Part 8

Comparing Thorpe’s half-elevation with the photograph of the building (Fig. 4), the general likeness again is obvious. But Thorpe shows no basement windows; his front porch agrees with his plan and differs from the actual work; he shows two four-light windows in the front at the side of the porch, whereas there are actually a four-light and a five-light; he shows a single pilaster between these windows, whereas there are two. The end of his wing has a four-light window; the building itself has a five-light. Niches which he does not show have been made on the main front as well as on the flanks of the various projections. He shows several ways of ornamenting the pedestals of his pilasters; in execution they have the gondola rings shown to the left of his ground story. The curly gable of his corner pavilion, although carefully shown, does not quite tally with the gable as carried out; nor does his angle turret on the central tower agree with what was built. He evidently started by treating the angle with quoins surmounted by a small turret at the top, but he subsequently lengthened the turret downwards. The pilasters which he shows on this central block do not appear in the building; if they had they would have served to bring that part of the composition more into harmony with the lower part, and nothing would probably have been heard of the suggestion that the central pavilion is part of an older building. A study of the plan and of the building, however, disposes of this suggestion, nor could the lofty hall and the room over it be harmonised with any known treatment of houses prior to the Elizabethan era.

The discrepancies here pointed out do away with the idea that Thorpe’s drawings were made from the building after erection. They are easily accounted for on the supposition that the drawings were modified in the course of being carried out.

If we turn to Smithson’s drawings, we find that his plan (Fig. 5) tallies almost exactly (as to the main walls) with the existing plan. This leads to the supposition that his plan was drawn from the actual building at a time when the addition of forecourts was contemplated; if, indeed, owing to the considerable and irregular slope of the ground they were ever contemplated. His elevation of the corner pavilion (Fig. 6) agrees almost accurately with the actual building.

There is one point in connection with the Thorpe drawings which bears forcibly upon the question as to the source whence the ideas which underlay our English Renaissance came. There was a tolerably widespread desire in Elizabeth’s time to benefit by what was being done in foreign lands. A young architect, John Shute, was sent by the Duke of Northumberland to study architecture in Italy. Lord Burghley made more than one inquiry for books on architecture recently published in France, and John Thorpe himself, as his drawings show, studied Italian, French, and Dutch books. One of the French books to which he devoted considerable attention was Androuet du Cerceau’s _Les plus Excellents Bastiments de France_, published in 1576, and in that book are a few plans with corner pavilions such as those at Wollaton. The disposition of Wollaton is so unusual that it is quite possible that Thorpe may have put into practice here some of the ideas he gleaned from Du Cerceau’s book. Some of Du Cerceau’s plans he copied into his own MS. book, but in doing so he adapted them to English uses, and it was much the same with Wollaton. The plan is not a direct copy; it is only the general idea which may have been derived from the French source. Thorpe having designed the plan and elevation, may be presumed to have handed them over to Robert Smythson, who, with the help of the master-workmen from Italy, carried the work out. Such a course of procedure would at any rate reconcile the claims of the various parties.

But leaving the question of who designed the house, a few words must be bestowed upon the structure itself. Its plan, although of foreign origin, was so contrived as to comply with old-established English habits. The central position of the hall rendered it not altogether easy of access in the usual way--that is, into the passage at the end called the “screens.” The most direct way from the front door to the hall is that which now exists, but this leads you into the middle of the side, not into the screens. Thorpe, therefore, kept his hall floor above the level of his front door, and led the visitor, not directly into the hall, but round to the right, and so, by way of a flight of steps, up to the end of the hall, and delivered him into the screens in the usual way. The spare space not occupied by the stairs he devoted to the porter’s rooms. Smithson’s plan shows a similar arrangement. A further reason for keeping the hall floor raised was that, contrary to the prevailing custom, he put his kitchen and servants’ rooms down in a basement. This was almost a necessity of the design, for being of a pretentious nature, it was obliged to be grand on every side, and the kitchen and inferior premises had to be hidden away in a basement in order not to spoil the symmetry of the four show-sides of the house.

The disposition of the house, with a central hall surrounded by rooms two stories high, necessitated an unusual height for the hall, which is over 50 feet high. Its window-sills also had to be above the roofs of the surrounding rooms, and they are some 35 feet from the floor. The upper floor of these adjacent rooms on the east side was devoted to the long gallery, but modern alterations, necessitated by constant use, have not only divided this up into a number of small rooms, but have effectually obliterated from the interior of the whole house all its Elizabethan character, except what remains in the basement and in the great hall. The fine stone screen remains here, and agrees with the sketches in the Smithson drawings: the original roof is also left--an excellent specimen of Elizabethan work. It has this peculiarity, that though fashioned like an open hammer-beam roof, it supports in reality the floor of a large room over, called the Prospect Room, which occupies the upper part of the central block that forms so conspicuous a feature of the house.

