Heritage of Wales
Early Modern Wales
Historians generally judge processes that continue over many years to be more important than single events. However, the beginning of early modern Wales may be said to date effectively from one action: the passing of the Act of Union in 1536. The end of the period is more indistinct: it could be said to wane as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace after the mid-eighteenth century.
The 1536 Act created the thirteen historic counties out of a patchwork of marcher lordships and the principalities of north and west Wales. The new shire administrations, the quickening pace of the economy and an increasing population all promoted a flowering of the principal towns. Almost simultaneous was the pivotal moment in the Reformation in Wales — the suppression of the monasteries, which was completed in 1539. This resulted in the decay of many great abbeys and their estates but at the same time the consolidation of great private landholdings that would dominate Welsh rural life until their own break-up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Reformation also fundamentally changed the ordering and decoration of the parish church and led to the first examples of a new building type, the nonconformist chapel. All these changes were reflected clearly in the buildings of Wales.
The shires created by the Act of Union survived as administrative units until the later twentieth century; they still have a lively presence reflected in vigorous county history societies and ongoing county history projects. They created a new administrative role for the principal towns in each county, where the shire hall became the focus of county administration. By contrast, while the previous symbols of seignorial authority, the castles, might retain a residual role as shire gaols, most continued their long decline into ruin. Welsh towns were generally small: research indicates that few had populations of over a thousand at the start of the early modern period. John Speed’s town plans of the early seventeenth century not only show how restricted they were in size but suggest that some of those without new functions were in a state of decay. The Royal Commission’s work in a range of towns has shown the importance of surviving architectural remains in telling the story of Welsh urban history, but suggests there is much still to be discovered.
It is easy to underestimate the vitality and influence of the new county towns. They were like vessels that filled and emptied for quarter sessions, assizes (or great sessions) and markets. A new building type made an appearance — the shire hall — where court sessions were regularly held. These were built and regularly rebuilt throughout the early modern period, but there are some precious and representative survivals. The timber-framed ‘market hall’ at Llanidloes, with a first-floor courthouse raised on timber piers above a covered market area, illustrates the first phase of courthouses. The replacement of timber civic buildings in stone is represented by the shire hall at Denbigh of 1572, rebuilt through the patronage of the Earl of Leicester. Eighteenth-century redevelopments, which tended to exclude markets from the ground floors, are represented by Beaumaris courthouse, where a dedicated courtroom is preserved.
The columned space beneath many shire halls was often occupied by a shambles which provided a focus for the market. Weekly markets and seasonal fairs were a key trading activity that periodically filled the main streets of the early modern town and spilled into the churchyard. In some cases it is possible to reconstruct distinct areas associated with certain trades, as at Haverfordwest. The layout of many towns still reflects their historic market function, with wide streets that could be used for temporary stalls. Machynlleth retains a weekly street market with some claim to continuity from the medieval period, whereas at Denbigh the market area was partly infilled with buildings.
The survival of early modern buildings in towns has been very uneven. A few very substantial townhouses have survived, notably Plas Mawr in Conwy, but generally there has been continual attrition of the housing stock through redevelopment. Towns in early modern Wales were predominantly timber-built, and timber-fronted houses have been identified even in areas outside the main concentrations of timber building, as for example at Haverfordwest. However, the prevalence of timber is sometimes difficult to imagine today. Towns were vulnerable to fires that could destroy large areas, as happened at Builth and Presteigne. The approximate area of the catastrophic fire that consumed Presteigne in 1681 can be traced today from the absence of medieval buildings.
Many early modern and medieval buildings were destroyed by late Georgian or Victorian urban redevelopment, without any visual record being made. Some towns, like Aberystwyth, are almost wholly Victorian and later, even though their layout is more ancient. Nevertheless, older urban buildings can be identified behind later facades, especially in less-developed towns or those that retain their historic centres. The Royal Commission’s survey of Cowbridge revealed twenty-four houses dating from before 1700 in the High Street. Surveys of Presteigne, Haverfordwest and Denbigh have revealed similar concentrations of early-modern buildings.
Some distinctively urban building types, such as guild buildings, have disappeared entirely (although the symbol of glovers’ guild survives at Denbigh). Relatively unaltered examples of other types are rare. Historic taverns often have a domestic or semi-domestic plan but they can be detected by their tendency to add specialised rooms, as at the Spread Eagle Tavern in Cowbridge where an eighteenth-century meeting room survives above a brewhouse dating from about 1740. Shops and commercial buildings, too, are scarce, while evidence for the booths and stalls typically used in market areas is purely documentary. Royal House in Machynlleth, first visited by the Commission in 1909, is notable for its continuity as a mercer’s dwelling and store for some 400 years.
Shops thrived as trade and disposable incomes increased, helping to support the growing population of towns as well as the demand for consumer goods in surrounding areas. Trade was supported by a growing infrastructure: facilities at ports and creeks among the most important. Coastal trade has left a legacy of quays and wrecks as well as some specialised buildings, including warehouses like the extraordinary fortified tobacco store at Aberthaw.
