The seventeenth century saw a transformation of vernacular architecture. It is argued here that this transformation may in part be explained by a changing view of how the house should express the standing of its owner. The sixteenth century had seen the introduction of renaissance architectural detail as a symbol of education, status and power. In the seventeenth century, a more complete architectural language was developed at a high social level, which extended beyond detail to embrace the overall form of the house. It is argued here that the loss of local, vernacular traditions may have been due to a simultaneous weakening of old structures of deference and authority, which would have made possible the spread of the new style by freeing it of its status associations. By the eighteenth century, vernacular building had come to consist of a number of regional variations on a national style, and associations with status had been replaced by concern for stylistic correctness.
The following is a revised version of a paper given at a conference at Rewley House, Oxford in November 2001.
The seventeenth century was critical for the transformation of vernacular architecture from a body of regional traditions to a series of variations on national norms. The century was also characterised by deep seated challenges to authority. Old intellectual systems were questioned and new explanations sought. While at a national level, established political and ecclesiastical authorities were confronted and sometimes replaced - though only for a time - by novel structures, new economic and tenurial patterns were everywhere affecting long-established social relationships. Direct challenges to the concept of a hierarchical basis for society were rare and anachronistic, but questions about identities, private affinities and personal allegiance were inescapable. It is tempting to seek a connection between contemporary architectural changes and the social dysfunctions of the age.
The wide variety of these architectural changes - in plan, amenities and structure, and in the external appearance of the house - indicate the complexity of their causes. Students of vernacular architecture have tended in the past to concentrate on the first three of these, looking at buildings in order to obtain information that was not originally explicit: about their construction and materials and about how they were built and used. We are beginning to try and understand the more subtle messages that the relationships of spaces and openings may convey about matters such as privacy and gender roles - messages whose successful reading may take us into the minds of the past, but which are not easy to decipher because even at the time they were largely taken for granted. But while we are becoming more skilled at making readings of this kind, we may ignore other messages that were originally more obvious: about how builders may have intended buildings to be seen, and the more general information that their appearance may allow one to infer about contemporary attitudes, social organisation and tastes. These may be statements that were once clear, but to whose language we have lost the code.
One reason for this neglect may be that we accept that in domestic building appearance can be equated with status and that there is little else to say. When Vitruvius uses the word 'decor' it is with the clear implication that ornament must be appropriate to its use and to the quality of the house's owner (Footnote 1). Certainly it was so regarded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The text that accompanies the plan of a house in Gervase Markham's The English Husbandman of 1613 makes clear the importance of matching ornament to the occupant in the Vitruvian sense (Footnote 2). The rooms are those one would have found in any house of a rich yeoman farmer or of the lesser gentry, but in the accompanying text Markham carefully distinguishes between the two classes of builder. He calls his plan 'the model of a plain man's country house', but describes in some detail how the outside might be embellished with turrets and decorative gables and other architectural ornament. 'But the scope of my book' he concludes 'tendeth only to the use of the honest husbandman, and not to instruct men of dignity.' It is clear that what is significant for Markham is that gentlemen's houses are distinguished visually from those of the lesser ranks of society, however prosperous individuals might be.
Architectural display based on rank is in any case well documented in the era when Markham was writing. Sarah Pearson has demonstrated how some Lancashire gentry had ornamental gables to their houses while their farming neighbours did not (Footnote 3); Linda Hall recognised that on the south-western edge of the Cotswolds, the houses of village gentry have stone mullions while those of yeomen have mullions of wood (Footnote 4). Church's House in Nantwich, which announces by redundant framing that it was the house of a man with money to spend, was described in the 1620s as 'gentlemanly' (Footnote 5). The high ends of many timber-framed houses have long been recognised as distinguished by a greater degree of ornament, and the same distinctions may be found in stone houses. College Farm at Northmoor in Oxfordshire has arched headed windows to the principal rooms - to the parlour, best chamber and to all the rooms of a wing where the college auditors would stay on their visits; other rooms have plain heads. Similar status distinctions occur inside houses as well. At Berry Hall, Solihull, the three cross beams of the single-storeyed hall are progressively elaborated from low end to high: first a plain chamfer, then two orders of mouldings, and at the high end further mouldings and a mask. Ornament that is often dismissed as the decorative enhancement of structural members frequently marks the status of the space where it occurs, or is proper to the standing of the occupant.
