The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 268 • Ian Whyte
Figure 15.2 Montacute House, Somerset; a fine example
of a Tudor country house.
Source: I. Whyte
Figure 15.3 Excavation of a sixteenth-seventeenth-century deserted bastle
house and fermtoun site, Glenochar, upper Clydesdale.
Source: I. Whyte
countryside and its inhabitants, have come to
epitomize the traditional English rural landscape
(Figure 15.2). The distinctive, sometimes whimsical
styles of the Tudor period with their exuberant
decoration gave way to more sedate Jacobean and
then to full classicism as the influence of Palladio
spread. Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King’s Works
from 1615, was the first architect to introduce the
fully-fledged classical style to England. In the later
seventeenth century, the taste for classical styles began
to gather momentum, producing some monumental
Baroque houses like Blenheim, Oxfordshire. In the
first half of the eighteenth century, a more restrained
Palladianism spread throughout Britain. By the later
eighteenth century, the Gothic style was beginning
to become popular. The houses of the gentry changed
more slowly than those of the aristocracy. Many
medieval moated sites continued in use, while hall
houses with screens passages were still being built in
southern England in the sixteenth century.
In the far north of England and in Lowland
Scotland, fortified houses, ranging from baronial
castles through tower houses to modest bastles,
continued to be occupied and even constructed into
the early seventeenth century. The study of late
medieval Scottish castles has been dominated by
architectural historians, and only recently have
archaeologists started to make a contribution.
Excavations at sites like Smailholm,
Borders and Threave, Dumfries and
Galloway have established that the
modern appearance of such
structures is misleading. They were
not isolated structures but were
accompanied by halls and ranges of
service buildings (Tabraham 1988).
Fortified bastle houses went out of
use in Cumber-land and
Northumberland following the
pacification of the Border after
1603. Recent surveys and
excavations in upper Clydesdale
have shown that such houses were
more common in southern Scotland
than has been supposed (Figure
15.3). In Scotland, they continued
in use for another half century or
more. The last Scottish tower house