At Lapworth, in Warwickshire, Packwood House is a charming Elizabethan farmhouse, built in the full reign of Elizabeth I for a family of lawyers. Its Tudor timber-framed heart, preserved and enhanced in the twentieth century, makes it a fine witness of the dwelling of the rural lesser nobility of the Renaissance.
A house of the Fetherston family
Packwood was built from 1556 to 1560 for John Fetherston, head of a dynasty of Warwickshire lawyers. It was originally an Elizabethan farmhouse, timber-framed, mixing domestic and agricultural function — the very type of the house of a rising gentry family, neither high nobility nor peasantry. The Fetherstons kept it until 1876. Its Great Hall, its tapestries and its sixteenth-seventeenth-century furniture restore the living setting of a prosperous family of lawyers.
A Tudor heart enhanced
In the twentieth century, Packwood was saved and embellished by Graham Baron Ash, who lovingly restored it and 're-Tudorised' it, before giving it to the National Trust in 1941. The authentic Tudor core was thus preserved and enhanced. The estate is also famous for its extraordinary garden of clipped yews — but this was planted later, in the mid-seventeenth century, and is therefore outside our chronological window (it is no less spectacular for that). To see: the Tudor timber-framed house, the Great Hall, the sixteenth-seventeenth-century tapestries and furniture, and the yew garden (later but remarkable).
Did you know?
The famous yew garden of Packwood is traditionally read as an evocation of the Sermon on the Mount: the clipped yews are said to figure the twelve 'Apostles', the four 'Evangelists', the 'Multitude' and, atop a mound, 'the Master'. This appealing interpretation is however later than the garden itself — but it bears witness to the English taste for the symbolic charge given to gardens.
Notes
Packwood House lies at Lapworth, Warwickshire (near Solihull); a National Trust property (Grade I listed), house and gardens open to the public. Seasonal hours to check.
Quiz
- For which family was Packwood built?
- The Fetherstons (dynasty of lawyers)
- The Shakespeares
- The Dudleys
- From when does the Tudor house date?
- From 1556-1560 (reign of Elizabeth I)
- From the twelfth century
- From 1900
- Is the famous yew garden within our period?
- No, it is of the mid-seventeenth century
- Yes, from 1500
- It is Roman