The Heart of England: Living It Up How We Built Britain

I'm travelling through Britain

to discover how a thousand years of history has shaped our buildings,

our villages and our towns.

This week, I'm in the middle of England,

working my way up from Wiltshire in the south to Cheshire in the north.

I'm seeing how the country was transformed in the 16th century,

a golden age in the story of Britain.

I'll be discovering houses that introduced new standards of comfort.

Spectacular palaces, built to woo a virgin queen.

Towers that mystify with their secret codes.

And the idyllic villages of the Cotswolds, barely changed in four centuries.

This was an age of great wealth and the comfort and luxury that came with it,

a new landed class, building for their own pleasure.

It was the start of a boom in the creation of great houses

that have left their mark forever here, in the heart of England.

The year is 1536.

England is undergoing a revolution.

Henry VIII is destroying the power of the Church, dissolving monasteries

and selling off land and buildings to his supporters.

It was a chance for ambitious men to cash in on the biggest property boom Britain had ever seen.

Lacock Abbey, in Wiltshire, was once a nunnery.

When it came up for sale, one man saw his chance.

It was bought by William Sherrington, a minor courtier,

hoping to improve his social status.

Parts of Lacock Abbey still look like a religious foundation -

these cloisters with their lovely tracery of windows,

vaulted ceiling embossed with strange mystical beasts.

You can almost imagine the nuns processing

on their way to one of the seven services they went to every day in the church.

But in 1540, Sherrington took possession,

and he had rather different ideas.

He knocked down the church and moved in with his family,

transforming the abbey into a comfortable country house.

The huge communal rooms above the cloisters, where the nuns used to eat and sleep,

were converted into grand living quarters.

Where the abbey church had stood, Sherrington built a tower, dedicated to worship of a different god.

This was designed as a perfect strong-room.

Stone shelves and alcoves for him to keep his treasure.

A great iron-bound door here for security, and padlocks.

There was no staircase, so you can't get from this room up into the room above,

or down to the room below - that's the only entrance.

And then in the middle, this beautiful marble-top table,

octagonal table,

ideal for him to count his money.

Money was the key to Sherrington's power.

He was the under-treasurer of the Royal Mint at Bristol.

But there, ambition and greed got the better of him.

He made a fortune by clipping the coinage -

literally cutting bits of gold off it or making it lighter in weight than it should be.

He was discovered, but there were no flies on Sherrington.

He grassed on his boss.

His boss was executed.

Sherrington went scot-free.

One of the old rogue's descendants still lives in part of the house today,

in a flat just off the courtyard.

-Hello.

-Hello.

How very nice to meet you.

Let's come out here a little bit further.

It's a wonderful place to live, isn't it?

It is. It's a bit big, but it's a wonderful place, yes.

This courtyard is what? Dairy, brewery...? What are you living in - the old brewery?

I live, um, over the stables.

-Yes.

-In the hayloft.

-You're in the hayloft?

-I'm in the hayloft.

-It's a nice place to end up.

-Oh, yes, very nice!

It was originally a religious foundation.

And it's always been a fairly peaceful life here.

I don't think we've got any skeletons in the cupboard, and certainly no ghosts.

Well, you HAVE got a skeleton because Sherrington was a crook.

Well, he was a crook, yes. He wasn't a very pleasant character at all.

Are you ashamed to have him as an ancestor?

Well, maybe I'd rather not.

Sir William Sherrington's rise from minor gentry to Knight of the Realm

was typical of the upward mobility of Henry VIII's reign.

A rare opportunity for betterment that wasn't to be missed.

At Lacock, an abbey has been turned into a grand private house.

It's the perfect example of the revolution that was transforming England in the 16th century.

The country had been taken over, was owned and controlled by a whole new class of man.

To get rich quick was the dream,

as land and money were taken from the Church, and given to men and women on the make.

Country houses took on a magnificence once seen only in palaces and cathedrals.

It reached its peak in the reign of Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth's habit of dropping in on her subjects for a visit changed the look of British architecture.

Elizabeth didn't build any houses for herself.

She didn't need to - she got others to do it for her.

She kept her courtiers hungry for power and influence, and keen to impress her.

And they impressed her by building some of the greatest houses in the world,

houses literally fit for a queen.

Burghley House in Lincolnshire - more a palace than a house.

It was built by Sir William Cecil, founder of one of the great English dynasties.

Politics was his life, and he rose to become Elizabeth's lord treasurer.

"No prince in Europe," she said, "hath such a councillor as I have in mine." And she needed him.

She was all-powerful, but she was indecisive and sometimes impetuous.

He, on the other hand, was practical, clear-headed, and above all, patient.

They were a perfect match.

Sherrington's Lacock was a make-over, but Burghley is a spectacular new building.

It has Cecil's success stamped all over it, his coats of arms everywhere you look.