It only remains to say that the house was entirely new from its foundations, and that it occupied eight years in erection. There was apparently no building here before it, although very frequently we find Elizabethan houses enveloping the remains of a humbler predecessor. The Willoughbys had lived at Wollaton for some generations previous to the building of the mansion, but their home was a house somewhere near the church. It has been suggested that the central block is earlier in date than that which surrounds it; but reflection shows that the hall must necessarily have been built in relation to the lower buildings round it. There is nothing to indicate any alterations of an older building; the detail of the central block, although different, is contemporary with that of the rest of the house, and the whole of it is shown on Thorpe’s drawing. Everything, therefore, tends to prove that the whole house was built at the same time. Duchess Cassandra tells us that the stone was brought from Ancaster, and that the same pack-horses which brought it took back Sir Francis’s coal in exchange. Notwithstanding that he got his stone for nothing, she says, and that labour was much cheaper in those days, the house cost Sir Francis £80,000.

The external treatment is of pronounced classic character, with plenty of pilasters and bold cornices. There are a number of circular niches containing busts of classic personages such as Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, and Diana. The master-workmen out of Italy were presumably familiar with these celebrities, and so might have been Mr. Robert Smythson, gent., but the ordinary English workman must have been rather puzzled by them, and perhaps secretly relieved when he heard that a shipload of them had gone down, an accident that is said to account for some of the niches being empty. But, _pace_ Duchess Cassandra, a good deal more assistance in English houses came from the Dutch than the Italians in the time of Elizabeth, and it would not be surprising if the building accounts, which are some day to be published, showed that Holland rather than Italy was the source whence some of the lower work was derived (in spite of the gondola rings which adorn the bases of some of the pilasters), as it was almost certainly the place where the curly gables of the pavilions had their origin.

The Smithson drawings, which have come to light again in recent years, are of very great interest. It is difficult to say what was their exact purpose. The elevation of the pavilion (Fig. 6) may have been drawn from the executed building. On the other hand, it may have been a development of Thorpe’s rather rough sketch. If so, it would probably be the work of Robert Smythson, and thus link him up with John; and, assuming that they were father and son, John must have preserved his father’s drawing among his own.

The plan (Fig. 5) has already been surmised to represent an idea of adding a forecourt to each front; but the levels of the ground seem to preclude the possibility of their ever having been carried out, and the drawing may be merely an exercise of fancy. In any case it appears odd to modern notions that the principal objects opposite to three of the fronts should be the stables, the dairy and laundry, and the bakehouse and brewhouse. On the fourth or entrance front there was to have been a gatehouse, which was quite a customary feature. The forecourt lying between the gatehouse and the mansion was to have been surrounded by a raised terrace or colonnade, as is indicated by the flights of steps leading up to it.

The plan of the orchard (Fig. 7) is entitled “Sur Percevalles Willoughbyes Newe Orcharde at Wollaton, Ann. Domi. 1618.” It is curious, inasmuch as the central part corresponds in outline with the plan of the house. Whether it was ever carried out or not is not known. Sir Perceval, it will be remembered, was the son-in-law and successor of Sir Francis, the builder of the house.

The drawings of the screen (Fig. 8) are of peculiar interest. There are three of them: one is the general design, differing in some respects from the actual work, and suggesting that it was the original design subsequently modified; another is a sketch for the upper carved panels between the columns (Fig. 9), and it agrees with the existing carving; the third is a sketch for the panels in the frieze above the screen (Fig. 10), and it agrees, in the main, with the actual work. All these facts point to the drawings being the originals from which the work was executed; they may, therefore, without forcing the argument, be fathered upon Robert Smythson, and they thus provide another link to connect Robert with John.

It is always interesting to find out who the men were who designed the old buildings which we admire so much. The houses did not grow of themselves, there were definite means employed to gain the results; and a careful study of such drawings as survive is gradually helping us to further knowledge on the subject. Several groups of men at this period seem to have been proud of their work and to have preserved their drawings. Among them were the Thorpes, father and son; the Smithsons, who for several generations (excluding Robert, who, however, seems to be taking his place in the family) were architectural designers of acknowledged ability; and Inigo Jones with his nephew and successor, John Webb. The lives of these men covered almost the whole of that interesting period in English architecture when the Italian influence was gradually transforming our methods of design. The elder Thorpe, who was already at work in 1570, saw the early stages; Inigo Jones, who died in 1652, was the agent who familiarised his countrymen with the finer forms of Italian design, and established the reign of Palladianism, the effects of which lasted for more than a century and a half. The work at Wollaton represents an early step in this long development, and will always be interesting on this account alone, apart from the striking, and indeed magnificent, individuality of the house itself.

