Study-Day Report: Stanway Manor, Gloucestershire

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Study-Day Report: Stanway Manor, GloucestershireSource: Architectural History, Vol. 41 (1998), pp. 245-260Published by: SAHGB Publications LimitedStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1568657 .

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IVianor, Glucestershie'

Stanway Manor is'i aywy highly unconventional house, breakin may of the

prompting questions about how it has come to have both the plan and the variety of elevational treatment that are visible today, but serving as a reminder that the adaptation into country houses of sequestered monastic remains must often have resulted, through the need to econormize, in unorthodox compromise layouts. Though agreed to date largely from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Stanway is known to have been altered on a number of subsequent occasions, several of which can be precisely dated though without necessary certainty as to what was done. 2 The most strikn ofisuuual features - no doubt in large measure due to the adaptation of existing buildings of quite different character - are the elongated and irregular L- shaped plan of the main house (Fig. i), the position of the hall at one end of the entrance front and the steady rise of floor levels in the ground-floor rooms of the south range.

Stanway had from early in the eighth century been a possession of Tewkesbury Abbey: the great fourteenth-century barn east of the church is the chief surviving reminder of its monastic past. In 15 3 3 Sir Richard Tracy, younger brother of the owner of the nearby estate of Toddington, obtained a lease of Stanway, and after the Dissolution bought the estate.' There will certainfly have been an accommodation block of some kind on the monastic grange (early referred to as the abbot's 'fair stone house') and perhaps more than one.4 Kip's engraving of the house, made in I 713 (Fig. 2), shows a two-storey block (demolished probably in i 8 59) extending eastwards from the north end of the west range, which, though apparently refenestrated in the sixteenth century, may have been one such; it seems plainly not to have been a hall, which may have stood on the site of the later kitchen and 'audit room', in whose west walls fragments of early masonr-y are visible. There is some reason to suppose that the two bays at the east end of the south range may also antedate the building of the post- Dissolution house: the relation of this end to the rest of the south range suggests an ad- hoc junction around the present east staircase to allow access to the easternmost room on the first floor; and indeed the whole notion of actually designing the long south range in a series of ascending levels on the ground floor is bizarre.' The otherwise so far unexplained fact that the two easternmost bays project on the north side by about two feet might also be accounted for by this end of the range's being primary (though it should be noticed that there is an approximately equal break-forward into the re- entrant angle at the west end of this front). On the other hand the existence of three stone doorcases in this section of the house has in our view been misinterpreted: they



246 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 4I: I998

&'ard

it -1,

' L

Lack Stairs

04 J i a0 1_0 '60

Lr :' '*i.i Fig. i. Stanway Manor:

'*.'x: .4,~,; .... I~4L1 ground-floorplan as at present

are identified by David Verey7 as being of 'early Tudor type', but their profiles and mouldings are in fact almost identical with those of doorcases on the gatehouse and the garden gate north-east of the house, which certainly date from the early seventeenth century, as well as with others surviving elsewhere in the house. We think nevertheless that the east bays may represent an early residential block (or part of one), which was adapted for chambers or lodgings after the Elizabethan house had been built out eastwards to meet it. The thick wall on the west side of the present library might indicate the end of the old house, though it does not coincide with the break- forward to the north.

Further possible evidence of the inclusion within the Elizabethan house of surviving portions of the monastic buildings, both to the east and where the north range once was, comes from the angle within the south and west ranges, which is acute by about three degrees, suggesting a scarcely visible fudge in the layout of the new buildings in order to accommodate the absorption of two surviving blocks not quite parallel with one another - though it is not easy to see how the distortion helped matters. Overall,



STANWAY MANOR, GLOUCESTERSHIRE

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Fig. 2. Stanway: Kip's viewfrom the south (from Atkyns' History of Gloucestershire), 1713

this would result, it seems, in an irregular outward-facing U-shaped house with a rere- court and an end-hall at the south-west comer - a layout which could once be found elsewhere in Gloucestershire at Hardwicke Court:8 end-halls, as Thorpe reveals, were not uncommon at this period.9 Suggestions that a scar near the east end of the north face of the south range may point to there having once been an east range as well are not easy to sustain: at most, perhaps, an enclosing wall.10