A further reason why students of vernacular architecture have often neglected the significance of ornament and the appearance of the house may be found in the history of the subject. It is no coincidence that the foundation of the Vernacular Architecture Group was coeval with the post-war triumphs of the modern movement in architecture. One may note in passing that the 1933 edition of Sidney Addy's pioneering Evolution of the English House was edited by John Summerson, who should be remembered not only as an architectural historian but also as an advocate of architectural modernism. Both movements were communitarian. The modern movement was concerned for an efficient architecture appropriate to the needs of the masses in what was hoped was an increasingly egalitarian age, while the VAG was concerned to study the anonymous buildings of past communities and by doing so to discover more about how ordinary people lived their lives. Neither movement - and this is why the coincidence of the two movements is significant - saw decoration as more than an incidental add-on, and therefore neither was greatly concerned with it. For the moderns, preaching the beauty of functionalism, decoration implied the employment of historical styles, pretentious, elitist and anachronistic (Footnote 6). For students of the vernacular, too, ornament could be an optional extra, a personal element that may (as William Morris had taught) have reflected the creativity of the individual craftsman but had little to do with the essentials of the house. Houses have therefore tended to be studied in terms of the plan and how it worked, its construction and materials, and the way in which, as form followed function as the moderns believed, plan and structure interacted.
Although a conscious choice between different, freely available architectural styles was hardly possible before the eighteenth century, the associative power of innovative detail was already evident in the sixteenth, with the piecemeal appearance of classical motifs on élite buildings of essentially traditional form. An awareness of such novel architectural detail lay behind William Harrison's otherwise preposterous claim - that 'if ever curious building did flourish in England, it is in these our years, wherein our workmen excell, and are in a manner comparable with old Vitruvius, Leo Baptista and Serlo (Footnote 7).' There is no way in which English sixteenth- century buildings could be compared to Alberti's, and foreign architectural treatises and commentaries on Vitruvius were only available to rich patrons, but from Harrison's evocation of their names it is clear that he was aware of new influences and approved of them as progressive innovations. The secularisation and expansion of the universities, and the large number of new grammar schools founded to teach the classics, created a climate in which classical learning was a central attribute of culture, and education itself an essential, defining element of the gentleman. In an age which set store by symbolic languages and which distinguished the rank of builders by the level of decoration on their houses, classical ornament was associated with status, and status itself was inseparable from concern with the proper ordering of society.
We know little at present about how classical elements were first absorbed into vernacular architectural decoration. It is clear that plasterers' and regional masons' workshops had access to models deriving from Continental prints and engravings, whether supplied by patrons, acquired by journeymen, or gained indirectly through apprenticeship or by working with more knowledgeable colleagues (Footnote 8). It is as yet unclear how details, that at a high social level are generally associated with masonry or with interior work, became assimilated into regional building traditions. On the early- seventeenth-century gatehouse at Stokesay are traditional figures of wild men enclosed in cusped mandorla-like frames; beneath them are fluted pilasters of unquestionably classical derivation. A timber house in Broad Street, Ludlow, has its jetty carried on scroll brackets that are in no way gothic in their form, but which have come a long way from any kind of correct classicism. The Feathers Hotel in Ledbury - where no doubt the elite of the town resorted after their meetings in the contemporary Town Hall across the road - has an early seventeenth-century jettied facade where crude Ionic pilasters are applied to the upper floor. Were these indications of the quality of the entertainment to be enjoyed within?