THE ANCIENT AND MODERN TRENT

BY BERNARD SMITH, M.A.

THE RIVER TRENT

The valley of the Trent deserves to be considered as one of the most interesting of the antiquities of the county of Nottinghamshire. When our ancestors dubbed it “The broad vale of Trent,” they unconsciously laid stress upon its width, and, in fact, rightly, because the present river Trent is a misfit--too small for the valley--a shrunken representative of that ancient stream which carved the great steep-sided trench between Nottingham and Newark.

There is something very human about the behaviour of rivers; they live and move. In their youth, and at their headwaters, they are full of energy, constantly overcoming difficulties and removing obstacles from their course. As mature streams their paths are smoother and their ways more orderly. In old age they wander lazily to the sea, often haltingly and dropping their burdens on the way. But--unlike human beings--they are constantly at work. Should their energy be greater than is required to carry their load of rock-waste, they employ it in lowering and widening their beds, and in clearing and straightening their path to the sea. If all their energy is required to carry their load they can still burrow sideways into their banks, although they cannot now cut downwards. If the load is too great they wisely drop the overburden and carry that which their strength is equal to. The power of a river should never be gauged by its work or appearance at ordinary times, for tremendous vigour--out of all proportion--comes both with increase in volume and increase in pace, conditions only fulfilled when the river is in flood. Rivers, again, are more than human in the manner in which they adapt themselves to their environment. If hard rocks must be crossed they take the shortest path in a narrow gorge; if soft rocks are traversed they follow them as long as possible, meandering somewhat lazily along the path of least resistance; they thus tend to become adjusted to the texture and grain of the rocks over which they flow.

THE ANCIENT TRENT

The history of the river Trent is intimately connected with the story of the Great Ice Age in Britain. This event--so recent from a geological standpoint--was fairly distant from the human point of view, since nearly all of the Palæolithic relics of this country date from the retreat of the ice.

Long before the Ice Age (at a time when great earth movements were taking place upon the Continent and building up the Alps) the younger rocks in the Nottinghamshire area were uplifted and tilted gently to the east, away from the older and underlying Carboniferous rocks of the Pennines, and were thus brought within the influence of destructive processes.

Rivers, running down the slope in the direction of the North Sea, began to cut deeply and form a plain, whose general surface agreed roughly with the slope of the river channels. The higher beds on the west were stripped away, because a river is more active and cuts more deeply at its head than near its mouth. Hence the original surface of the uplifted plain has gone; the new surface slopes on the whole from west to east, and the older rocks are more elevated than the younger ones.

Tributary streams, developed along north and south lines in the soft belts of rock, became in time more important than the first-formed west to east streams. One of these tributaries, no doubt, working its headwaters backwards from the Humber, formed a valley in the red clays of Nottinghamshire which lie west of the Lincoln Cliff, and tapped the easterly-flowing waters, thus forming a river very similar in direction to the present Trent.

However this may be,[41] there is no sign of that river and that valley at the present day, although they were doubtless the guiding lines which eventually determined the course of the Vale.

Nottinghamshire was invaded by ice-sheets descending from the north. The direction of movement was rather from the west of north in the west of the county, and from the east of north in the south-east of the county; and as the ice advanced the rivers were naturally destroyed, partly by refrigeration, but chiefly by being invaded by ice. When the climate ameliorated the floods were let loose and the waters sought their old channels.

As the ice-front retreated it left behind it a mass of gravel which was in part washed from the ice-front by water draining the ice, and in part introduced by floods from distant sources. At the same time it is possible that much of the gravel was deposited beneath the surface of a large sheet of water; for in late-glacial times the water in this district seems to have been augmented by floods pouring into the basin from the direction of the Cheshire Plain and endeavouring to escape to the North Sea, since its escape to the Irish Sea was prevented by the Irish Sea ice. In our district it is thought that the water, finding its passage to the Humber barred by the retreating extremity of the ice-sheet, which rested against the cliff north of Lincoln and extended thence to the high ground north-west of Kelham, was forced to pour over a low gap in the hills at Lincoln.