The assumption that the EFlizabethan house was constructed in one campaign seems to be confirmed by the existence in the south range of two staircases of a somewhat archaic form, rising initially round a large solid newel which gives way to an enclosed but hollow square (John Heward suggests a comparison with that at Kirby Hall, Northants of c. I580). The awkwardly contrived access to an upper room eastwards from the eastemmore stair may perhaps be seen as support for the view that part of the 'abbot's house' survives in the masonry at this end of the house. The steps of both these staircases are of the simplest kind - unmoulded oak baulks which in the westernmore stair were encased at some point in the eighteenth century. The space between them is now occupied by the drawing room, and above its ceiling is a moulded lateral beam11 of the same form as the main beams in the hall confirming the likelihood that the two rooms belong to the same build. The natural assumption - which may need challenging - might then be that the west range, consisting presumably (from south to north) of hall, screens passage, buttery-cum-pantry,

247



ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 41: I998

kitchen, was built together with most of the south range, whose ground-floor levels were adjusted in two stages to allow the old east block (built on higher ground) to be incorporated into it, while its centre provided ample space for a large parlour, with great chamber above.

Much of the present fenestration of the west front is suspect (Fig. 3). The only windows which seem indisputably early are two at the north end on the ground floor: there is nothing in these windows to suggest a date earlier than, say, the mid- Elizabethan period, and they are therefore probably part of the first completion of the house by either Sir Richard Tracy (d. 1569) or Sir Paul (d. I620); disturbance of the stonework below the southemmore of the pair shows that the window once continued downwards - perhaps as a door - indicating the possible survival of some pre- Elizabethan walling at this point, a fragment possibly of the west wall of an early hall. The hall oriel, whose mouldings, while much done up, differ from all the rest on the west front, also appears likely to be original to the Elizabethan house; but the fenestration elsewhere on the lower two floors is probably the result of regularization during alterations either late in the seventeenth century or, more likely, in the mid- nineteenth, when William Bum is known to have carried out a major reorganization of the house. The paired windows in the so-called 'audit room' (now the dining room north of the screens passage) seem definitely Victorian; and evidence of the stonework round the main entrance door (Fig. 4) confirms that the upper part of the wall below the high windows of the hall is of fairly recent date. The doorcase must be one of the alterations recorded in Anne Tracy's diary in I724:12 a joggle joint to its left indicates that the stonework there had to be amended to accommodate it, and there is another joint to its right but only rising to about half its height: above this there is no sign of disturbance, implying that the wall above that point on the right of the door dates either from the introduction of the door or (more probably) from a later reconstruction which had to be accommodated to the then existing doorcase. The discontinuation of the string-course to the right of the doorway would support this. For what the evidence is worth, Kip's engraving, which shows the west front in intensely sharp perspective, indicates two rows of evenly spaced windows apparently of upright proportions with more wall and less window than at present and with a string-course about half-way between ground and first floor floors but no string above. (John Heward informs us that in the ceiling of the first-floor room created at some later stage over the screens passage there are exposed moulded beams and joists, of the same form as those in the hall, whose mouldings stop short above the centre of the west window at a beam which is flat on the north side, indicating that at first-floor level the north wall of the hall has been moved. The beam is evidently exactly above the thick masonry north wall of the passage: the implication therefore appears to be that the north wall of the hall (originally the back wall of the screens gallery and perhaps originally timber-framed in its upper half) was at some point moved two or three feet to the north to create a usable room when the gallery was boxed in. The Guide13 suggests that this was probably in i 860, but Bum's plan (Fig. 5) shows that he proposed blocking a doorway at the east end of the closed-truss beam, which implies that the room was at that time already in existence. Its window may nevertheless be an insertion or amendment by Bum, and that it is necessarily well off-centre in relation to the door

248



STANWAY MANOR, GLOUCESTERSHIRE 249

Fig. 3. Stanway: westfront (Photo by Lucinda Lambton)

Fig. 4. Stanway: entrance doorcase on the west front, by Francis Smith 1724



ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 41: I998

Fig. 5. Stanway: upper-floorplan by William Burn, 1859. The room partly over the screens passage is marked 'X'; the black outline to the north-east shows the medieval building demolished by Burn

below shows that the door and passage wall were left in position when the upper partition was shifted.)

