8 THE JACOBEAN TRADITION ASTON HALL 



the inquiry into the Jones and Webb drawings, which will be 

 fully dealt with in Chapter IV. 



Incidentally a study of the drawings by Jones and Webb 

 forces the inquirer to reconsider the relations of those two men 

 as hitherto accepted, and compels him to readjust his ideas as to 

 some of the work he had been taught to attribute to Jones. 



With the seventeenth century we get into much closer touch 

 with the designers of buildings than was possible in earlier 

 times : in many cases we can get behind the buildings to their 

 architects. But the chief purpose of the following pages is 

 to trace the changes that took place in the houses themselves 

 and their accessories, and although it would be neither possible 

 nor desirable to omit all mention of the architects, the latter 

 will be subsidiary to the main theme, and will be dealt with not 

 so much biographically as by way of showing how their training, 

 their opportunities and their idiosyncrasies affected the buildings 

 with which they were concerned. 



The present and immediate purpose is to give a brief and 

 broad outlook over the period dealt with in detail in subsequent 

 chapters ; and to that end a series of houses has been selected, 

 separated from each other in point of date by intervals of some 

 twenty or thirty years. 



The first of the series is Aston Hall (Fig. 2), which may 

 be considered an example of how the old order lingered on. 

 It has all the characteristics of Jacobean design, with its two 

 pronounced wings, its curved gables, its fine chimney-stacks, 

 and its mullioned windows : not to mention an open arcade and 

 a forecourt with garden houses at the two outlying corners. 

 These characteristics were gradually to disappear from houses. 

 The plan became more compact, and wings were discarded, 

 except that version of them which became fashionable later on, 

 and which consisted of a separate block on either side of the 

 main building, connected to it by a colonnade. Gables dis- 

 appeared, the only approach to such features being the flat 

 pediments which were often employed as central ornaments 

 to the facades. Chimney-stacks became plainer, and the flues 

 were massed into solid blocks, instead of rising in separate 

 shafts from a common base. Mullioned windows lingered on 



O 



for some years, but the mullions were of wood, and were 

 insignificant compared with their stone predecessors. They 

 were merely part of the wood window frame, and they dis- 