The reasons for the initial adoption of such details at a superior architectural level seem clear, and the prevalence earlier in the sixteenth century of redundant structural ornament in timber-framed building shows that classical decoration was itself assimilated to an existing taste for decorative display and to an approval of conspicuous consumption. This in turn was no doubt related to the growing number of gentry at all levels, from the village upwards, all keen to demonstrate their wealth and their standing to each other and to their inferiors.
But at the social level at which in the sixteenth century ornament had been normal, there is in the course of the seventeenth a falling-off of all forms of decorative display, whether didactic or status-based, both inside the house and outside. This repudiation of ornament derived from a more general seventeenth-century internalisation of approved behaviour of which the most obvious manifestations were the rise of Puritanism, the providentialism and introspection that are characteristic of a great deal of contemporary verse and prose (Footnote 9), a decline in indiscriminate hospitality (Footnote 10), and extensive - if largely anecdotal - evidence of a greater taste for privacy and retirement. Inside the house, wall paintings would be covered up by wainscot, and at the level of the gentry house and higher there was a marked falling-off of heraldic display. Externally, a decline in the use of ornament can be parallelled by a changing taste in inscriptions. The famous windows at Little Moreton Hall, of 1559, announce their builder in English; there is a comparable inscription on the front of Church's House at Nantwich and on some other houses of the region. There is none where such inscriptions are combined with ornament of classical derivation, and this is perhaps because a classical culture itself encouraged a greater reticence and the employment of more recondite forms of expression. M. W. Taylor cited and illustrated a number of inscriptions on the outside of buildings in the north-west (Footnote 11). Sixteenth-century examples are for the most part in English, written out at length with the names of the builder and some appropriate sentiment in prose or rhyme. Later examples are briefer and more cryptic, often in Latin, and include no more than the builder's initials. By the eighteenth century inscriptions of any kind on the outside of houses were rare throughout the country. The falling-off of inscriptions is significant, implying a changing attitude to cultural and personal display.
Such a changing mental climate would be favourable for the acceptance of the new, plainer architectural styles that had been introduced by Inigo Jones and his followers and that would gradually spread from London (Footnote 12). The intellectual strength of the new architecture lay in its totality: in combining details with elevation and plan rather than consisting merely of the piecemeal application of classical ornament to forms of independent evolution. But for most people the greatest encouragement for the new style was probably in the new building of London streets, squares and suburbs, where even the aristocracy would live in uniform houses with plain façades and where the ever-increasing numbers of London visitors would see architectural exemplars that were virtually devoid of ornament. The influence of the capital can be seen in other cultural areas, notably in the spread, from the later seventeenth century, of what has been called a 'print culture', the rapidly growing availability of books and periodicals, increasingly deriving from London and disseminating a common culture to anyone with access to them (Footnote 13).
Jones's more correct and complete classicism had been perceived by the Court as having imperial resonances and as symbolic of order in the commonwealth; for all its novelty, it chimed in with an essentially conservative political agenda in which established authority was to be maintained and hierarchies reinforced (Footnote 14). But even in the 1630s and 1640s the Court's opponents were equally ready to adopt these new styles and new forms, and a greater seriousness and a condemnation of extravagance is to be found on both sides of the mid-century political divide. Roger North observed at the end of the century that 'we have grown into much variety in disposing our conveniences of habitation, in which the court hath ledd, and the country followed (Footnote 15).' Though the origins of the new architecture were intellectual and hierarchical, by the loss of symbolic ornament, architectural display would lose the ideological and didactic content that it possessed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and become a matter of fashion, of status in which correctness was the criterion, and of stylistic rules which were easy for anyone to follow. When in the 1660s Roger Pratt was describing houses appropriate for gentlemen, noblemen and princes, his gentlemanly house was to be ornamented by no more than a raised platt band, a cornice and a few steps to the front door (Footnote 16). As North would write, 'Beauty doth not consist in small embellishments, but in the outline or disposition of a fabric ... Uniformity ... is what all expect to find, and blame if not observed, and scarce any know why, but it is handsome, say they, becvause it is uniforme ... I add that the most knowing injoys no more (Footnote 17).'
