SIXTEENTH CENTURY HOUSE-PLANNING AS ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN THORPE'S DRAWINGS.
One of the most valuable sources for obtaining knowledge of the house-planning of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. is the collection of drawings in the Soane Museum, known as John Thorpe's. This collection has given rise to a certain amount of controversy, and will probably give rise to more, for there are so many objections to any theory which can be advanced as to its origin and use. This is not the place to enter upon the arguments for or against any particular view; but as it may be advisable to adopt some kind of working hypothesis, that which best fits the facts seems to be this--that the drawings were drawn in a large book (with the exception of some few which were stuck in), and that by far the greatest number, if not actually all, were drawn by John Thorpe.[30] There were two men of this name, father and son, and both may have had a hand in it. But whether this hypothesis be accepted or not, it is certain that all the drawings were made during the closing years of the sixteenth century or the opening years of the seventeenth, and that they represent either surveys of buildings then existing, or designs for new ones, or exercises in ingenuity of planning. Whatever else we may or may not have, we have here the Elizabethan and Jacobean ideas of what houses were or ought to be, what accommodation they should contain, and how it should be disposed. In this respect the collection is particularly valuable, because we get everything at first hand; we see some designs in course of development, and others as they were finished, and entirely free from the manifold alterations which houses themselves have necessarily undergone in the course of three centuries. We also get in the elevations, or "uprights" as they were then called, the designer's ideas of how the houses were to appear; but in this respect we do not fare so well as with the plans, since the number of elevations is far smaller.
[30] The arguments in support of this view are given in a paper by the author, published in the _Architectural Review_ of February, 1899.
[Illustration: 213.--THE CHÂTEAU OF ANSSI-LE-FRANC, COPIED FROM DU CERCEAU (PAGE 75 OF THORPE'S BOOK).]