In the Shropshire countryside, the ruins of Moreton Corbet offer a poignant spectacle: the elegant façade of a Renaissance manor 'in the Italian style', grafted onto a medieval castle, and left unfinished. It is the stone elegy of an architectural dream broken by death — that of Robert Corbet.
A manor 'in the Italian fashion'
The Corbet family held at Moreton a medieval castle. Around 1579 — the year following the death of Sir Andrew Corbet — his son Robert Corbet undertook to add a sumptuous new wing: according to the chroniclers of the time, 'a most gorgeous and stately house after the Italian fashion'. Robert Corbet, taken with the continental architectural ideas inspired by Palladio and Italian classicism, wanted to make his house a showcase of Renaissance modernity, adorned with mythological sculptures (chimeras, wyverns) and a classical ordering rare in England.
A work broken by the plague
The dream came to nothing. In 1583, Robert Corbet was carried off by the plague, and the work stopped abruptly, never completed. His brothers Richard and Vincent tried to carry on the work, without ever bringing it to term. The manor, ruined later during the Civil War (taken in 1644, its walls still bear musket impacts), remains today a magnificent open-air Renaissance façade — a fragment of Italian dream planted in the English countryside. To see: the ruined Elizabethan Italianate façade, the mythological sculptures (chimera, wyvern), the medieval keep and gatehouse, the walls marked by the musket balls of 1644.
Did you know?
A local legend attributes the unfinished state of Moreton Corbet to a curse: the Puritan Paul Holmyard, persecuted by the Corbets for his faith, is said to have cursed the house and prophesied that it would never be inhabited. The reality is more prosaic — Robert Corbet died of the plague in 1583, in the midst of building. But the coincidence between the curse and the ruin was enough, in the Shropshire imagination, to make these remains a haunted place.
Notes
Moreton Corbet Castle lies at Moreton Corbet, Shropshire; a ruin run by English Heritage, freely accessible. Hours to check.
Quiz
- In which style did Robert Corbet want to build Moreton Corbet?
- 'In the Italian fashion' (Renaissance classicism)
- In flamboyant Gothic
- In Romanesque style
- Why did the work remain unfinished?
- Robert Corbet died of the plague in 1583
- A lack of money
- An order of the queen
- What does the façade still bear?
- Musket impacts of 1644
- Roman mosaics
- A clock