There is clear evidence that the attic gables of the west range are a later alteration. A windbrace visible in the southernmost attic room and the abrupt cutting-through of the purlins on the west front to allow for the gables prove that the latter are secondary: they were, however, in place by I7I3, and so it seems reasonable to assume that the date of 1670 recorded on one rainwater head and the initials I.T. for [Sir] John Tracy, the owner between i666 and 1677, is that of the attic in its present outward form. The dormers between the gables are not shown either by Kip or on Detmar Blow's survey plan of the attic and must therefore date from after 1913; but if there were attic rooms

250




before I670 there must have been dormers to light them; and if there were, did these rooms extend over the hall? Possibly most likely was a garret, for storage and/or inferior servants' sleeping quarters, lit only by windows at each end.14

There are still large questions unanswered about the present state of the hall. It might have been expected that anyone building a substantial house in Elizabeth's reign and still wanting the splendour of a two-storey hall, especially one on the scale of that at Stanway, would have completed the display with an open roof. If that were the case however, it would mean that the hall ceiling is part of a later alteration, the earliest date for which would seem to be c. I630-40, when, evidently, the south front was redesigned. At that date a ceiling of moulded beams and joists of this form would seem implausibly retardataire. So probably the ceiling, with the implication of an attic above, is original. (A two-storey hall with superimposed attic was, it appears, built at Mannington, Norfolk as early as 1451; and there are of course major examples in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries of high halls, the equivalent of two storeys, with flat ceilings and further rooms above as at Longleat, Littlecote, Wollaton, Burton Agnes and Hatfield.) The south-facing bay window at the high end of the hall is, we assume, a seventeenth-century insertion designed to create symmetry on the new south front: its mouldings are consonant with the rest of those on that front, and its presence at this unorthodox point in the room rules out any sort of canopy or ceremonial dressing of the dais.1 The windows high up on the west wall north of the oriel are suspect for a different reason: they appear to have been recut at a comparatively recent date at the same time, perhaps, as their outer heads were raised to bring them level with those of the oriel and of first-floor windows further north: this has required that the lintels be chamfered (Fig. 6), as a result of which the west half of the ceiling (restored apparently in I860) was, it seems, retooled to ramp upwards to the outer wall: evidently what was left of the upper structure of the walls after the chamfering of the lintels was thought insufficient to support the transverse beams in their flat position.16 All the upper two thirds of the walls of the hall are now coated in render scribed to imitate stone, which conceals whatever form of lintels (in wood or conceivably iron) actually bear the load: the staining of this render to give an impression of alternating voussoirs in the imitation flat arch over the 15-feet-wide opening of the oriel will not deceive for long when one observes that the rere-'arch' towards the window has vertical 'joints'. The readiest explanation of all this is that in I859-60 Burn redesigned the west front to produce a more regular appearance, with the upper windows neatly laid out under a new string-course and all of the same form and size save that those in the hall have an extra tier of lights underneath. Burn was presumably also responsible for the imitation-Jacobean panelling on the west wall of the hall behind the shuffleboard table, though now vanished stretches may have been seventeenth-century: they are known from a Victorian photograph showing also a chimneypiece understood now to be in Dallas which might be contemporary with either set of wainscot. The present chimneypiece, evidently in the position where one has always been, dates from I958 and is the work ofJeremy Benson.

