to the erection of fine houses that the England of that period has been described as “one great stonemason’s yard.”  The great noblemen and gentlemen of the Court were filled with the desire for extravagant display, and built such clumsy piles as Wollaton and Burghley House, importing French and German artisans to load them with bastard Italian Renaissance detail.  Some of these vast structures are not very admirable with their distorted gables, their chaotic proportions, and their crazy imitations of classic orders.  But the typical Elizabethan mansion, whose builder’s means or good taste would not permit of such a profusion of these architectural luxuries, is unequalled in its combination of stateliness with homeliness, in its expression of the manner of life of the class for which it was built.  And in the humbler manors and farm-houses the latter idea is even more perfectly expressed, for houses were affected by the new fashions in architecture generally in proportion to their size.

[Illustration:  The Moat, Crowhurst Place, Surrey]