The highest elevations between Newark and Lincoln, near Coddington, Potter’s Hill, Swinderby, Eagle, and Doddington, are capped by the gravels of late-glacial age. The Lincoln gap was then cut down; the ice had now probably retreated--although there is no direct evidence--and already opened up the way to the Humber, and a second series of gravels distributed by running waters on gently-inclined slopes of the solid formations and in hollows scoured through the older gravels. Such gravels occur near Nottingham, Radcliffe, Farndon, and Newark; and from the latter place they stretch to Winthorpe and Langford, and thence in a well-defined S-shaped belt to within one and a half miles of Lincoln. They are also found to the east of that city. The waters were again rapidly lowered and escaped by two exits--the Humber and the Lincoln Gap. Gravels formed at this stage occupy not only the floor of the present Trent valley, but below Newark spread widely over the ground to the east, abut against the well-marked terrace of the second series near Langford and Eagle, and sweep round the northern flank of the Doddington Hills to Lincoln.

The rather scanty evidence at our disposal tends to show that all these deposits were formed after the retreat of the ice, for although they rest upon boulder-clay (the ground moraine of the ice-sheet) at several points, they are never found beneath it. Between Nottingham and Newark the valley floor is almost certainly post-glacial, for, were it not so, we should expect to find boulder-clay on the valley slopes or beneath the river deposits--but such relics are wanting. The river had, however, established its present course very soon after the close of the Ice Age, because the bones of extinct mammalia--mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus--have been found in the valley deposits above Nottingham. At such a time heavy floods would occur when the winter snowfall melted in the spring, and the river and its feeders would be larger and more powerful than the present stream, which cannot lift and spread gravel over its flood plain.

Between the flood-periods the stream was choked with débris and gravel-bars, and compelled to split up into rapidly changing branches which spread the gravels far and wide. Such was the ancient Trent--a powerful flood immediately after the Ice Age, but slowly dwindling in volume and power as, in course of time, it cut deeper and deeper and sunk its valley below the level of the earlier-formed gravels, which were therefore left as terraces and flats above the level of the latest and lowest flood-plains (Fig. 1). The older gravels are probably of Palæolithic Age, although no remains of the earlier Stone Age have been found in them. Palæolithic man, however, inhabited the district, for signs of his presence have been discovered in the Creswell Caves, hence it is reasonable to expect that Palæolithic implements may eventually be discovered in some of the oldest post-glacial gravels between Nottingham, Newark, and Lincoln.

In the Idle and Leen valleys there are also gravel terraces of considerable antiquity, whose history is very similar, although somewhat shorter than those of the Trent.

THE PRESENT RIVER TRENT

Since the accumulation of the river gravels there has been slight widening of the valley in places, but hardly any deepening. The gravels, as a rule, are spread over it from side to side beneath the recent alluvium of the present enfeebled river, and the surface of the alluvial plain is at a slightly lower level than that of the gravel terraces. At ordinary times the river meanders to and fro among its ancient gravel-bars without sufficient energy to clear away all the detritus brought down to the flat by its tributaries. It rearranges the mixed sandy gravel of the old river, depositing the sand above the gravel, and placing a layer of loam, derived mainly from red Triassic rocks, upon the top of all. Thus the alluvial plain--within the old gravel plain--is built up both by lateral wandering of the river and by the floods which level up the surface.

Between Midsummer and Christmas A.D. 1346 long continued rains caused one of the most disastrous of the early recorded floods. In 1683 the bridges at Nottingham and Newark were destroyed by ice and water, due to the breaking up of a frost (which began in September, accompanied by much snow). Muskham and Holme also suffered severely. The Brampton bank (Breach Pit Bank) was broken five times previous to 1730, and again in 1824, since when a new bank has been erected. The banks near Newton and Torksey gave way in November 1770 and flooded all the lands on both sides of the Foss Dyke as far as Lincoln, flooding villages and destroying great quantities of hay and corn. Water stood several feet deep in the houses of Narrow Marsh, Nottingham. Floods also occurred in 1774 and 1790.

The great flood of Candlemas 1795 was--like that of 1683--the result of a quick thaw after a frost, which lasted from December 24, 1794, until February 9, 1795, and was accompanied by some 15 inches of snow. In Notts, as well as in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, the whole of the Trent valley was a scene of desolation, rendered more terrible by the masses of ice and melted snow carried along by the waters. The outer river bank near Spalford (the Wath Bank) burst at the south-east end of South Clifton Hill (Fig. 2), where the signs of the flood are still discernible (the hollow formed, though now dry, was long filled with water). An immense breach was formed, into which 80 loads of faggots and over 400 tons of earth were dumped before it was filled up.