The layout and use of rooms in the first stage of the complete house is problematical, especially those in the west range. An obvious difficulty is that of access to the upper floors in this range. At present they can be reached from the principal stair in the

17

25I



ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 41: 1998

Fig. 6. Stanway: upper window-heads in the hall

re-entrant angle via the first-floor corridor which runs above the passage along the east side of the west range; but, though one must be cautious about what he thought would be visible from a suppositious viewpoint in the sky, there is no sign of an upper corridor in Kip's engraving; and, more significantly, high up near the south end of the ground-floor passage is a lintel, of the same form as those in the redesigned south range, which implies a north-facing window at this point and hence an outer wall: this would rule out a first-floor passage when the south front was recast in, say, I630. Access to the upper floor in the west range must therefore have been by a staircase in the region of the present one near the north end, very likely occupying part of the modem pantry and perhaps within a polygonal-ended tower-like structure shown by Kip roughly in this position. Though this will have been at the service end of the house, there may well have been a good suite of rooms here on the upper floor- possibly indeed that of the owner if he followed the way of numerous contemporaries in taking advantage of constant warmth from the kitchen for his private accommodation. Access to the attic must always have been from the north and - to judge by the present mean companionway - has never been satisfactorily worked out.

252




X j I E [~I ~~ F"! I O

Fig. 7. Stanway: eastfront r int -~ I,Z l _ m rrr r(diagram ofpart of William

LJ LL IT ffl __j F L Taylor's painting ofthe house v\~~

q ~~~from the east, 1749)

We suggested above that the expected sequence north of the hall in the Elizabethan house would have been screens passage, pantry-cum-buttery, kitchen. It seems likely that the northermost room was indeed the kitchen, with a large open fireplace and stack at the north end and windows appropriately high in the west wall.i7 In its south wall a wide alcove suggests that there might once have been twin doors at this point from service rooms to the south. To the south, however, is now the 'audit room', with a fireplace in the middle of its east wall. The foreshortening of the west range in Kip's drawing makes it difficult to be sure of his precise intentions; but he appears to show a stack at a point which would coincide with this fireplace, and such a stack is clearly visible on William Taylor's admittedly somewhat naive painting of 1748 (Fig. 7).18 This implies that the audit room fireplace dates back at least to 1713 (since the room's two doorcases, plainly Victorian pastiche, are sub-Tudor, the present chimneypiece is probably early eighteenth-century) - with the further implication that this was then likely to have been, as it is now, a single room. Was it always so, designed perhaps as a 'winter parlour',19 or perhaps once even divided in three, the northern half split between pantry and buttery? Service rooms must in any case have been in this area awkwardly far from the cellar stairs in the re-entrant angle.

To provide under-cover access to the cellar without going through the hall there was almost certainly a pentice-covered walk along the line of the present corridor east of the audit room and hall. Flags in the entrance (screens) passage are continuous with those in this corridor and not of a kind that one would expect in a floor new-laid in the eighteenth century when, the evidence is, the screen was remodelled and the passage wainscoted: they were therefore very likely laid during the i630os campaign. Further confirmation of a single-storey covered walkway comes from the lintel already mentioned, belonging to a window whose height above the ground would most easily be explained by its having to be above a lean-to roof, and from the fragmentary survival of a doorcase, evidently of the same sub-Tudor form as those scattered about the house and outworks, which led into the east corridor from the bottom of the principal staircase. (This doorway was largely destroyed to allow the cutting through of a larger door in the eighteenth century, but part of one jamb remains behind the later architrave; the semicircular arch from the hall to the staircase is set on jambs

253



ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 4I: I998

which reveal remnants of yet another doorway of the same kind.) The assumed pentice had been built up into the present three-gabled two-storey thickening of the middle of the west range by the time of Taylor's painting, in which it is clearly visible. This work therefore seems to date from some time between I7I3 and 1748, but it is stylistically at odds with work known to have been carried out in 1724 and may therefore be an independent local job. It had a door in the present position, but this had disappeared by the time of a nineteenth-century photograph: the present one is apparently a pastiche dating from Detmar Blow's alterations in I913, possibly incorporating a seventeenth-century overdoor.

