GLOUCESTERSHIRE has been exceedingly well served by its early historians. The 860 pages by the landowner and lawyer Sir Robert Atkyns, The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire (1712), are stunningly interlaced with seventy-three plates prepared by Johannes Kip between 1700 and 1710. They are almost all of country houses, and where they can be checked with existing buildings or other sources Kip's bird's-eye views prove to be extremely accurate. Samuel Lysons, A Collection of Gloucestershire Antiquities (1803), has even more plates of almost equal interest. Samuel Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (1779), has a number of country house plates engraved by Bonner, while Thomas Rudge, The History of the County of Gloucester (1803), 2 volumes, an update of Atkyns, completes this quartet of outstanding county histories.

For the landscape and its historical development, see H. P. R. Finberg, The Making of the English Landscape: Gloucestershire (1975), B. S. Smith and E. Ralph, A History of Bristol and Gloucestershire (3rd ed. 1996), and C. and A. M. Hadfield (eds.), The Cotswolds: A New Study (1973). For the leading families, see J. Johnson, The Gloucestershire Gentry (1989) and the more specialist N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (1981).

The Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society have been published since 1876, but medieval houses have not been well served in this county in comparison with medieval churches. J. and H. S. Storer and J. N. Brewer, Delineations of Gloucestershire, Being Views of the Principal Seats of Nobility and Gentry (1825–7), is self-explanatory. The late twentieth-century version is in three volumes by Nicholas Kingsley, The Country Houses of Gloucestershire (1989–2001).

AFFETON CASTLE, Devon

LIKE Bickleigh 12 miles to the east, Affeton ‘Castle’ is a substantial fifteenth-century gatehouse to a fortified house of which little else remains. This remotely situated residence was built of local grey rubble with freestone dressings bythe Stucley family, a cadet branch of the Stukelys of Great Stukely in Huntingdonshire who acquired the manor when Sir Hugh Stucley married Katherine Affeton in about 1434. Three centuries later Sarah Stucley married into the prosperous Bideford trading family of Buck, with the family dividing their time between Hartland Abbey, Daddon, and Affeton Castle. In 1859, George Buck took the title by licence of Sir George Stucley in preference to his patronymic name to establish himself as heir to the landed Stucleys rather than the mercantile Bucks. A year later, the gatehouse at Affeton was rehabilitated as a shooting lodge by David Mackintosh, who subsequently worked at the Stucley seat of Hartland Abbey. Today, Affeton Castle is the centre of a substantial estate run in tandem with that at Hartland Abbey.

Proudly standing above the wooded valley of the Little Dart, a tributary of the River Taw, Affeton is the only significant late medieval secular residence in central Devon. Sacked three times during the Civil War, this two-storey gatehouse was described in 1859 as ‘a ruin … with a turret at one corner and a battlement, and windows of late Gothic character’. Approximately 60 feet by 22 feet, it has corner buttresses with roll-moulded offsets, and a garderobe projection at the south-east angle.

Throughout these volumes, constant reference has been made to the work of two primary topographical sources for late medieval England and Wales – the mid-sixteenth-century recorder John Leland and the mid-eighteenth-century artists Samuel and Nathaniel Buck. The former pioneered the practice of observation and direct inquiry in a sequence of travels across the Tudor countryside, while the latter made a pictorial record of over 400 medieval buildings at the point when their antiquarian value was being appreciated as much as their stimulation to romantic and picturesque sensibilities. Their architectural import, and in the case of the Buck brothers their accuracy, have been undervalued.

JOHN LELAND

John Leland (c. 1503–52) was a youthful polymath – poet, antiquarian archivist, royal chaplain, librarian, and humanist – before he was thirtyy ears old, when he received his royal commission to ‘search after England's Antiquities, and peruse the libraries’ of monasteries, cathedrals, and colleges for manuscripts of value (1533). The result is his Itinerary, a topographical compendium describing five journeys made between about 1539 and 1545, plus jottings and notes, most of them drawn up during his earlier visits to monastic libraries but some subsequent to his extended travels. The publication drawn from the manuscripts now held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford was initiallyedited byThomas Hearne and published in 1710–12, with his notes following in 1715.

THREE factors distinguish the greater houses of the south-east from those of central and south-west England. The first is the large number of episcopal residences in the region. Even leaving those of London to one side, they contribute nearly a third of the properties covered in the detailed survey. The second is the paucity of major secular houses in Surrey and Hampshire and the limited number in Kent and Sussex. The third is the response across the region to the fear of French attack and possible invasion during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and this is considered in detail in the essay that follows.

