Overlooked Britain
Lucinda Lambton
In his magisterial book The British Stable, the late lamented Giles Worsley wrote, ‘No animal has been so favoured by architects as the horse. Ever since Francesco di Giorgio built the famed ducal stables at Urbino in the 1480s, and probably long before, horses have been associated with fine buildings.’
How true; most especially when you realise what a quantity of equine arrangements have been of equal design to the stately houses they were built to serve. Giles Worsley, indecently, was eulogising to the manner born, since his family’s home, Hovingham Hall in Yorkshire, has a particularly splendid 1750s arrangement for the horses, with a great arched and columned, neoclassical riding school confronting you as you step through the front door; immediately followed by stables of serene beauty.
Then there are the stables at Althorp in Northamptonshire, with their Tuscancolumned portico modelled on Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s, Covent Garden, which is substantially handsomer than the somewhat bland big house itself.
And so it goes on, the length and breadth of the country, with a wealth of finest architecture built to honour the horse; which, after all, until the coming of the motorcar, was the very cog at the centre of every day life.
All hail to the stable as the glorious manifestation of this importance and all hail in particular to the rarity of the 17th-century beauties at Peover Hall in Cheshire. There are earlier survivals – and indeed grander survivals – of the same date; there are even those of a similar design. But what most emphatically they are not are stables with an abundance of decorative plasterwork. Fleur-de-lis, strapwork and writhing flowers encrust the ceiling. Marching along the full length of the building there are ornate wooden arches on Tuscan columns (pictured), with a fancy strapwork frieze. What a sight! These are quarters more suitable for humans – decoratively discerning ones at that – than they are for horses.
They were built in the 1650s by Mrs Ellen Mainwaring – we are told so by a flowery lettered stone, incised with the words ‘The Gift of Mrs Ellen Mainwaring to her son Thomas Mainwaring Esq. 1654’. The lettering is surprisingly festive – as are the stables – considering that Thomas Mainwaring’s father was made of sterner stuff as Master of Horse in the Parliamentary forces during the Civil War.
The family owned Peover from the Norman Conquest up until the 20th century. In 1639, Sir Philip Mainwaring was appointed Irish Secretary by Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Strafford, accused of treason, was doomed to be beheaded – attended by Archbishop Laud – before a crowd of 200,000 on Tower Hill in 1641.
Van Dyck painted a portrait of
Mainwaring and Wentworth together in 1639: Strafford swarthy and coarsefeatured, Mainwaring with face and hands of exquisite refinement. Thomas Mainwaring, for whom the stables were built, was his great-nephew.
Horses had not been so luxuriously accommodated until more or less the late 1500s; before then, cruelty rather than comfort had been all too commonplace. There were alarming practices of horse husbandry, such as tying a hedgehog beneath the horse’s tail for extra speed; or, as a punishment, a live cat might be strapped to a pole beneath the horse’s stomach. This, I fear is a practice that is still employed in Romania to this day.
Such horrors were first written of in 1550 in Federico Grisone’s Gli Ordini di Cavalcare – The Orders of Riding. In England, Gervase Markham was one of those who led the way. All was set fair with his 1607 publication of Cavelarice, or The English Horseman: Contayning all the Arte of Horsemanshippe. Subtitled ‘As much as is Necessary for any Man to Understand, Whether he be Horse-breeder…. or sadler… together with …an Explanation of the Excellency of a Horse’s Understanding’, it was one of the first books in English to suggest that training ‘bee done with all the gentleness and quiet means that may be’.
Improvements for equine welfare continued apace with the upright hay hecks of 1500s, preventing dust getting into the horses’ eyes, invented by Christopher Clifford and first described in his 1580s The School of Horsemanship. These are a rare survival at Peover, along with the flint-cobbled floor and a 16thcentury drainage system; all intact, beneath the wealth of plasterwork, which no doubt gives somewhat limited pleasure to the horses.
It is thought that the craftsmen who triumphed in Peover’s stables also carved the screen of the private chapel at nearby Cholmondeley Castle. They are oddly alike, although with different roles: one lot framing an altar; the others each framing the hindquarters of a horse. At Peover, there are Tuscan capitals; at Cholmondeley, they are of the Corinthian order.
As if these two rarities were not remarkable enough, in about 1620 the Mainwarings had already built comparable stables at Whitmore Hall in Staffordshire. While not having the rare plasterwork, they do have the pleasingly flamboyant details of enormous double wooden balls hanging from the centre of each arch; all repeated in miniature around upright hay hecks beyond.
Peover Hall itself is a somewhat uninteresting house, although the march of history has interestingly progressed within its walls. As usual, even investigating a mere square mile of England brings its rich rewards: it was at Peover that General Patton made his Headquarters for the US 3rd Army to train for the D-day landings 75 years ago. It also became a prisoner-of-war camp.
As a colourful footnote, Whitmore Hall, the Mainwarings’ other great mansion, home to another of their Elizabethan stabling arrangements, was lived in by Thomas Twyford, inventor of the single-piece, ceramic wash down water closet of 1875.