Stylistically there is good reason to think that the house was given a facelift in about 1630, when Sir Paul's son, another Richard, was the owner. This involved the creation of the forecourt, including the gatehouse and gateways to north and west, and the refacing of the entire south front of the south range to produce a symmetrical design concealing the change in levels (Fig. 8): from the outside the deception is complete, but the internal ground-floor sills, which are above head height at the west end are at feet-level at the east. Care is needed in interpreting this facade, since it is known from nineteenth-century photographs that - evidently in 1724 - the windows lighting the great parlour (later drawing room) and the room(s) above it were sashed and their proportions changed; their restoration to the presumed original form has been carried out with such skill, however, that no disturbance to the wall is visible. Slight discrepancies between the windows as they exist (including several which show every evidence of being unchanged since the I63os) and as shown by Kip are probably not significant, but it is worth noting that the two westernmost windows on the upper floor are shallower than the remainder: one of them lights the staircase, and the other, originally evidently blocked in its lower lights, is at the south end of the present nursery above the hall, the ceiling of which is several feet above the first-floor rooms to the east. Kip shows all these upper windows as identical, but this cannot ever have been correct. Confirmation that the bay window at the west end (lighting the south end of the hall) dates from the revamping of the south front comes from the continuity of the south-front string-course, which comes to stop at a quite arbitrary level in the hall oriel.

The roof of the south range - at least as far eastwards as the stack between the library and boudoir near the east end - is double-framed with collars supported by raked queen struts, and might be either sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century; it shows little sign of major alteration, but the existence of one moulded beam, similar to those in the hall, placed transversely across the range and upside-down is puzzling: it may simply have been a superfluous piece left over from the construction of the hall or great-parlour ceiling. The present south-range roof is in any case secondary to that over the west range; for the rafters and purlin of the east side of the latter continue without a break across the west end of the south range, whose purlins simply butt on to its side. The east end of the south-range roof seems to have been substantially reframed, with lateral rows of vertical struts under the purlins. Assuming that Kip is to be relied on as showing the parapet walk continuing round the east end of the range, this reframing is presumably linked with the reconstruction of the east gable further east. It is possible that the stonework of the gable in its original position was too heavy

254




Fig. 8. Stanway: southfront

to be supported by the tie-beam underneath it and that for safety's sake it was moved to its more conventional present position, even though this resulted in an awkwardly asymmetrical east end. (Francis Smith20 was adamant that a stone pediment would be unsafe on the north front of Badminton: was he basing this opinion partly on the basis of an unsafe one at Stanway?) The architecture of Stanway at this period, especially that of the exuberant gatehouse (Fig. 9), is a characteristic and fascinating mixture of the traditional (Tudor arches and sub-medieval mouldings), the only slightly out-of- date court style (curvaceous gables, strapwork and upright ceil-de-bceuf windows) and classical already beginning to go mannerist (fine doric columns with a Smythson-like entablature but a gapingly wide segmental pediment broken to make way for a framed cartouche). It is the persistent survival of the most traditional features which, oddly enough, is maintained in the doorcases inside the house.

Anne Tracy's diary reveals that there were considerable changes in I724 including, as David Durant has suggested,21 the creation of a great apartment in the south range, prompted by the second John Tracy's wealthy marriage and the nearby presence of his cousin the 4th Viscount Tracy, at Toddington. Anne Tracy mentions on io February, 'Mr. Smith here settled the affair of the G. Parlour', and later that Mr Smith had been to collect his money; since visible work of the early eighteenth century is entirely in Francis Smith's manner (the south doorcase, for example, surmounted by a window framed by floreated volutes, is essentially a replica of others at Stoneleigh, Sandywell and Mawley), we can safely assume that he was the Mr Smith in question. 'The affair of the G. Parlour' must have meant its redesigning as a drawing room: what remain of Smith's period in the room are some woodwork (doors and shutters, rehung on new hinges when the windows were altered for the second time), the cornice and the chimney tabernacle, including perhaps the fireplace though not the mantelshelf. The north wall of the great parlour and of the former great chamber which we assume once occupied all the now divided space above it, has blocked

255




Fig. 9. Stanway: gatehouse,frontispiece

Fig. 0o. Stanway: Detmar Blow's drawing of the north front of the south range, 1913