A taste for plain façades in which status display was less possible fostered a common architecture across the social scale, a taste that in the eighteenth century Palladianism encouraged and codified, and which could by then easily be realised through the increasing availability of pattern books whereby joiners and masons anywhere could execute an architecturally correct door surround for anyone who wanted it. Such a process was more destructive of existing vernacular forms than the reception of classical ornament itself had been. Without documentation, it is difficult to know whether any particular detail was copied from a pattern book, from an existing exemplar, or formed part of a craftsman's stock in trade. But from the 1720s onwards there was a spate of books by Batty Langley, William Halfpenny and others that catered specifically for the working joiner or mason who was no doubt more concerned to carve a doorcase that would not disgrace him than he was to match the degree of ornament to the status of his client: a guinea from the parish clerk was as good as a guinea from the squire (Footnote 18). As Colin Platt has concluded, 'the Second Great Rebuilding ... saw the triumph of taste over riches (Footnote 19).'
The ultimate result was what may be described as a process of architectural democratisation, marking a significant change in the message that the building was able to express. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in replacing local architectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not. The very nature of the eighteenth century, classical architectural vocabulary was that distinction lay in correctness and refinement rather than in conspicuous consumption, a distinction that was qualitative rather than quantitative, but which was readily attainable by anyone who mastered the rules. The weakening of status expression is suggested by other contemporary trends - for instance a greater flexibility in the use of titles such as 'Mr' and 'Gent.', and the rapid spread down the social scale in the erection of stone tombstones. The rise from the later seventeenth century of what has been called the pseudo-gentry - those whose incomes did not derive from land but whose manners and incomes resembled those of the gentry class - was an urban phenomenon, and the increasing social self-confidence of urban elites after the Restoration has been described by Peter Borsay (Footnote 20). In building uniform houses with similar detail and which conformed to polite architectural norms, members of social groups in the eighteenth century expressed their standing and their sense of community just as clearly as did the members of the upper classes with their classical details in the sixteenth.
Such essential plainness of form and simplicity of detail could readily be adopted further and further down the social hierarchy. As such, they would constitute a style that would supersede the vestiges of local vernacular traditions, and become, in the hands of local builders, a national vernacular. The poet Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Burlington observed the phenomenon and did not like what he saw:
You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous Buildings once were things of use.
Just as they are, yet shall your noble Rules
Fill half the land with Imitating Fools;
Who random Drawings from your Sheets shall take
And of one Beauty many Blunders make (Footnote 21)
But it was this very uniformity that recommended Georgian architecture to the pioneers of modernism in the twentieth century. J. M. Richards - who combined propaganda for the modern movement with admiration of the eighteenth century - would write in a widely read book of 1940 that
the small houses for farmers and country squires that still abound throughout our countryside ... are the anonymous products of a uniform language such as we need today more than anything else ... it is the quality in the mass of building that makes an age of civilised architecture (Footnote 22).
In 1977, Bob Machin wrote of the need for 'a theory of building history which will explain ... the emergence of permanent vernacular building in the fifteenth century, its extension and the successive rebuildings of vernacular houses from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, and the replacement of vernacular by "polite" or "pattern-book" architecture from the mid-eighteenth (Footnote 23).' Machin rightly identified tenurial circumstances, increasing wealth and the probability of a building cycle - of complex origin - as key elements, but these do not determine the form of the building itself. The gradual adoption at the vernacular level in the course of the seventeenth century of novel plan forms, generally interpreted as providing less communal space and more allocation of rooms to specific functions or individuals - forms characterised as 'closed' by Matthew Johnson (Footnote 24) - parallels comparable developments in the gentry house. In both there may be similar causes. Developments at both the polite and the vernacular level can be seen as manifestations of a contemporary mental climate common to all levels of society, in which an increasing value placed upon privacy, an increasing focus on family as opposed to community, and changing attitudes to display, were all essential elements. In terms of consumption and higher living standards, the increasing quantity of furnishings with specialised functions required the provision of specialised space for these to be used to full advantage. Given the parallels and the forces of emulation, the development of vernacular houses cannot be seen as wholly independent of the polite. The evolution that Machin described over a longer time scale can also be seen in terms of evolving class relations and as a history of increasingly licensed emulation.
