Monmouthshire Houses

Monmouthshire Houses: A Study of Building Techniques and Smaller House-Plans in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries is a study of buildings within the county of Monmouthshire written by Sir Cyril Fox and Lord Raglan and published by the National Museum of Wales. The study was published in three volumes; Part I Medieval Houses, Part II Sub-Medieval Houses, c. 1550–1610 and Part III Renaissance Houses, c. 1590–1714, between 1951 and 1954. The series was republished by Merton Priory Press in 1994. A later historian of Welsh architecture, Peter Smith, described Fox and Raglan’s work as equal in importance, in its own field, to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Monmouthshire Houses: A Study of Building Techniques and Smaller House-Plans in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Little Pitt Cottage, "the most completely surviving cruck-truss hall house in the county",[1] was typical of the lesser Monmouthshire houses studied by Fox and Raglan.
  • Composed of:
  • Part I Medieval Houses (1951)
  • Part II Sub-Medieval Houses, c. 1550–1610 (1953)
  • Part III Renaissance Houses, c. 1590–1714 (1954)
AuthorSir Cyril Fox & Lord Raglan
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre
PublisherNational Museum of Wales
Media typePrint (hardback)

History

Sir Cyril Fox (1882–1967) was Director of the National Museum of Wales from 1926 to 1948.[2] Fitzroy Somerset, Lord Raglan, the great-grandson of the 1st Lord Raglan, British Commander during the Crimean War, was a soldier, author and resident of Cefntilla Court in Monmouthshire.[3] Raglan was also a Commissioner for Ancient Monuments in Wales and both he and Fox were pioneers of the study of vernacular architecture, being founder members of the Vernacular Architecture Group.[4] From the early 1940s until 1949, Fox and Raglan undertook the most extensive survey of lesser Monmouthshire buildings ever undertaken.[5] Raglan described their methodology in the introduction to the first volume, Medieval Houses, published in 1951.[lower-alpha 1] He would identify houses of interest and obtain the necessary permissions from owners, before calling in Fox to undertake a detailed survey.[5] In the Introduction to the 1994 reprint, Peter Smith, author of Houses of the Welsh Countryside, recorded Raglan's approach; "as we travelled from farmhouse to farmhouse, I realised that his was a name that carried weight and in Monmouthshire opened every door...status and personal charm carried the day and we followed in his wake".[7]

In the Introduction to Sub-Medieval Houses, the second volume of their history, Fox and Raglan record the genesis of the project. Wartime defensive precautions in 1941 led to a decision by the Ministry of Works to demolish an important farmhouse, Upper Wern-hir, near Llanbadoc. Fox and Raglan obtained permission to survey the building before its destruction and their investigations, together with the threats to Wern-hir and other, similar, buildings, convinced them of the need for a comprehensive survey of such structures throughout Monmouthshire.[8] Working mainly at weekends, and funded by the National Museum, Fox and Raglan produced "the first truly comprehensive regional study of vernacular architecture in Britain".[9] Some seventy years after the volumes were first published, Fox and Raglan's work is still cited by scholars.[10][11] The architectural historian, John Newman, author of the Pevsner for Monmouthshire, considered their joint work as "ground-breaking, the single most important publication on any aspect of the county's buildings",[12] and Smith described Monmouthshire Houses as "one of the most remarkable studies of vernacular architecture yet made in the British Isles",[13] "a landmark, in its own field, as significant as Darwin's Origin of Species".[12]

Description

The three-volume work comprises detailed studies of over 400 houses and farmhouses built in Monmouthshire between the medieval period and 1714.[14] The volumes are:

  • Part I Medieval Houses (1951), OCLC 916186124; (reprinted 1994), ISBN 9780720003963[15]
  • Part II Sub-Medieval Houses, c. 1550–1610 (1953), OCLC 277251975; (reprinted 1994), ISBN 0952000989[16]
  • Part III Renaissance Houses, c. 1590–1714 (1954), OCLC 502362648; (reprinted 1994), ISBN 1898937001[17]

Notes
  1. Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales holds a collection of materials relating to the production of Monmouthshire Houses including some of Fox’s notebooks.[6]

References
  1. Newman 2000, p. 266.
  2. "Sir Cyril (Fred) Fox (1882–1967), Director of the National Museum of Wales, 1926–48". Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
  3. "Lord Raglan, 79, Dies in Wales". New York Times. 15 September 1964.
  4. Johnson 2014, pp. 6–7.
  5. Fox & Raglan 1994c, p. iv.
  6. "Cyril Fox Collection". Amgueddfa Cymru. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
  7. Fox & Raglan 1994c, p. iii.
  8. Fox & Raglan 1994b, pp. 15–16.
  9. Scott-Fox 2002, p. 190.
  10. Saint George 2010, p. 132.
  11. Hodges 2015, p. 262.
  12. Newman 2000, p. 84.
  13. Smith 1975, p. 7.
  14. Fox & Raglan 1994a, preface.
  15. Fox, Cyril; Raglan, Fitzroy. Monmouthshire houses: a study of building techniques and smaller house plans in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, 1. Merton Priory Press. OCLC 916186124.
  16. Fox, Cyril; Raglan, Fitzroy. Monmouthshire houses: a study of building techniques and smaller house-plans in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, 2. National Museum of Wales. OCLC 277251975.
  17. Fox, Cyril; Raglan, Fitzroy. Monmouthshire houses: a study of building techniques and smaller house-plans in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, 3. National Museum of Wales. OCLC 502362648.

Sources
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