256




windows of an obvious early eighteenth-century form on either side of the stack. The north front (Fig. io) is so random an elevation that they can never have been intended as cosmetic dummies, and these windows must once have flanked the fireplace symmetrically - a decidedly unusual arrangement in an eighteenth-century room; but the parlour without them is dark and would be darker still with smaller Georgian windows and if the south door were, as it must originally have been, of wood and not, as now, glazed. Subsequently the parlour (by then the drawing room) was given a pseudo-Jacobean ceiling (presumably by Burn), and - perhaps not overseen by Bum, since the craftsmanship is of poor quality the room was rewainscoted when the north windows were blocked and the rest returned to their Carolean form. The great apartment will, it is assumed, have continued into the 'Elcho rooms' at the east end, with the present library as ante-room and the boudoir as bedroom. Early eighteenth- century decoration of these rooms has not survived, the library trim and other decoration probably dating from c. 1770, when the library corridor may have been created and the bedroom fireplace moved from its west wall to the north. The two main entrance doorways, on the west and south fronts, are convincingly of 1724 (Anne Tracy mentioned, on 20 October, going 'in the Garden to seen the Arms put up' i.e., the cartouche over the south door); and the wainscoting of the screens passage and classical re-ordering of the screen into a doric colonnade also evidently belong to this campaign (Fig. i).22 Lord Neidpath's Guidebook gives I86o for the date when 'the oak posts supporting the gallery were sheathed with the present stucco Doric columns'; but the doric entablature is convincingly eighteenth century, and projections within it imply columns where they now are, so that what may rather have happened in i 860 is that existing wooden doric columns were coated with render to bring them into line with the newly rendered upper walls of the hall. Their neo-classical orthodoxy would be surprising for i860, and also, it has been argued, for 1724; but columns of the main doorcase aedicule at Smith's Kinlet (Shropshire) of 1727-29 and those of the hall in the same house are, except for the absence of convex fillets in the lower third of the fluting, identical in form with those at Stanway. In fact one need go no further than the outer face of the Stanway gatehouse for a pair of columns which, apart from their standing on high pedestals, are precise models for those in the hall.

In brief summary, therefore, we suggest that the best evidence at the moment is that during Elizabeth I's reign the first Sir Richard Tracy or Sir Paul built an irregular U- shaped house, with an end hall at the angle, whose north and south ranges probably incorporated small residential buildings dating from the late monastic period. The west range probably looked much less regular than it does now, and the south range certainly did. The latter was refaced and very likely re-roofed c. I630, when the gatehouse and forecourt were built. The attic of the west range was given its present gables in 1670. Detailed bringing up to date (hall screen, drawing room, new entrance doorcases, partial refenestration and possibly the east passage) was carried out by Francis Smith in 1724, and more c. 1770 (Elcho rooms). In 1859-60 Burn, in addition to building offices to the north, now altered or removed, re-ordered the west front, rendered the hall and largely redecorated the drawing room replacing mullioned windows removed in the eighteenth century. Detmar Blow's work of 1913, in addition to large new offices to the north-east (removed in 1949), included repairs to the main

257




...... ;:i[

..-... .:: , ... ...

Fig. i i. Stanway: hall screen, given its presentform in 1724, stuccoed 186o

house but no major alterations, though it may have been he who added dormers along the west front.

APPENDIX ADDITIONS AND A DISAGREEMENT, by JOHN HEWARD The site and setting of the house are crucial in trying to unravel the development at Stanway and do explain some of the quirks of the plan. Lord Neidpath has pointed out to me that the house, tucked into the hillside, avoided the worst of the wind and driving rain even a few yards out into the open and yet was not badly affected by the frost and cold felt by the hillside itself. Presumably this and the economy of retaining at least some of the abbey's buildings persuaded the first Tracys to remain on the site of the medieval buildings. In addition they leased the house for several years (until after 1583 according to Lord Neidpath); so drastic rebuilding on a new site may not have been an option. Particularly in the late sixteenth century any enlargement of the house to the west was tightly restricted by the church and possibly by a road hard against the house on the line of the present forecourt. The steep slope of the hill to the east prevented building in that direction, and the slope of the present garden to the south and the position of service buildings and their drains had all to be taken into account. A second medieval barn is known to have existed north of the surviving one and forming the north side of a large court, though I do not see this as a forecourt to the lodgings or grange, which are off-centre to the south. The proximity of house and church follows the conventional arrangement for a church and manor house of Anglo-Saxon or early medieval origin, but Tewkesbury owned the property from such an early date that it is difficult to identify the arrangement of the buildings or their function.