"Haven't I done well!" is the message.

This is the rooftop at Burghley House.

Now, this is a new roof, lead one, 1991, and it's all been redone

because in the Elizabethan era, this whole space was flat.

An area where you could walk around and where the privileged and the powerful would come

to argue, to discuss, to plot, maybe,

well away from the ears of servants,

and other people who shouldn't hear what they had to say.

And what a place to walk.

It's a sunny afternoon now and it's beautiful enough.

But imagine coming up here by moonlight or starlight,

when everything's silent all around,

and you've got these pinnacles and pepper pots and pillars...

Sheer magic.

The roof area covers 1½ acres,

with turrets and arches that frame the landscape.

And a forest of chimneys.

Chimneys were all the rage at the time.

There was a passion for chimneys because chimneys proclaimed your wealth and your status.

The more chimneys, the more fires, the more fires, the more rooms.

And here at Burghley, there are chimney's everywhere,

chimneys hidden in the balustrades, chimneys in these great Roman columns.

And not content with that, they even added false chimneys

to show how rich and powerful the family was.

There are 76 chimneys at Burghley.

And the real ones, at least, had to be cleaned.

What do you do, exactly?

It sends the weight right down to the bottom.

And once the weight gets right down to the bottom,

the rope follows through and the brush goes down, and the man at the bottom pulls it right down.

Then, when it's at the bottom, he sort of signals us,

-and we just get the other end of the rope and pulls it back up.

-Who gets covered in soot?

-Edward, sometimes.

-He does - that's why you put him up there!

-Yes!

How often to you do this job to this...?

-About once a year.

-One a year?

How many years have you been doing it?

-33 years, well, 32 years now.

-Have you?

-Yes.

-Is this how they'd have done it in the Elizabethan days, the way you're doing it, do you think?

-I should think so, yes.

-They'd send somebody down.

Yeah! ..OK?

-Can you hear him?

-Keep pulling!

-You want to go and...

-Yeah, go and chat to him, yes.

-Who's down at the bottom?

-Simon.

-Simon?

-Yes.

-Simon!

-(Yes?)

Oh, hello! Can you hear me easily?

-(Yes, I can hear you.)

-Do you like Burghley?

-(Yes, it's OK.)

-The first interview I've ever done down a chimney!

And the funny thing is, we can't hear a word you're saying, so it's all up to me!

They always say questions are the only things that count in interviews!

You don't need the answers!

The lavish extravagance of Burghley and its sophisticated style

transformed the English country house.

It's one of the most spectacular creations of the Elizabethan era.

When the Queen set out to visit her subjects

on her Royal progresses across the country,

she used the palaces of her noblemen as her hotels.

If you heard the Queen was coming, you might swell with pride or give way to panic -

or both.

It was a fabulously expensive business having the Queen to stay.

The normal bill for a grand house would be, in those days, about £80 a week.

It rose to £3,000 a week, when the Queen came.

William Cecil wrote to a courtier who was expecting the Queen, "May God give us both long to enjoy her,

"for whom we both mean to exceed our purses."

This extravagant hospitality could prove ruinous.

When Sir Christopher Hatton built Holdenby Hall in Northhamptonshire,

to receive Elizabeth, he made it the largest private house in England.

He moved an entire village so as not to spoil the Queen's view of the countryside.

Dedicating it to her, he refused to live in Holdenby himself until the Queen had visited.

This is all that remains of Holdenby, these two elegant arches

that used to lead into the courtyard - everything else is gone.

And the terrible thing is, Queen Elizabeth never came here.

Hatton died penniless, because he'd spent so much money,

childless, unmarried.

A terribly sad end to the story of a man who just wanted to please his Queen.

There were two Englands under Elizabeth - the vastly rich who displayed their wealth

and wanted to gain influence at court

and the huge majority, the rest of the country, who lived rather differently.

Three-quarters of the working population still laboured and lived on the land.

Farm workers earning only a few pence a day

lived in basic farmsteads much like this, in the woods near Holdenby.

The house had a wooden roof, and at one end, a huge chimney and fireplace which stuck out.

And then the main part of the house itself, built from tree trunks pushed into the ground

and then wattle, which is all kinds of woods that you can sort of weave together like that,

to make it nice and strong all the way along,

and then cow dung, which is the clay, cow dung put on top, smeared on.

And finally,

a lime plaster on top of that, to allow it to breath.

Very simple construction, but very effective.

Inside is a single room

supported by an A-shaped frame, with a sleeping area upstairs.

Now, this is the kind of food a farmer in a simple farmhouse like this would have had.

A staple of bread, cheese, eggs, ale to drink,

and this soup made of barley,

carrots, parsnips...called potage.

A mess of potage.

The rich looked down on this diet - not only looked down on it,

but thought parts of it were positively dangerous.

