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Sussex is not normally considered a particularly rewarding county for the historian of eighteenth-century architecture. In terms of great house building its heyday was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period which produced a notable string of mansions along the northern foot of the Downs — Glynde, Danny, Wiston, and Parham, among others. To the more refined sensibilities of the eighteenth century the county was little short of primeval. Thomas Fuller’s judgement in 1662 (‘A fruitfull County, though very durty for the travellers therein, so that it may be better measured to its advantage, by days journeys then by miles’) was endorsed with interest in the next century by Horace Walpole, who reckoned that ‘the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George the 2nd was the first monarch of the East Angles’.
- Type
- Section 3: The Stuart and Georgian Country House
- Information
- Architectural History , Volume 27: Design and Practice in British Architecture , 1984 , pp. 241 - 254
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984
References
Notes
1 Fuller, Thomas The History of the Worthies of England (1662), p. 97.Google Scholar
2 Walpole, Horace letter to George Montagu, 26 August 1749 (Correspondence, Yale edition ed. Lewis, W. S. (1941), IX, p. 96).Google Scholar
3 Ibid.
4 The year in which he was knighted; his mother Mary Elrington is recorded as holding Wiston still in 1568. The Victoria County History (see below), citing The Buildings of England, suggests that building began c. 1575, but there is no documentary evidence for a precise date.
5 The panelling, formerly in the Brown Parlour, was transferred by Blore to the library on the south front.
6 The early history of the estate is \vell summarized in The Victoria Country History: Sussex (1980), vi part 1, 261-62, from which the information in this paragraph is largely derived.
7 Kent Archives Office, U269/M 102/2.
8 Ibid., U269/E 272/1.
9 Ibid., U269/E 272/1.
10 Ibid., U269/E 272/2.
11 Formerly at Wiston and now at Findon Park House.
12 Grimm’s, S. H. drawing of the east front, dated 4june 1787 (Bodleian Library, Gough Maps 31 fol. 26b), is inscribed ‘This old family seat of the Gorings was originally as large again; halfofit was destroyed in the Civil War ofK.Ch. I’.Google Scholar
13 Leeds City Art Galleries 13.282/53. Although Hollar’s authorship is disputed, the drawing appears to be a preliminary sketch for his less detailed engraving of the same subject.
14 West Sussex Record Office, Wiston MSSS9I. The map is dated May 1639 and signed by Henry Bigg, Surveyor. The Earl of Thanet had purchased the estate in 1634.
15 In this case the gallery probably extended from it at first-floor level along the south side of the paved court.
16 This is shown on the 1839 Blore survey plan, in the possession of Mrjohn Goring.
17 The viewpoint was the hill above the hamlet of Lower Buddington, now vanished.
18 I am grateful to Mrs Madeleine Ginsburg of the Victoria and Albert Museum for this opinion.
19 Thomas-Stanford, C. Sussex in the Great Civil War and Interregnum (1910), pp. 79, 85.Google Scholar
20 Fletcher, Anthony A County Community inPeaceand War: Sussex 1600-1660 (1975), p. 333.Google Scholar
21 PRO, E179/258/14.
22 Christian Fagg’s notebook, in the possession of Mrjohn Goring.
23 West Sussex Record Office, Wiston MSS 3674, 3675, 3676.?
24 British Library Ci 16 i 4(26). The poem is ascribed by the Library catalogue to c. 1734, but to c. 1720 by Francis Goring’s MS history of Wiston (West Sussex Record Office, Wiston MS 5972). It is entitled ‘Agghim Sally . . . the Case of a certain famous Sussex Baronet (as remarkable for his memorable Atchievements among the Female Part of the creation, as for the many Races he won at Newmarket) and Miss Sally’.
25 Ashmolean Museum, Gibbs Drawings vi, fols 1—9, entitled ‘Plans for Wiston House the seat of Sr Robert Fagg Barronet byjames Gibbs architect’, and also 11, fols 139 and 141b.
26 Sir Robert Ill’s account at Hoare’s Bank contains no payments to Gibbs, but one of £57 (8 May 1738) to ‘Jno James’.
27 A daughter Sarah predeceased him, according to his tomb slab in Wiston church.
28 This may in any case have already fallen down, since it is not referred to in Elizabeth Fagg’s marriage settlement of 1743 (West Sussex Record Office, Wiston MS 4989).
29 In the possession of Mrjohn Goring are two plans (ground and first floors) taken by Blore’s assistant on 17 May 1839 (Cambridge University Library, Add MS 3956) and labelled, it would seem, by Charles Goring the then owner.
30 This is suggested by both the Country Life article of 1909 (see below) and by Francis Goring’s MS history of Wiston.
31 ‘Wiston Park, Sussex’, Country Life, 27 February 1909.
32 Nairn, Ian and Pevsner, Nikolaus The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), p. 383.Google Scholar The Country Life article assigns it to ‘the age of Wyatt Gothic’ and therefore ‘probably an alteration of about one hundred years ago’. Viscountess Wolseley calls it Victorian in her book Sussex in the Past (1928), p. 123.
33 The term ‘baronial’ is applied by Evans, John (Picture of Worthing, 1814,11, 155)and Horsfield, T. W. (History and Antiquities of the County of Sussex (1835), 11, 234).Google Scholar
34 Langley, Batty Gothic Architecture, Improved by Rules and Proportions . . . (1747)Google Scholar, first issued in 1741-42 as Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved . . .
35 The gallery itself was put together by Blore from re-used bits, but an earlier gallery is indicated on the 1839 plan.
36 West Sussex Record Office, Wiston MS 5142(3).
37 East Sussex Record Office, Fuller Papers, SASRF 15/29. See Anthony Dale, ‘Brightling Park’ (in Sussex County Magazine 29 (1955), 463—69), which implausibly attributes the saloon to William Kent. Francis Goring’s history of Wiston, written in 1943 (loc. cit.), asserted that the plasterwork was then ‘over one hundred years old and probably 150 or 160’, and was ‘mouded in situ, I believe by Italian workmen’.
38 One possibility is that the services of Gibbs, applied to by Sir Robert Fagg III, were reactivated by his sister. Elsewhere in the county Gibbs prepared unexecuted designs for the 9th Duke of Norfolk at Arundel, and he is a stylistically plausible candidate for the remodelling of the chapel at Cowdray House, which seems to have been carried out in the late 1740s. He was not entirely averse to the Gothic, as his designs for Hartwell (a tower, before 1738), Kirkleatham (door to the Turner mausoleum, 1740), Stowe (Gothic Temple, 1741-42) andKiveton (Gothic ruin, 1741) indicate.
39 In the possession of Mrjohn Goring.