Herstmonceux Castle

[poliphilo]

Built in the 1440s by Henry VI's treasurer, a man called Fiennes, Herstmonceux Castle is one of the first large scale buildings in the country to be made of brick. It's not really a castle, of course- any more than the chateaux of the Loire Valley are. This was an age of artillery- and a few well-placed cannon balls would have had all that fancywork sliding into the moat. The architect may have been the same chap who designed Eton College for the King. Brick was such a new idea that workmen had to be imported from the Low Countries- and a local brick-making industry created from scratch.

The English Renaissance begins here.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

We didn't need defensible so much by that stage not that these islands were ever much good at castles and city walls.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Not good at castles? We talking about the nation that girdled Wales with a ring of state of the art military instillations? Or- to leap forward in time- strung artillery forts (again state of the art) along the south coast?

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I mean more the sort to keep enemies out rather than those to frighten the locals- those are all obsolete by big Henry's time! Henry's coastal forts were an old fashioned joke. Upnor castle anyone?