They wouldn't eat raw vegetables, for instance.

What they thought was healthy to eat was meat.

Is this the kind of pig the Elizabethans would have had, is that the sort of animal?

-This is the Iron Age wild... sort of, boar pig, yes.

-A wild boar?

-Yeah.

-He looks quite wild.

-She's got a very long nose.

-This is what does the damage, this is what does the rooting up.

If you want any ground cleared, this nose here would clean sort of brambles, nettles, the lot.

-They'd eat the roots.

-Can I pick one up and see?

-Yeah.

-You're meant to pick a pig up by the back legs, aren't you?

-Yes.

-Is that the safe way of doing it?

-It is.

Have to get him from behind, that's the trouble.

Oi!

Come on.

-I don't know what you do with them when you pick them up!

-Squeal like a pig.

-Yes!

Below the peasant farmer, at the bottom of the social scale were unemployed vagrants,

who wandered from one village to another, begging for food and shelter and work in the fields.

Elizabethan parliaments passed severe penalties for vagrancy.

Offenders could be whipped until bloody, or burnt through the right ear.

Many villages, like Dunchurch in Warwickshire, had their own way of dealing with vagrants.

Beggars could be put into stocks, like these.

I don't know whether I can get into them...

Ah!

And locked in like that for three days or so,

left here, on a diet of bread and water, unable to move,

and then kicked out of the village, and sent back home, where very often they weren't welcomed either,

and went back soon onto the road.

So being a vagrant or a beggar in Tudor times was a pretty rough life.

CAR HORN BEEPS

In the old town of Warwick, a homeless unemployable soldier,

just back from the wars, would fare a little better.

Lord Leycester's Hospital was a set of Almshouses for soldiers who had been pensioned off.

It was founded in 1571 by Lord Robert Dudley, a courtier to Queen Elizabeth.

As long as they observed the rules, the old soldiers could live here in peace.

Over 400 years later, the Almshouses are still serving the same purpose,

giving shelter to ex-servicemen, and still observing the same rituals.

-Morning, Reverend.

-Morning, sir.

If we remember the injuries we suffer and never deserved,

help us to remember the kindnesses we received and never earned.

'The same prayers have been said here every day since the 16th century.'

Help us to be thankful for your unfailing mercies and those of other people

for the sake of the glory of your name, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

When the Almshouses were first built, all the residents slept in one large hall over the courtyard.

These days, they have separate flats.

My flat is known as the Upper Malt House, which is this building here.

And I have the upstairs flat,

and it's a nice place to rest my head, and we're keeping the history of the place going.

We're helping to maintain what is really a traditional part of the country.

There aren't many places like this left.

Living here - think of that.

We had uniform on for Queen or King of country,

and you've still got that same thing here.

There's still an opening and we're still...as if we're still needed.

-I've won!

-Cheat!

-And if you want to stay out the night, can you do that without asking?

-Nobody's checked us yet!

You've got to be at the chapel next morning.

You go every morning to that service.

-Yes, yes.

-What does that mean to you?

To live here, it's part of the job.

-There's actually a head count.

-Mm, to make sure we're all in.

And to see that you are still well.

-You have to show you're up and alive at 9.30 every morning.

-Exactly.

Down the road from Warwick, in Stratford-upon-Avon,

is a different form of Elizabethan charity - the King Edward VI Grammar School.

Before Tudor times, schools had been run by the by the Church,

but by 1547, there was a grammar school in every market town,

with a common national curriculum.

The Tudor age heralded a new passion for education.

Schools were set up for the poor.

And as long as a family could afford for them NOT to work at home, boys started going to school.

And the result was a huge rise in literacy among all classes.

ALL: Audit, audimus, auditis, audiunt.

Amo, amas, amat...

THEY ALL TALK AT ONCE

Schoolrooms were very noisy places, with pupils learning by rote,

either chanting or reading out texts aloud.

Doceo, doces, docet...

Give us this day our daily bread.

-Can I borrow this?

-Yes.

This is one of the key tools for learning to read and write - the horn book.

A wooden block covered with thin horn and with the alphabet on it.

Below that, vowel sounds, and other sounds -

ab, eb, ib, ob, ub, ba, be, bi, bo, bu.

And then below that, the Lord's Prayer.

Thanks very much.

And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive them That trespass against us.

Latin and Greek were at the very heart of the curriculum.

It was thought essential to speak the classical languages.

Not that it always worked with all boys, even with a bit of help from teacher's little friend.

The most famous pupil of this school, William Shakespeare,

was described by a fellow playwright as having "small Latin and less Greek".

Not that it did him any harm.

THEY ALL TALK AT ONCE

Punishment for failing to study was harsh and painful.

So, what were you doing? You were doing...Latin, weren't you?

What do you think of that as a way of learning it? Did it work?

Um, yeah. It does help.

