Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England

Abstract

Ashley House in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (Fig. 1), is best known to architectural historians for its detailed and informative building accounts, which date from the years 1602 to 1607. The house was demolished in 1925 without adequate record, and scholars have tended to assume that it was built to a quite unexceptional H-plan design and was, therefore, of no great architectural interest. A recently-discovered contemporary first-floor plan of Ashley House shows that it was in fact a building of considerable importance. The plan (Fig. 2) demonstrates that Ashley was remarkably similar in layout to both Charlton House and Somerhill in Kent, two Jacobean houses justly famous for their innovative, axially-placed halls (Figs 3 and 4). This architectural development, as is now generally recognized, represented a significant departure from the linear house-plans most often associated with traditional, hierarchical household arrangements.