THE TOWER-HOUSES OF ENGLAND.
NikTHEN the great tower of Venice crumbled into dust the
other day, after standing for a thousand years, the people of the city wept over it, even as the Hebrews did over the ruins of Jerusalem. These city towers, holding the civic bells, were from the earliest days the visible emblems of unity and freedom, and the voices of the consecrated bells were the symbols of ideas of religion, liberty, and preserva- tion. But apart from the Campanile, towers themselves seem at one time to have appealed very strongly to the taste or fancy of the day merely as a most dignified and desirable form of residence. The taste was doubtless partly inherited from the time when a strong tower was better than any rocky defence. But it flourished exceedingly in England as late as the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and still crops up as a freak indulged in by certain minds. Beckford, the author of " Vathek," built himself a tower at Bath, and another at Fonthill, with rooms in which to live apart from and above the world. That at Fonthill fell down after the owner had parted with it. "Indeed," said he when he beard of its fall, "it never paid me the compliment of making so low a bow."
Besides the Border "Peels," which were made for defence against constant raids and forays, and large tower-houses built in that shape for the same reason, such as Deere Castle, in Cumberland, and Belsay, in Northumberland, a number of others remain which were never intended for defence at all, as the large windows and absence of arrow-boles show, but were houses pure and simple. There was something in the aloofness, the fine view, the sweep of air, and possibly in the economy of roofing which appealed to the persons about to build, and caused them to develop this design with great art and struc- tural skill, and sometimes at immense expense. Among the surviving tower-houses are Nunney Castle, in Somerset- shire ; a very considerable number in the two Northern counties ; Middleton Tower (built of brick, and still a considerable gentleman's house), near Lynn, in Norfolk ; Friston Tower, near Ipswich, the origin of which is uncertain ; and that extraordinary and splendid build- ing, Tattershall Castle, in Lincolnshire, in which is con- tained complete, in one enormous brick tower of elaborate design and decoration, and 170 ft. high, the mansion of one of the greatest men in England at the date of its erection, Lord Treasurer Cromwell, who " flourished " in the early days of Henry VIII., and amassed a great fortune when most people were losing theirs. His "totem," the money-bags, appears repeated all over the interior, especially in the elaborate mantelpieces. The tower appears to have taken more than twenty years to build, or to have been in course of erection, possibly with many interruptions during that time. It shows in the finest scale all the characteristics of this very interest- ing class of old English house. Among these are large turrets at the corners, some to hold the chimneys, and some the staircases, though those at Tattershall are also decorated with battlements, and once had small leaden spires. In fact, we doubt if there is another single tower, other than the Victoria Tower at Westminster, quite so elaborate in England. We have never found any one who could calculate the number of thousands of tons of masonry in it, but it is certainly among the finest pieces of early brickwork we have. The bricks are believed all to have been imported from Flanders. They are small "Dutch" bricks, very hard, and so bright in colour that people passing within sight in the train have been known to ask, "What is that new castle ? "
The plan of Lord Cromwell's house sounds simpler than it was. You can build a tower and divide it into storeys, entering each by a staircase coming up through the floor from below easily enough. That is done in most plain square church towers, though even in these, which are not meant for habitation, but only to hold the bells and the clock, the best type have a separate turret to carry the staircase in. But Lord Cromwell's architect had to make a tower to hold all the members, and many of the servants, of a great man's family. He had to provide for side- staircases, chimneys, fire-places, ventilation, sanitation, food stores, bedrooms, passages, and last, not least, a well. All these were to be in the compass of the tower walls, the only thing in his favour being that he was not limited as to height. Each added storey, on the other hand, meant an addition to the weight carried by the tower base and founda- tions. Briefly, we may say that the architect put his stair- cases into the turrets, his passages and chimneys into the walls, and provided the very small bedrooms, and the very numerous other chambers which the laws of health and con- venience of the day required, mainly in the thickness of the walls. The great rooms were four in number, one on each floor. These were entered from the south-east turret, up which the grand staircase wound in one hundred and seventy- five steps, with a door leading out into each great room. The stone hand-rail of this stair is most beautifully moulded, so as to be ornamental and to give the hand a firm grasp. It is a differ- ent pattern from any modern form of hand-rail, and is sunk into the brick. From the great apartments passages lead out into the thickness of the walls, and communicate also with the grand staircase. The east wall, for example, is 15 ft. through from side to side, and contains in each storey elegantly vaulted passages, bedrooms, and cupboards. This wall also contains the chimneys. The great rooms must have been very fine. The chimneypieces are so beautiful that they were taken as models for those in the new Houses of Parliament. That on the ground floor was the finest, but trippers have been allowed to knock off and carry away or deface all the most delicate carvings. The shields are quite spoiled, but birds and squirrels, foliage and flowers, and the "Treasurer's Purse" are still left in parts uninjured. The "Treasurer's Purse" is repeated in this as an ornament as well as in the upper storeys. There were good large windows filled with tracery on the south, north, and west sides of the tower, giving plenty of light. In the rooms on the east side, where the bedrooms and passages were, the windows are only slits. The tower itself is 38 ft, square, the internal measurement 22 ft. in the clear. Nothing could be better than the treatment of the bricks. It is worth the while of any architect who uses this material to go and see it. The passages are all brick-vaulted and groined, of admirable construction, and the grand machicolation in brick has no equal in England. The whole tower stands on arched vaults, extending from the centre through the angles of the tower into the bases of the turrets ; under the crown of the vaults was a deep well, and all round the tower the wide protecting moat. It must be remembered, too, that the roof was a grand flat platform, making a charming place to walk on, with a magnificent view, while the elaborate turrets and parapets made a fine foreground. Altogether this was and is a unique and splendid building. It was formerly surrounded by a moat, like most East Anglian houses, and the stables and other offices were probably built of wood out- side the encircling water. It is not probable that this class of house will ever come into fashion again, even with the modern invention of lifts to make locomotion more easy. But their existence is an interesting record of a phase of human taste of which they were a substantial and very picturesque, if costly, embodiment.
At the present day our only regular tower-dwellers are the people who live in the Martell° towers along the coast, and the lighthouse keepers, though probably there are many houses of this type still inhabited in Ireland, where they continued to be built for defensive purposes long after anything but purely convenient and non - defensive houses were erected in England. The lighthousemen find life dull, not because they live in a tower, but from their complete isolation. When a telephone is run out to one a coastguard on shore often reads the paper to the men or the man off duty in the lighthouse tower, who thus enjoy the news of the day and keep up with the times when the weather is too rough to get a boat across. But the Martell° tower on some picturesque stretch of low coast forms a perfectly delightful residence, with its ditch, bridges, and high firm platform on the summit. It has all the sentiments of mediaevalism about it, together with un- rivalled sea air. The writer once slept for a night in a Martell° tower just to enjoy the novelty of the experience, and found that from many points of view it made a very agreeable marine residence. The hugely thick brick-lined walls keep it cool in summer and doubtless warm in winter, and the windows being non-glazed, there are no draughts. The glacis makes a delightful lawn where, as is often the case, it is covered with fine grasses, and any one with a turn for gardening can find employment in the ditch or moat.
Previous page
