English country house

The English country house can be vast or comparatively small and of great or little architectural merit.

The English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a London house. This allowed them to spend time in the country and in the city—hence, for these people, the term distinguished between town and country. However, the term also encompasses houses that were, and often still are, the full-time residence for the landed gentry. These people were central to the squirearchy that ruled rural Britain until the Reform Act 1832. Frequently, the formal business of the counties was transacted in these country houses.

With large indoor and outdoor staffs, country house were important as places of employment for many rural communities. In turn, until the agricultural depressions of 1870s, the estates, of which country houses were the hub, provided their owners with incomes. However, the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the swan song of the traditional English country house lifestyle. Increased taxation and the results of World War I led to the demolition of hundreds of houses; those that remained had to adapt to survive.

While a château or a schloss can be a fortified or unfortified building, a country house is usually unfortified. If fortified, it is called a castle.

Stately homes of England

Longleat House was the first country house to open to the public, and also claims the first safari park outside Africa. As such, it became the first property in what later was known as the Stately Home Industry. The term "stately home" is subject to debate and indifferent use, and avoided by historians and other academics. As a description of a country house, the term was first used in a poem by Felicia Hemans, The Homes of England, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. In the 20th century, the term was later popularized in a song by Noël Coward, and in modern usage it often implies a country house that is open to visitors at least some of the time.

In England, the terms "country house" and "stately home" are sometimes used vaguely and interchangeably, however, many country houses such as Ascott in Buckinghamshire were deliberately designed not to be stately, and to harmonies with the landscape, while some of the great houses such as Kedleston Hall and Holkham Hall were built as "power houses" to impress and dominate the landscape, and were most certainly intended to be "stately" and impressive. In his book Historic Houses: Conversations in Stately Homes, the author and journalist Robert Harling documents nineteen "stately homes"; these range in size from the vast Blenheim palace to the minuscule Ebberston Hall and in architecture from the Jacobean Renaissance of Hatfield House to the eccentricities of Sezincote. The book's collection of stately homes also includes George IV's Brighton town palace, the Royal Pavilion.

Evolution

Forde Abbey. Many country houses have evolved and been extended over several centuries. Here, the architecture runs from Medieval ecclesiastical to Palladian and on to Strawberry Hill Gothic, while at sometimes an attempt at unity has been made by the use of crenelation.

The country houses of England have evolved over the last five hundred years. Before this time, larger houses were usually fortified, reflecting the position of their owners as feudal lords, de facto overlords of their manors. The Tudor period of stability in the country saw the building of the first of the unfortified great houses. Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries saw many former ecclesiastical properties granted to the King's favourites, who then converted them into private country houses. Woburn Abbey, Forde Abbey and many other mansions with Abbey or Priory in their name often date from this period as private houses. Other terms used in the name of houses to describe their origin or importance include Palace, Castle, Court, Hall, Mansion, Park, House, Manor, Place.

It was during the second half of the reign of Elizabeth I and under her successor James I that the first architect-designed mansions, thought of today as epitomizing the English country house, began to make their appearance. Burghley House, Longleat House, and Hatfield House are among the best known. Hatfield House was one of the first houses in England to show the Italianate influence of the Renaissance, which was eventually to see the end of the hinting-at-castle-architecture "turrets and towers" Gothic style. By the reign of Charles I, Indigo Jones and his form of Palladianism had changed the face of British domestic architecture completely. While there were later various Gothic Revival styles, the Palladian style in various forms, interrupted briefly by baroque, was to predominate until the second half of the 18th century when, influenced by ancient Greek styles, it gradually evolved into the neoclassicism championed by such architects as Robert Adam.

Brympton d'Evercy evolved from the medieval period; its provincial architects are long forgotten. Yet, Christopher Hussey described it as "The most incomparable house in Britain, the one which created the greatest impression and summarizes so exquisitely English country life qualities".

Some of the best known of England's country houses were built by one architect at one particular time: Montacute House, Chatsworth House, and Blenheim Palace are examples. It is interesting that while the latter two are ducal palaces, Montacute, although built by a Master of the Rolls to Queen Elizabeth I, spent the next 400 years in the occupation of his descendants who were gentry without a London townhouse, rather than aristocracy. They finally ran out of funds in the early 20th century.

However, the vast majority of the lesser-known English country houses, often owned at different times by gentlemen and peers, are an evolution of one or more styles with facades and wings in various styles in a mixture of high architecture, often as interpreted by a local architect or surveyor and determined by practicality as much as by the whims of architectural taste. An example of this is Brympton d'Evercy in Somerset, a house of many periods that is unified architecturally by the continuing use of the same mellow local Ham Hill stone.