258




I quite like the idea of the sixteenth-century house's being approached from the east: the cross terrace could mark the line of the road, though I should like to see more evidence for this in the landscape to the north and south. A long courtyard entered from the narrow end would make the house more like Toddington, though dropping down into the court would be rather odd; and, given the position and alignment of the gatehouse, by the seventeenth century the main approach was certainly from the south.

I do not agree with the suggestion that the east end of the south range is of medieval date: to me none of the visible features in the south range appear medieval, though it could be on the site of a medieval one. The scale of the building at the south-east corner does not fit with that of the medieval buildings in the north range shown by Kip, and the slope of the site would have been a much more serious problem before the south garden was levelled in the seventeenth century. The timber-framed walls exposed on the first floor at the east end, with large square panels, and the moulded beams above the drawing-room ceiling suggest that the whole south range dates from the later sixteenth century: was it started as a second campaign of work shortly after the completion of the hall? The break-forward on the north side of the range would have been symmetrical if an east range had been planned, though not built. The large blocked windows on the north side could then be interpreted as part of this work and would suggest that the house was inward-looking. The work of the seventeenth century would then include the creation of the garden, levelled with considerable terracing along the west side, and the turning of the principal rooms in the south range to look outwards to this new garden. The retaining wall on the west side of the garden has ceil-de-bceuf openings of a distinctly post-Civil-War form. Could the campaign of 1670 be much more extensive than so far assumed? Could the door at the centre of the south front shown by Kip be of c. I670 and suggest that that was when the late sixteenth-century range was remodelled?

Is there really 'ample space' between the south-range staircases for a parlour with great chamber above'? In a late medieval or sixteenth-century house of the status of Stanway I should expect the principal room to be on the first floor: at Stanway the ground-floor room is much higher than the chamber above it. Was there a grand public room or great chamber on the first floor, or was the present drawing room used as a great chamber and there was actually no parlour? The plan allows for a state apartment in the seventeenth century with an ante- chamber, a state bedroom in the position of the library and corridor, and a closet in the Elcho sitting room. The first floor would then have provided space for a single but secondary apartment with a similar layout. This would explain the arrangement of staircases (the east being a privy stair), and the provision of garderobes at the east end.

Could the attic rooms in the hall range have provided space for a long gallery? The house is of sufficient size and status to call for one, and this would be a reasonable position for a gallery in the late sixteenth century - reached by a stair at the service end. Possibly access to the roof walk along the south front at roof level, returning across the east end, was either contrived from the gallery or was from the top of the east stair.

NOTES

I This is a report - the first, it is hoped, of an occasional series - based on the SAHGB study day held at Stanway by kind permission of Lord Neidpath on 21 May 1994, together with a subsequent visit by Architecture and Design in the West of England on 5 December I995. It has been prepared by Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire and is intended not as a final statement about the house but as a notice of present thoughts, on which comments and criticism are warmly invited. John Heward, who was not able to be present at the study day, has kindly allowed us to print his commentary and disagreement as an appendix. - Editor 2 Hard evidence includes the succession of owners following the purchase of the estate in c. 1537-38; those who held the house during the periods of its controversial architectural history were: Sir Richard Tracy (Sheriff i56o-6I, d. 1569), Sir Paul (ist baronet 1611, d. 1620), Sir Richard (d. I637), Sir Humphrey (d. I651), Sir Richard (d. i666), Sir John (d. I677), Ferdinando (son of 3rd Viscount Tracy of Toddington, d. I682),

