The object of this short note is simply to draw attention to a type of castle gateway which has evidently escaped attention; though, of course, individual examples have usually been duly noted in published descriptions of those castles where they occur. What we may call, by contrast, the two recognized types of castle gate are (i) the single mural tower pierced by the entrance passage, and (ii) the twin-towered gateway which, consisting essentially of a pair of mural or flanking towers, one on either side of the gateway through the curtain, develops from at least the thirteenth century into the great twin-towered gatehouse of the later Middle Ages.

The ‘long gallery’: a name and a room perfectly familiar these days to anyone visiting or reading about English country houses and, indeed, equally familiar since the midnineteenth century to those acquainted with prints and descriptions of country-house interiors. Does the name, however, as we use it today, go back much further than the nineteenth century and what are the problems which the word ‘gallery’ itself can present?

This paper discusses the origin and diffusion of a particular type of very common small house that is characterized by what has come to be known as the lobby-entry plan. It was built in great numbers in the seventeenth century in much of England, and, though superseded by more modern types, continued to be built at least until the middle of this century. The subject, the history of vernacular architecture, is not usually associated with Howard Colvin. Nevertheless, in 1961 he published an account of Haunt Hill House at Weldon in Northamptonshire, a lobby-entry house that clearly shows how artificial the boundary between vernacular and polite architecture really is, if it exists at all; and the same is shown by some of the buildings discussed below.

The word ‘lodge’ has a complex etymological history. Because it was originally a general term meaning any building in which people lived, it could be applied equally to a substantial manor house used as a hunting base, to the residence of the master of a college or to the much humbler apartments of the porter of the same institution. It was in its limited later usage to describe a small house standing as guardian to a park gate that the lodge became a building type of real architectural significance, but its etymological flexibility, this ambivalence between the class systems, is a pointer to its architectural importance.

The ‘long gallery’: a name and a room perfectly familiar these days to anyone visiting or reading about English country houses and, indeed, equally familiar since the midnineteenth century to those acquainted with prints and descriptions of country-house interiors. Does the name, however, as we use it today, go back much further than the nineteenth century and what are the problems which the word ‘gallery’ itself can present?

Long before its completion in 1792 James Wyatt’s restoration of Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of fierce debate within antiquarian circles. Criticism of Wyatt’s activities was at first directed at the destruction of antiquities they involved, but attention also focused on the alleged inadequacies of the Wyatt Gothic style, a criticism inspired by the new fittings and altarpiece, but above all by ‘the most conspicuous object in the whole church’, the reconstructed choir screen and organ loft.

Contemporaries regarded Donaldson’s Hospital as William Henry Playfair’s greatest work, a view the architect himself probably shared even though the effort of designing it cost him very dear. At first sight its richly towered and pinnacled profile and even bay design might seem to have owed something to Barry’s designs for the Palace of Westminster, but its building dates, 1842-52, are deceptive. The five years’ long competition which eventually led to Playfair’s appointment was initiated eighteen months earlier and the earliest submissions of 1834-35 had the same rich Tudor- Jacobean character as the executed building on an even more extensive scale. It was only as the competition progressed that parallels began to develop which were never lost on its promoters.

On 1 March 1629 a small but high-level Dutch deputation arrived in London. It represented the Dutch East India Company and its mission was to try and normalize relations between the Company and its English counterpart, and to secure the release of three Dutch trading ships confiscated by the English in the aftermath of the Amboyna incident (1623).

The set of seven drawings of Bolsover Castle now at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire was first discussed by John Harris in his The Artist and the Country House (1979). He illustrated three of the drawings, and convincingly connected them with the engravings of Bolsover Castle in the Duke of Newcastle’s celebrated La Méthode Nouvelle et Invention Extraordinaire de Dresser les Chevaux, published for the Duke (or, as he then was, Marquess) in 1658, during his exile in Antwerp.

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design was finished early in 1712; Shaftesbury, abroad in Naples and already ailing, sent the manuscript to London, addressed to Lord Somers. Within a year the author was dead. In his last two years of life, Shaftesbury had been able not only to prepare for the press the second edition (London, John Darby, 1714) of his Characteristicks, first published in 1711, but also to put together a sequel which he entitled Second Characters. This new work was to consist of four essays, the first being the Letter Concerning Design and the second the Judgment of Hercules.

In 1755, Robert Adam was introduced to Piranesi in Rome. By the following year the relationship had developed sufficiently for Adam to become one among several of Piranesi’s patrons. This friendship was cemented by a partial dedication of volume 11 of the Antichità Romane, in 1756. And so it continued until Adam’s departure from Rome in the spring of 1757. Apart from the intellectual benefits such an encounter held for Adam, the more tangible record lay in the books of Piranesi’s etchings in his library and a chalk and ink capriccio, now in the Soane Museum. It is possible to clarify this bond between master and pupil by assessing a small group of drawings divided between two private collections, at Blair Adam and at Penicuik House. Together, they show Adam and Piranesi at work as topographic artists, and they make clear — alas — the shortcomings of Adam.

Among the many collections of topographical manuscripts deposited in the British Library are 525 foolscap sheets of detailed notes and drawings bound together in two bulky volumes and entitled:

The wish of the Committee is to give the School a national character because there is in Scotland an art of the past with a distinctly local colouring capable of being developed and applied to the wants and necessities of the present day. To enable this to be done the Committee must have an historical collection of examples of the various phases of art left to us from the past.

‘Architecture and History’: I take my title from a lecture by William Morris, delivered in 1884. One of its themes was the link between art and society, between style and culture, between architecture past, present, and future. My lecture takes up a similar theme from a rather different perspective. I want to concentrate on the stylistic problems created by those assumptions of continuity and reciprocity. In a nutshell, Morris’s generation was faced with an architecture apparently dying from a surfeit of history. In an age of extraordinary scientific and technological progress — an age bewitched by theories of evolution — architecture seemed to be mesmerized by the Renaissance, by the Middle Ages, by Antiquity. Hence the dilemma of style. What I shall try to do is to examine that Victorian problem of style through the eyes of the Victorians themselves. But this is an inaugural lecture. So the witnesses I shall call will be my predecessors.