288 The History of Longleat. 
15th centuries—ecclesiastical of course—most of the building 
gone—a gate-house left—the rest now a granary and dairy. 
Norrington, in the Hundred of Chalk, an old house belonging 
now to the Wyndhams, built by the Gawens in the reign of 
Henry IV., has ecclesiastical windows. At Woodlands, near Mere, 
and at Potterne (the latter once the occasional residence of the 
Bishops of Sarum) there are, I understand, vestiges of houses of 
this class. The Bishop’s Palace at Salisbury has some very ancient 
portions, but it has been so frequently altered by successive prelates, 
that it is not easy to distinguish which they are. Great Chalfield 
House, near Bradford, built in the 15th century, about 1490, is as 
good a specimen as we have of the old English manor house; very 
collegiate in its appearance, yet having a vestige of the castle style 
in its moat and gate-house. The prevailing tone of house archi- 
tecture before the reign of Henry VIII. was certainly ecclesiastical. 
And this explains in some degree why it is that one is so often told 
by. the farmer’s wife at an old house, “they do say it was once a 
nunnery, or kind of abbey like.” Not that there were such estab- 
lishments in one half the places in which they are thus supposed 
to have been, but the style of building, corresponding with that of 
nunneries and abbeys, often leads to the idea that they could have 
been nothing else. Henry VIII., who turned over many new leaves 
in England, introduced, amongst other changes, a novel style of 
house building. The style which he patronized, (and a more liberal 
or accomplished patron of the arts never existed in this country), 
was the ancient classic architecture of Greece, then lately revived 
in Italy. Upon the ecclesiastical or Gothic style, now beginning 
to expire, was engrafted the Corinthian, Jonic, or Tuscan. This is 
the way in which this kind of architecture is generally described : 
but it is considered by some, to be, after all, a distinct and inde- 
pendent style of itself, of which we have as yet no proper history. 
Of this novel mixture, Longleat is one of the purest examples. 
The house has also this peculiarity, that whereas we have upon the 
whole, very few examples remaining of any old English mansion, 
in its entire original state, this may be regarded, externally, as a 
complete specimen of its period. Most houses have been added to 
