The early Tudor country house

by Maurice Howard

Typified by a house such as Compton Wynyates, low-lying brick-built and attractively unsymmetrical, the early Tudor country house has often been described as displaying an indefinable quality of Englishness. But the builder of Compton Wynyates would be surprised to see his house today, without the moat and the rambling and fragile outbuildings of timber that originally surrounded it. The popular view of the early Tudor country house is shaped by the accidents of survival and therefore by a false idea of what these buildings were really like. Howard's wide-ranging account shows these hosues as they were built, how they were lived in and what they demonstrate about the society of the time. Primarily products of the great and wealthy, they are an interesting key to the workings of the power structure and the influence of the Court. At the start of the period, the higher ranks of the clergy were setting the pace for new building projects, as epitomized by the activities of Thomas Wolsey. T