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John (d. I735). Rainwater heads on the west front bear the date 1670 and on the west and south fronts the initials 'I.T.' Kip's engraving of the house* was printed in Atkyns' History of Gloucestershire in 1713, and William Taylor's painting* was made in I749. Anne Tracy's diary* records alterations in 1724. William Bum's presence is recorded in I859-60 (see Colvin, Dictionary, I995 edition, p. I9I; plans dated September I859, Stratton Street, London*) and Detmar Blow's in 1913 (plans and elevations*). Previous accounts of the house include those of the VCH Gloucestershire, vol. VI, p. 225; of Christopher Hussey (Country Life, 3-17 December I964); of Lord Neidpath (Stanway House: a Guidebook (1982)) and of Nicholas Kingsley (The Country Houses of Gloucestershire, vol. I (I989), pp. 173-76). Asterisked items are kept at Stanway. 3 The history of the family is ably summarized in Lord Neidpath's Guidebook. 4 See Neidpath, Guidebook, p. 15. A comparable almost complete survival of an 'abbot's fair house' is the fifteenth-century Ashbury Manor, Berkshire, on a former grange of Glastonbury Abbey - like Tewkesbury a Benedictine house. 5 The diary of Emma Dent of Sudeley Castle records a visit to Stanway on 28 February 1859, in which she reports that 'the oldest part of the house, which contained "the abbot's room" and was standing at the time of the Conquest [!], is to be pulled down and restored.' [Sudeley Castle Muniments, F.34: information from Nicholas Kingsley]. That this 'oldest part' was the north range seems to be confirmed by Bum's plans for his new offices with the outline of the old building superimposed. It had apparently already been much altered by the time of Taylor's painting. 6 There are signs in the small attic room north of the east staircase that there was once a vice stair at this point. 7 David Verey, The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire, the Cotswolds (I970), p. 416. 8 See Kingsley, op. cit., pp. I02ff.

9 Plans of houses with end-halls in Thorpe's book (John Summerson (ed.), The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe, Walpole Society (I966)) include T.II8 (Summerson, pl. 55), T.207 (pl. 94) and T.217-8 (pl. IOI). 10 Suggestions have also been made (see Appendix, below) that the house might originally have been entered from the east. Apart from the fact that newly built U-plan houses of the Elizabethan period commonly had their entrance fronts within the open court, we have not been able to see evidence for this, and if it ever were the case, it had clearly been abandoned by the time the gatehouse and forecourt were built to the west. I I Others of this kind may survive above the drawing-room ceiling, but are not readily visible. 12 See below, p. 255. 13 Guidebook, p. 5. 14 The two existing dormers on the east face of the roof may be eighteenth-century additions: they are shown on Taylor's painting (see n. 2). 15 It ought to be observed, nevertheless, that end-halls shown in Thorpe's book (see n. 9) regularly have windows at the dais end. I6 Chamfered lintels like those in the hall at Stanway appear also on the upper windows of the otherwise totally dissimilar two-storeyed saloon at Newbold Revel (Warwicks): this house is a complete recasting (dated 17I6) of an earlier, probably sixteenth-century one, and the saloon was evidently created within the walls of the great hall. Additional height was needed in order to keep the window heads of the first floor on the east side level, suggesting that the ceiling of the eighteenth-century saloon had to be hung underneath the existing roof (now entirely removed, but cf. Upton Hall, Northants: John Heward & Robert Taylor, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire (I995), pp. 3I7ff.). The eighteenth-century redesigning of Newbold is not documented but is generally agreed to be the work of Francis Smith: cf. Andor Gomme, Newbold Revel: an Architectural History (Newbold Revel, 1998). I7 It is unlikely that the kitchen was further north than this, since the next section of the building (where Bum did place his kitchen) seems always to have had a transverse roof and apparently contained a broad gateway. i8 See above n. 2. I9 Cf. Thorpe T.202 (Summerson, pl. 96: plan of Somerhill, Kent), where the winter parlour is shown between the hall and kitchen. 20 See below. 21 Personal communication. 22 Cf. Neidpath, op. cit., p. 5.

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Study-Day Report: Stanway Manor, Gloucestershire

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