The fashionable William Kent redesigned Rousham House only to have it quickly and drastically altered to accommodate space for the owner's twelve children. Canons Ashby, home to poet John Dryden's family, exemplifies this: a medieval farmhouse enlarged in the Tudor era around a courtyard, given grandiose plaster ceilings in the Stuart period and then given Georgian façades in the 18th century. The whole is a glorious mismatch of styles and fashions that seamlessly blend together. These could be called the true English country house. Wilton House, one of England's grandest houses, is in a remarkably similar vein; although, while the Drydens, mere squires, at Canons Ashby employed a local architect, at Wilton the mighty Earls of Pembroke employed the finest architects of the day: first Holbein, 150 years later Indigo Jones, and then Wyatt followed by Chambers. Each employed a different style of architecture, seemingly unaware of the design of the wing around the next corner. These varying "improvements", often criticised at the time, today are the qualities that make English country houses unique. Scarcely anywhere else in the world would an elite class have allowed, or indeed pursued, such an indifference to style.

Sizes and types of country house

There are no written terms for distinguishing between vast country palaces and comparatively small country houses; all descriptive terms, which can include castle, manor and court, provide no firm clue and are often only used because of a historical connection with the site of such a building. Therefore, for ease or explanation, England's country houses can be categorized according to the circumstances of their creation.

Power houses

Kedleston Hall designed by Matthew Brettingham and Robert Adam, one of the great power houses.

The great houses are the greatest of the country houses; in truth palaces, built by the country's most powerful - these were the "power houses" designed to display their owners' power or ambitions to power. Really large un-fortified or barely fortified houses began to take over from the traditional castles of the crown and magnates during the Tudor period with vast houses such as Hampton Court Palace and Burghley [disambiguation needed] and continued until the 18th century - with houses such as Kedleston Hall and Holkham Hall. Such building reached its zenith from the late 17th century until the mid-18th century; these houses were often completely built or rebuilt in their entirety by one eminent architect in the most fashionable architectural style of the day and often have a suite of Baroque state apartments, typically in enfilade, reserved for the most eminent guests - the entertainment of whom was paramount to maintaining and gaining the required power of the owner. The common denominator of this category of English country house is that they were designed to be lived in with a certain degree of ceremony and pomp. It was not unusual for the family to have a small suite of rooms for withdrawing in privacy away from the multitude that lived in the household. These houses were always an alternative residence to a London house.

During the 18th and 19th centuries to the highest echelons of British society the country house served as a place for relaxing, hunting and running the country with one's equals at the end of the week, with some houses having their own theatre where performances were held.

The country house however, was not just an oasis of pleasure for a fortunate few; it was the centre of its own world, providing employment to hundreds of people in the vicinity of its estate. In previous eras when state benefits were unheard of, those working on an estate were among the most fortunate, receiving secured employment and rent-free accommodation. At the summit of these fortunate people was the indoor staff of the country house. Unlike many of their contemporaries prior to the 20th century, they slept in proper beds, wore well-made adequate clothes and received three proper meals a day, plus a small wage. In an era when many still died for lack of medicine or malnutrition, the long working hours were a small price to pay.

As a result of the aristocratic habit of only marrying within the aristocracy, and whenever possible to a sole heiress, many owners of country houses owned several country mansions, and would visit each according to the season: Grouse shooting in Scotland, pheasant shooting and fox hunting in England. The Earl of Rosebery, for instance, had Dalmeny House in Scotland, Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire and another near Epsom just for the racing season. For many, this way of life, which began a steady decline in 1914, continued well into the 20th century and for a very few continues to this day.

Squire's Houses

Waddesdon Manor. During the Victorian era, vast country houses by wealthy industrialists and bankers were built in a variety of styles.

The second category of England's country houses are those that belonged to the squirearchy or gentry. These tend to either have evolved from medieval hall houses, with rooms added as required or were built by relatively unknown local architects. Smaller and far greater in number than the power houses, these smaller houses, like their grander counterparts the power houses were still the epicenter of their own estate, but were often the principal or only residence of their owner.

However, whether the owner of a power house or a small manor, the inhabitants of the English country house have become collectively referred to as the Ruling class, because this is exactly what they did in varying degrees, whether by holding high political influence and power in national government or in the day-to-day running of their own localities in such offices as magistrates, or occasionally even clergy.