By the Rev. J. E. Jackson. 287 
that country might be, especially with regard to the personal safety 
of the inhabitants. When England was torn in pieces by baronial 
jealousies, and one noble lord went to make a morning call upon 
another, not to leave a card and ask him to dinner, but to batter 
his house down about his ears; in such precarious circumstances, 
the thicker the walls of the house were, the better for the gentleman 
on whom the call was made. A man’s house is still his castle, 
de jure, in the eye of the law; but in those days his house was a 
castle, de facto. The houses of the nobility were nothing else than 
fortified dungeons, of which you have some very good examples at 
no great distance, in the ruins at Wardour, and at Nunney near 
Frome. The necessity of providing for self defence became less 
and less, but the fashion lingered long after the necessity had ceased. 
Houses were next built in the form, and with much of the appear- 
ance, but without much of the real strength of castles. They had 
tower and gateway, battlement and moat; very feudal to look at, 
but not very strong, and certainly confined and dull to live in. 
One of the most complete specimens of this kind in England, is 
Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. 
In the reign of Henry VII. these castellated houses were chiefly 
built with high ornamented gateways, and large projecting windows. 
I do not recollect any example near us; but the front of St. James’s 
Palace in London, and of Eton College, may be familiar, and will 
give an idea of the kind of house alluded to. This style may be 
described as having been, in the main, what is commonly called 
the Gothic; namely, the pointed architecture of churches, applied 
to that of houses, in order to take off the prison-like look of the 
old English Castle. 
We have in Wiltshire the remains of several private houses of 
gentry, which will give a fair notion of what they generally were 
previous to the time of Sir John Thynne in 1540. There is, first 
of all, South Wraxhall House, near Bradford, the property of Mr. 
Long, of which the oldest parts are thoroughly ecclesiastical. The 
gateway is of Henry 8th’s reign; and other parts are of the reign 
of Elizabeth and James, with modern alterations. Place House, 
Tisbury, a grange of the Abbess of Shaftesbury, of the 14th and 
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