EPISCOPAL RESIDENCES

The spread and survival of episcopal palaces in England and Wales is patchy but the south-east retains a greater range in extent and quality than in any other part of the country. The political standing of the archbishop of Canterbury was of major significance through-out the middle ages. The relative wealth of his diocese and its position astride one of the key routes between London and Europe are at variance with its comparatively modest size. More than ten roofed properties survive, ranging from palace and castle to country houses, plus some ruined buildings and lost but documented residences. The diocese of Winchester is close on Canterbury's heels numerically and qualitively, with the benefit of even greater financial resources throughout the middle ages. Nine properties can still be examined, five roofed and four in ruin, plus the well-documented loss at Highclere. The see of Chichester is represented by residences at Chichester and Amberley, while the bishop of London's country house at Nurstead retains half of its timber-framed hall of c.1314.

CHURCH AND COAST

IT might be anticipated that the position of Kent between London and Europe would encourage the building of royal and baronial residences but this was not so. Much of the reason for this lies in the fact that well over half of the cultivated land of the county was owned throughout the middle ages by the two wealthy monastic houses at Canterbury – Christ Church Cathedral Priory and St Augustine's Abbey, with many of their estates in east Kent (and increased by the quite separate and widespread holdings of the archbishop) – and to a much lesser extent by St Andrew's Cathedral Priory at Rochester with its estates in north-west Kent. There were also a number of smaller church holdings, including the rights of Battle Abbey over much of the Weald, so that the county was primarily in ecclesiastical rather than secular hands.

The development of large baronial estates was also hindered by the inheritance law of gavelkind, a form of tenure well established before the Norman Conquest and essentially limited to Kent, whereby an estate was not inherited by the eldest but was divided equally between all male heirs. Such lands were freely negotiable on the open market and could be sold at will without reference to any lord. Some people preferred to retain their small holdings and security of tenure while others opted for a sum of money in their pockets rather than a tiny area of land. The former encouraged the development of the many late medieval farmhouses in Kent, while the latter contributed to the slow development of some of the larger estates.

DORSET is an appropriate introduction to the houses of south-west England, for with one key exception the early flourish of royal and episcopal castles in Wiltshire and Dorset was followed by almost total withdrawal from them. The ten stone castles in Wiltshire, led by the royal properties at Ludgershall, Marlborough, and Old Sarum and the episcopal fortresses within Old Sarum and at Devizes, Malmesbury and Downton were all in decay by 1350. Of the six stone castles in Dorset, only the dramatically sited royal fortress at Corfe and the early twelfth-century episcopal palace-fortress at Sherborne continued to be occupied throughout the middle ages. Building work at both sites had been completed before the close of the thirteenth century except for a tiered five-chamber tower added at Corfe Castle in 1377–8 which only survives at undercroft level, and some contemporarymodifications at Sherborne.

DEFENDABLE HOUSES

Our interest in Corfe Castle lies in the extremely important royal house built within the inner ward for King John in about 1201. Though badly ruined, its plan is relatively clear, but the region is particularly fortunate in possessing a second house for the same king at Cranborne. Despite its wholesale remodelling in the early seventeenth century which has converted this manor house into one of the most beautiful residences in southern England, the structure of c.1207 stands remarkably complete. These two houses, far earlier than any others surveyed in this volume, are of outstanding importance not only because of their early date and royal status, but because of the relative completeness of their plan and form and their relevance to regional developments up to 150 years later.

GREATER HOUSEHOLDS

THE élite households of medieval England were limited to the upper echelons of society, and they were distinguished and clarified by that rapid movement in social mobility that marked the 150 years between the beginning of the Hundred Years' War and the accession of the Tudor dynasty. As discussed in volume II, the gradual definition of the aristocracy from the relatively loose terms used in 1300 and the subsequent expansion of its lower ranks were essentially determined by financial standing.

By the close of the fourteenth century, the number of hereditary peers regularly summoned to parliament had stabilised at about eighty holders. Though new ranks were created such as marquess (1385) and viscount (1440), the number held fairly constant at between eighty to ninety families until the close of that century. To this number should be added the forty leading bishops and high-income ecclesiastics deeply involved in the political life of late medieval England. Landowners with an annual income of more than £40 were expected to take up knighthood, though knights banneret were an enigmatic group who gradually disappeared after the first quarter of the fifteenth century. They were paid a daily rate twice that of a knight, but it was not a hereditary rank, so that holders moved either upwards into the peerage or downwards to the knightly class. The demands of the crown on the battlefield and the growing complexity of administration during the fourteenth century helped to clarify the status of knights as well as the lower one of esquires.

KENT

WILLIAM Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1576, new edn R. Church, 1970), is the earliest published history of any English county and is still of some value. Two centuries later, Edward Hasted, A History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, was a four-volume work, issued in 1778–99, and much revised for the second edition in twelve volumes, 1797–1801 (reprinted 1972). It is a mine of information and the bedrock of subsequent Kentish studies. It also stifled subsequent historical research.