Port books show the range of traded commodities, from ovens of imported Devon fireclay (still to be seen in some Glamorgan farmhouses) to exported bar iron. There was industry in Wales before the Industrial Revolution, not only mining for coal and metals but also lesser-known commercial undertakings, including several coastal salt works, one of which has been excavated at Port Einon in Gower. Iron, copper and lead were exported from furnaces established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were important wireworks in Monmouthshire, and a mint was established at Aberystwyth, though it did not survive the Civil War. Timber for charcoal was essential to these undertakings: ore was brought by sea to the Ysgubor-y-coed furnace established in a well-wooded part of north Cardiganshire, where the furnace and charcoal barn are in the care of Cadw.
A new elite emerged, beneficiaries of the Act of Union and the Reformation, and they favoured great houses of an architectural type that could be found across England and Wales. From these houses ‘Leviathan’ estates were consolidated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The houses of the Welsh squires, the new magistrates and county officials who were also substantial landlords, are an interesting group. In the later sixteenth century open-hall houses were rebuilt with wings and upper floors. They generally had a parlour at the entry and a first-floor great chamber above the hall and displayed a profusion of chimneys. Numerous examples have survived and topographical drawings (especially those commissioned in the eighteenth century by Thomas Pennant) provide a visual record of many lost houses of this type. The earliest of them, like Monaughty in Powys, were probably built in the first decades after the Act of Union. The Royal Commission’s thematic volume on the greater houses of Glamorgan charts the themes and variations in plans and detailing. Some Welsh houses stand out as truly innovative in their Renaissance inspiration, notably Bachegraig in Denbighshire, built of brick and influenced stylistically by the high-roofed urban houses of the Low Countries. The verticality of these new houses (sometimes called towers by the poets), with their important first-floor chambers, provides a telling contrast with the long and low houses of sub-medieval type of the farmer.
The Civil War and interregnum interrupted elite building during the mid-seventeenth century; the dated addition to Uwchlawr’r-coed by John Jones, the Regicide, is a telling exception. A new confidence after the Restoration prompted the rebuilding of several great houses, including Tredegar House near Newport and Newton House at Llandeilo. These were advanced houses designed by professionals — though it has proved difficult to identify the architects concerned. The anonymity of architects continues to the mid-eighteenth century, even with regard to important houses like Nanteos, Ynysymaengwyn, Erddig, and many others. It is only from the later eighteenth century that the professional architect living and working in Wales and the borders can be properly studied: most notably John Nash.
Other indications of status of the great house included dovecots, lavish stables, deer parks, fishponds, gatehouses, and heraldic ornament (features mapped in the Glamorgan Greater Houses inventory). There is growing appreciation of the number of early modern gardens surviving as earthworks features, sometimes dramatically revealed by aerial photography, and spectacular painted representations survive of those at Newton House, Llannerch and the now-recreated garden at Tredegar House. These mannered gardens seem to express a concern for order after the dislocation of Civil War, and new lodges and gated entrances of growing elaboration maintained social distance architecturally.
The trend towards national tastes and styles in the squire’s house may be contrasted with the growing regional character of farmhouses and cottages. One conventionally thinks of post-medieval domestic architecture as becoming more uniform, but the reverse was true in early modern Wales. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a uniform hall-house plan, generally built using cruck frames, was replaced by an astonishing local diversity of types nuanced by region and class.
Peter Smith’s classic map of regional house-types in Houses of the Welsh Countryside shows the varied geography of vernacular architecture. The work of exploration on which the map was based, involving the classification of many hundreds of houses, made an enduring contribution to Welsh archaeology. It reveals some major contrasts in planning between west and east, and north and south. The mapping of architectural detail reveals some remarkably localised features: notable examples of this local distinctiveness are the round-chimneyed farmhouses of Pembrokeshire and, more particularly, the conical chimneys of the St Davids area.
The maps in Houses of the Welsh Countryside present a series of overlapping regional contrasts not only in terms of architectural detail but also in building materials. Stone versus timber was a fundamental contrast, with concentrations of timber buildings on the eastern side of Wales (though much timber building is disguised today behind later facades). Brick building before 1700 was largely restricted to north-east Wales. The Royal Commission’s recording of vernacular buildings has investigated this contrast through intensive surveys of Glamorgan in the south and Radnorshire in the east, while it has shown that Caernarfonshire houses combined combined timberwork of high quality with robust stone walls. The Commission’s recording of clay (clom) buildings features in contributions to the Cardiganshire County History and its forthcoming volume on cottages.
Several new plan-types emerged, defined according to the diagnostic feature of the position of the main doorway in relation to the fireplace. The lobby-entry type was characteristic of Clwyd and north and central Powys, and the longhouse or hearth-passage type was characteristic of southern Powys, upland Glamorgan, upland Gwent, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. Both types derived from the hall-house plan and preserved the hall (now with a ceiling), with its bench and table at the upper end.