The emergence of permanent building in the fifteenth century, though facilitated by rising incomes and by greater security of tenure, may have been encouraged by a high degree of landlord absenteeism and by the widespread farming of manors which was destructive of the physical structures of hierarchy. Certainly, by the mid sixteenth there was pressure for a wide variety of legislative controls over class behaviour and appearance - pressure which can only have arisen from a feeling that the established order was under threat (Footnote 25). While the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century development of vernacular building has often been seen as autonomous, catering for needs that were different from those of the patrons of polite building, at the same time the multiplication of lesser gentry was creating a bridge in terms of normative behaviour between higher echelons of society and the local community. Gervase Markham's comments and the contemporary examples cited by Sarah Pearson and Linda Hall show not only the wish to distinguish the lesser gentry house from the yeoman's visually, but also how close was the housing of the two classes in other respects.
But central to the changes of the seventeenth century were changing views of society. In the sixteenth, belief in 'the great chain of being' - a static and divinely ordained world of mutually dependant ranks - was still almost universal. By the end of the seventeenth, the assault on such beliefs had become irresistible, with the destruction of the exaggerated monarchical claims that it had given rise to and as Baconian enquiry increasingly permeated every aspect of thought (Footnote 26). The old beliefs would be replaced by a more pragmatic and functional view of a society in which rank remained central but in which men were motivated by a variety of economic, psychological and social factors. Such a view increasingly sanctioned an architecture determined by rules, not by rank. What was described above as the democratisation of the form and appearance of the eighteenth-century house can be seen as the conclusion of a process of emulation that had been in progress since the late middle ages.
It may be the very obviousness of this process that has led students of the vernacular to ignore the matter of image. That there was a fundamental loss of local building traditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is accepted. Economics, changing tenurial relations, demography, improved communications, and technical and stylistic innovations, all contributed to the weakening of regional traditions in the building crafts, while parallel social changes were leading to changes in the form of the house itself. But the decline of vernacular practices cannot be explained solely by material factors, and this loss of localism parallels developments in other fields of culture and social relationships. Anna Bryson writes that 'a rather curious disjunction has appeared between an élite to whom are assigned ideas and ideologies, and the rest of the population who are to be studied more anthropologically (Footnote 27).' This is partly, of course, because it is easier to study the elite as individuals, the rest of the population en masse; the nature of the evidence tends to be different. While students of vernacular architecture have become highly skilled in interpreting documentary evidence alongside structural, such evidence tends, inevitably, to relate to economic and material circumstances rather than to mentality. The difference between the ways in which we have studied vernacular architecture and polite seems a good example of Bryson's observation.
Although the appearance of the houses of the elite may be an expression of status, this is not to say that those who are not members of that elite do not share the same view of society. Where wealth and status go hand in hand and where there is widespread acceptance of symbolic languages, people's failure to build houses like their superiors' may be as much a sign of their acceptance of social differentiation as it is of their greater poverty. It is clear that at certain times and places, the expression in building of distinctions of class and status has been considered significant. With the weakening of vernacular craft traditions and the spread of a universal architectural language, the loss of these distinctions seems clear as well. What we know already about the appearance of the house suggests that this was carefully read for social meanings by contemporaries. We need to recover the ability to do so, and with it an insight into the communal values and hierarchies that made such distinctions significant.