The Victoria County History for Kent has never progressed beyond three early volumes (1908–32) and no further volumes are planned. A multi-volume history of Kent has been promised by the Kent History Project, established in 1989, but only one title, on the seventeenth century, has yet seen the light of day. In the meantime, F. Jessup, A History of Kent (1974) and C. Wright, Kent Through the Years (1975), provide brief surveys, while P. Brandon and B. Short, The South-East from A.D. 1000 (1990), cover London south of the Thames as well as Kent, Surrey, and Sussex. Kent has no record society, adding to the problems awaiting the recorder(s) of its historical development, but the archive repository at Maidstone is a particularly rich one which has published the series Kentish Sources. They are subsequent to Kent Bibliography by G. Bennett (1977) and its Supplement of 1981.

INTRODUCTION

THE phrase ‘The Hundred Years’ War', first used by Desmichels in 1823, may be a highly convenient term to describe the attenuated late medieval conflict between England and France, but it is conceptually misleading. It is not so much that this struggle for supremacy extended well beyond the traditional limits of 1337 to 1453, but the fact that it was not a continuous war but a series of vicious conflicts, separated by extended periods of uneasy peace or truce marred by sporadic hostilities. Nor was it simply between the Plantagenet and Valois dynasties, but also between them and fiefs such as Brittany, Flanders, and Burgundy who chose to support one side and then the other as the political or economic situation demanded. To a lesser extent, it also involved Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Castile, Navarre, and Portugal, creating a complex pattern of political, financial, economic, military, and social consequences. Though this essay is precise in its scope, one consequence common to this as to most other aspects of the War is that a conflict which began between protagonists who only knew the feudal order was concluded about 150 years later by an increasingly meritorious society at the dawn of the Renaissance.

The origins of the conflict were deep rooted and lay at least as far back as the Angevin inheritance of Aquitaine in the mid-twelfth century. The more immediate cause was the dynastic crisis in France in the years following the death of Philip IV in 1314 and his short-lived successors, and the feudal responsibilities and family conflict inherent in the close relationship between the royal houses of France and England.

ABINGDON ABBEY, Berkshire and monastic granges

At the time of the Dissolution, Abingdon Abbey was the sixth wealthiest Benedictine monastery in England and one of the most high-profile communities in the region. The scanty monastic remains have some relevance to contemporary residential work, while its granges are even more pertinent to our purpose.

The site is now almost completely covered by the borough offices, houses, and gardens of Abingdon town, so that only the abbey gateway and a line of domestic buildings of the monastic base court survive. The latter consist of the bakehouse and granary (twelfth century with mid-fifteenth-century roof), the two-storeyed exchequer (c. 1260) and a residential range (mid-fifteenth century) now used as a dwelling, a theatre, and an empty area respectively. For our purposes, the residential range is of considerable value for comparison with contemporary secular ranges. Over 70 feet long, this two-storeyed range is stone-built towards the millstream and river Thames, but timber- and brick-built towards the abbey court, the upper part open-framed. It is now curtailed by about 25 feet at the east end, and with the lower half of the inner wall stone rebuilt after 1820 (possibly during the 1895 restoration), but the brick noggin between the studs is original, as are the first-floor windows towards the river of paired cinquefoil lights, transomed, under square heads, dating the range between the mid and late fifteenth century.

The significance of the range lies not in its drastically modified ground floor, possibly used for storage initially, but in the layout of the upper floor.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE

THE River Thames and its tributaries have determined the landscape of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire but the river barely affects Gloucestershire. Its birth there is indistinct and the nascent water barely achieves scale before it has left the county a little beyond Lechlade. The River Severn and the Cotswold hills are the primary features of Gloucestershire, determining three contrasting landscapes. The Vale of Gloucester is spanned by the Severn and its tidal estuary. The latter is flanked by the Forest of Dean towards the Welsh border and the Vale of Berkeley (a continuation of its sister vale) to the foot of the south Cotswolds. This range of hills extends the length of the county and initiates its most lovable characteristics. Beyond the Cotswold escarpment lies a broad, gently sloping limestone plateau dipping towards the distant Thames valley.

Each of these distinctive landscapes determines its building materials, population, and economic prosperity. The Forest of Dean was little populated and therefore lacks major medieval houses. In contrast, the Severn was a leading trade route, frequently subject to flooding but serving a rich pastoral region. The Cotswolds were exposed, windswept, and thinly inhabited, as some parts still are, but the hills provided some of the most profitable sheep runs in England.

Arable farming was the main source of livelihood in the early middle ages but the sheep runs developed in size between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries to become the dominating resource of the region. The lay subsidy of 1334 reveals that the income-generating resources of Gloucestershire positioned the county as eighth in England even though it had a relatively low population.