In the hearth-passage house, house and cowhouse were frequently combined under one roof. There has been considerable interest in this ‘longhouse’, sometimes claimed as the quintessential Welsh house. Recent research has shown that the longhouse had a wide distribution but that it was by no means found throughout Wales. It was concentrated in the pastoral areas of the centre, west and south but not in all areas of pastoral farming: it is noticeably absent from the north-west. The Commission’s study of Radnorshire houses advanced the thesis that the longhouse was characteristic of areas that saw endemic cattle stealing in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is probable that these combined ranges were not just convenient agriculturally but a prudent response to the unruliness of the period.
The early rejection of the hall-house plan in north-west Wales was remarkable. Within two or three generations open halls had been replaced by fully storeyed houses with enclosed fireplaces at ground and first floors. The Caernarvonshire inventory charted the remarkable ubiquity of the ‘Snowdonian’ house, which is also dominant across Merioneth. The earliest example dated by an inscription on the building is 1585 but dendrochronology carries the story back to about 1540. The cross-passage and the lower service-rooms of the medieval plan were retained but the hall was replaced by a kitchen with a large gable-end fireplace as its focus. A stair, frequently sited alongside the fireplace, led to the upper chambers that had replaced the old inner rooms.
A process of make do and mend can be identified in farmhouses, which were often altered piecemeal rather than rebuilt, with a surprising number retaining medieval fabric. However, in the early modern period there was considerable investment in new farm buildings, whose vernacular character is strongly marked. The earliest that survive in quantity are barns. Survey in Glamorgan has revealed a wide range in size and chronology from great sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century barns to smaller upland examples. The earliest barns dated by inscription were built in the seventeenth century. In Radnorshire the development of innovative combination ranges (integrating barn and cowhouse, often at different levels) can be charted through eighteenth-century date inscriptions, but other combinations (especially stables, carthouses and granaries) are later, dating from the late eighteenth century or more usually the nineteenth. The outline of a chronology of farm buildings has been established, but they remain under-recorded and among the vernacular buildings most at risk. Many types of farm building and architectural detail are highly localised or pleasingly idiosyncratic. The circular pigsties of south and west Wales are good examples of relatively minor buildings of regional character; the dovecot constructed in a cave at Culver Hole, Gower, is unique.
The impact of the Reformation on religious buildings was profound. Its strictures were enforced by the new magistrates through the assizes and quarter sessions. The religious houses were swept away, creating a supply of building materials for robbing within a large radius of a dissolved house, such as the now fragmentary Abbey Cwm-hir. The dissolution involved the destruction of centres of craft patronage as well as of religious life and it terminated a long period of beautification and renewal of church fabric best illustrated by the ornate timber roofs and rood-screens of the late middle ages. Llanidloes parish church shows the often contradictory nature of the Reformation process. It has been argued that the church took advantage of the dissolution of Abbey Cwm-hir in 1536 to retrieve an arcade from the abbey and reuse it to enlarge and re-roof the church. The 1542 completion date on one of the shields on the new and costly hammer-beam roof is consistent with the tree-ring dates. Complete with its winged angels, it was the last of its type.
Within a few years the interiors of parish churches had changed almost beyond recognition. Church goods were seized, images were destroyed or defaced, wall paintings were whitewashed over and sometimes replaced by black-letter texts and the royal coat of arms. Occasionally, there is evidence for iconoclasm, as at Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, where a face appears to have been obliterated deliberately. Some chapels of ease were permanently closed and converted to domestic use: the Commission has recorded three chapels in Glamorgan that were converted to houses in the early modern period. The Welsh gentry’s support of the Anglican settlement is readily appreciation from their monuments and hatchments, which increasingly cluttered parish church chancels or special chapels. Some monuments are of considerable historical and artistic interest, for example the Stradling and Aubrey monuments in Glamorgan.
The post-Reformation reordering of parish churches is difficult to chart and has been overlaid by nineteenth-century restorations. Very few new churches were built, but they included the extraordinary Leicester’s Church begun in 1578, and first given serious attention in the Denbighshire inventory.
This was a Protestant preaching hall of extraordinary size (55 metres long); the largest church erected in Britain between the Reformation and the seventeenth-century rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral. The most important surviving example of seventeenth-century reconstruction is Mallwyd parish church, which was rebuilt according to Laudian principles by an intellectual clergyman, Dr John Davies, and included an extraordinary timber tower with Latin inscriptions. Estate chapels at Rug and Gwydir, the latter recorded in the Caernarvonshire inventory, preserve interiors of high craftsmanship.
The most significant purpose-built religious buildings of the period are the early nonconformist chapels. They are vernacular in spirit and low-key: despite the Toleration Act intended to protect them, chapel congregations did not want to draw attention to themselves. Internally the chapels were arranged according to Protestant principles. Maesyronnen in Radnorshire and Capel Newydd at Llangian in Caernarfonshire are the best examples. From these unobtrusive buildings a very visible national religious architecture was to develop in the nineteenth century.