At Home - Bill Bryson [33]
To accommodate all the new room types, houses grew outward as well as upward. An entirely new type of house, known as the prodigy house, began to sprout and proliferate all over the countryside. Such houses were almost never less than three stories high and sometimes four, and they were often staggeringly immense. The most enormous of all was Knole in Kent, which grew and grew until it covered nearly four acres and incorporated 7 courtyards (one for each day of the week), 52 staircases (one for each week of the year), and 365 rooms (one for each day of the year), or so it has long been said.
Looking at these houses now you can sometimes see, in the most startling way, how the builders were learning as they went. A striking example is Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, which was built for the Countess of Shrewsbury—Bess of Hardwick, as she is always called—in 1591. Hardwick Hall was the marvel of its age and instantly became famous for its great expanses of windows, prompting the much quoted epigram “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.” To modern eyes, the windows are of a size and distribution that seem pretty close to normal, but they were such a dazzling novelty in 1591 that the architect (who is thought to have been Robert Smythson) didn’t actually know how to fit them all in. Some of the windows are in fact blanks hiding chimneys. Others are shared by rooms on separate floors. Some big rooms don’t have nearly enough windows, and some tiny rooms have little else. Only intermittently do the windows and the spaces they light actually match.
Bess filled the house with the finest array of silver, tapestries, paintings, and the like of any private house in England, yet the most striking thing to modern eyes is how bare and modest is the overall effect. The floors were covered in simple rush mats. The great gallery was 166 feet long but contained only three tables, a few straight-backed chairs and benches, and two mirrors (which in Elizabethan England were exceedingly precious treasures, more valuable than any paintings).
People didn’t just build enormous houses, they built lots of enormous houses. Part of what makes Hardwick Hall so remarkable is that there was already a perfectly good existing Hardwick Hall (which became known as Hardwick Old Hall), just across the grounds. Today it is a ruin, but it remained in use in Bess’s day and for another 150 years beyond.
Traditionally, the great house builders (and house accumulators) were monarchs. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than forty-two palaces. But his daughter Elizabeth cannily saw that it was much cheaper to visit others and let them absorb the costs of her travels, so she resurrected in a big way the venerable practice of making annual royal progresses. The queen was not in truth a great traveler—she never left England or even ventured very far within it—but she was a terrific visitor. Her annual progresses lasted eight to twelve weeks and took in about two dozen houses.
Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these—150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I—traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors