![]() In order to understand the impact that these refugees had on the architecture of England, a few of those contextual factors need to be explained independently.įigure 5: French Protestant Bible at the Huguenot Museum in Kent The Protestant refugees had an impact on the architecture of England, but that impact is tangled in a much larger mess of factors that influenced both England and its architecture at the time. The mess in the middle may never come apart cleanly, but at least the broader context can be untangled. Sometimes even the worst tangles at some point split into individual threads. By the mid-1500s, groups of Walloons and Flemish people were already making their way across the channel, driven by the Dutch Revolt, the religious and political civil war that waged between the Southern Hapsburg and Northern rebel-controlled regions between 15.įigure 4: Artillery Passage in Spitalfields, LondonĪ good rule of thumb for all those entering the grey area is to take a step back and another step out. This is because the French Huguenots were not the only group of Protestant refugees to enter England. However, as early as 1550, twenty-two years before those assassinations of Huguenots in Paris, Edward VI had already signed a charter granting asylum to any Protestant refugees. 1 This is probably the most famous influx of these early refugees, along with the one following the St. It is a mild butchering of the French word “ réfugié.” Though the word has Latin roots, it was first introduced into the British lexicon in the 17th century, just as another wave of French Protestant refugees were “introduced” into the British refuge following the 1684 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Interestingly, the origin of the word refugee in English might surprise some readers. Commonly classified as Huguenots, these groups came to England as refugees from various religiously motivated unrests in mainland Europe. Kew Palace is a revealing example of the murky history (and architecture) surrounding the influx of Protestant refugees that traveled across the channel into England from France, Wallonia, and Flanders. Add to this that the Dutch gable isn’t even entirely Dutch but more broadly of the Low Countries, that the way he utilized it was as an ornament and not as a functional gable, and that it was hybridized with the Renaissance pediment, and you begin to get a glimpse of the stylistic mess we’re about to dip into.įigure 3: Strangers Gate as the side entrance to St. Fortrey was the grandson of a refugee from Lille, which is now France, but was at that point part of Habsburg-controlled Flanders. Ironically, though the gable Fortrey chose is considered of Dutch origin, neither the gable nor he himself were Dutch. Artisan Mannerism, a bastardization of Northern Mannerism, itself a derivation of Italian Mannerism, often made use of the Dutch gable as an ornamental feature. Aptly called the Dutch House, the Kew Palace is an example of Artisan Mannerism, a style of architecture prevalent in England in the 17th century. The Kew Palace is a manor house built in 1631 for Samuel Fortrey, economist, writer, silk merchant, and-of import to us here-descendant of a Protestant refugee. (It just so happens that refugees have a tendency to find themselves smack in the middle of grey areas.) No, the grey we’re entering is one brought on by a series of contending factors overlaid on very little documentation. That’s not just because we’ve arrived in the land of the ever-cloudy skies. With that, we’ve entered the grey area, the murky, questionable, and generally problematic area in which we’ll remain until the end of this text. And here we get to the question that is at the core of this text: who imported it? The answer, you will quickly realize, is not as simple as…well, apple pie. In other words, it is so quintessential that one easily forgets that it isn’t originally English. The second thing you should know is that the Dutch Gable is to the English Renaissance what apple pie is to the USA. A more appropriate name for it might be the Low Country Gable, because it first appeared in the Middle Ages across what were then Dutch, Flemish, and Walloon regions. The first thing you should know about the Dutch gable is that it’s not exactly Dutch. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified. Aymar Mariño-Maza is the 2018 recipient of the H.
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