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SIE WILLIAM SHARINGTON'S WORK AT LACOCK, 

 SUDELEY, AND DUDLEY. 1 



By the Rev. W. G. Clark- Maxwell, F.S.A. 



It has long been recognised that the buildings erected by Sir 

 William Sharington at the dissolved monastery of Lacock present 

 certain characteristic features, which are of great value and interest 

 to the student of the early renaissance architecture of England, and 

 illustrate the transition to this from the Gothic of the Tudor period. 

 It may be therefore of interest to record the occurrence of these 

 features in two other buildings, with the erection of which, as we 

 know from documentary sources, Sharington was concerned; namely 

 Sudeley and Dudley castles. 



When in 1540 Sharington obtained possession of Lacock Abbey, 

 he probably found one portion, the abbess's lodging on the west 

 side of the cloister, ready for occupation as it stood ; and here he 

 seems at the first to have taken up his abode and gradually to have 

 altered the buildings to suit his requirements, beginning with the 

 southern range next the wall of the destroyed Abbey Church. 

 We know that this process had begun before, probably considerably 

 before, August, 1548, as a survey of that date preserved at Lacock 

 mentions the mansion-house as being then " a newe buyldyng " 

 (i.e. being built anew) ; and as we shall see later, he had at least 

 one stone-carver in his employ at the time of his death in July, 

 1553. 



In his work in this, the first portion of his alterations (up to and 

 including the present library), Sharington shows scarcely any dis- 

 tinctively classical features, and a much more pronounced Gothic 

 element than in his subsequent work, which from this point 

 onwards is almost wholly of renaissance character. 2 One might be 



1 Read before the Archaeological Institute, 2nd April, 1913, and printed 

 without the additional note in Arch. Joum., 2nd Series, xx. 175 — 182 (1913). 



5 See Journal of British Archaeological Association, n.s. xi., pp. 195 — 201. t 