-It does help.

-Chanting.

-Chanting helps.

-Mm.

-Why?

Because doing it repetitively, over and over again, gets it fixed in your brain.

Can you repeat, without looking at it, what you were saying?

-Not really. I can repeat the first three words.

-Go on then.

Amo, amas, amat.

-That's it?

-Yeah.

I think the cane for you!

I'm heading west, crossing into Worcestershire,

to see the darker side of 16th-century England.

To be a Roman Catholic under Queen Elizabeth was to take your life in your hands.

With England at war with Catholic Spain, any Catholic might be a traitor.

To be a Catholic priest was to be guilty of high treason, punishable by death.

Many priests went on practising, holding Masses,

travelling the country in disguise, at great risk to themselves,

and finding sanctuary at the homes of prominent Catholic families.

This is one of the places they came to.

Harvington Hall, near Worcester, belonged to an eminent Catholic family called Packington.

It houses a network of priest holes, places to conceal priests on the run.

They were made by the master builder, Nicholas Owen, who dedicated his life to protecting Catholics.

Owen must have had a kind of computer brain.

At least, he had the ability to see a house in three dimensions in his mind,

so he could decide where the best places to put the hides were.

And this is a very good example, this is just a little staircase.

Now, if you were searching the house, you'd naturally check the treads.

And this one, you discover, lifts.

But when you lifted it up, inside it was just a strong-box, a safe,

with the family's jewels, silver, perhaps some money.

So the searching party would look at it, maybe steal something, shut it up and assume there was nothing there.

But, if you lift it right up, at the back was a partition,

and when you removed the partition,

it was a priest's hide.

Owen worked tirelessly across the country,

devising and building ingenious priest holes, and saving hundreds of lives.

He worked alone, for the sake of secrecy.

Each hide was different, so that it offered no clues about the others.

This time, it's the fireplace.

It looks like a perfectly normal fireplace, with soot-stained chimney,

but in reality this isn't soot at all - this has been painted on.

This isn't a fireplace, it's an escape route.

If you lie down and look up, you'll see there is no chimney.

There are two steps,

and it leads up into the roof.

The most cunning hide in the building wasn't discovered until the 19th century.

One of the beams is hinged,

you can push it back and lift it up,

and behind is a priest's hide,

which I should be able to get into.

Ah! Ugh!

I don't think I'd have made a very good priest!

I think I'm stuck!

That's it! Anyway, thin priests could escape discovery!

It's a deliberately disorienting house, and it lends itself to deception,

with walls of different thicknesses, confusing twists and turns

and raised and sunken levels concealing hiding places.

The family could further disguise these secret spots by covering the trapdoors with reeds,

or even placing someone on the toilet above a hide, when the soldiers came round.

But where many priests remained safe, Nicholas Owen, the builder, wasn't so lucky.

A wanted Catholic, he went on the run.

After a 12-day search, he was starved out of one of his own priest holes.

In the Tower of London, he was tortured, hanged with weights on his body

until, it's said, his bowels gushed out, together with his life.

70 miles from Harvington Hall, east into Northamptonshire,

is another building which stands in eloquent defiance of the Elizabethan state.

The Triangular Lodge was built by the devout Catholic

Sir Thomas Tresham, in 1594,

after he'd been imprisoned for 12 years for his faith.

The building is an intricate riddle, a maze of secret codes.

At its simplest, it's all threes.

Three sides, three stories,

windows in rows of three, three gables.

A celebration of the Holy Trinity - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.

On the face of it, it seems a fairly innocent proclamation of Christianity.

But there are other messages here, secret messages, cryptic messages,

treasonable messages.

At the top of the building are Tresham's most dangerous hidden symbols.

The angels that carry the water spouts round the building

have letters engraved on them.

This one, for instance, the letter S.

The S stood for the Latin word "sanctus".

And "sanctus, sanctus, sanctus," or "holy, holy, holy," comes from the Catholic service, the Mass.

In England, under Elizabeth, celebrating Mass could lead to execution.

This whole building carried a dangerous and subversive message,

support for the outlawed Roman Catholic Mass.

What a daring and bizarre building this is,

expressing one man's obsession in mysterious stone symbols.

They were never deciphered by the authorities in Tresham's lifetime,

and some remain a mystery even today.

Thomas Tresham got away with it.

Curiosities like the Triangular Lodge were typical of the age.

The Elizabethans loved symbols, patterns and geometric shapes,

sometimes used in deadly earnest, but just as often in a spirit of play.

Across the Peak District and up into Cheshire

is a house and garden whose design is intricately woven together.

Here at Little Moreton Hall, is a very rare and perfect example of an Elizabethan knot garden,

these geometric shapes made from tightly clipped box.

And in the middle of it, this four-leaf clover pattern,

which is clever, because it exactly copies the pattern on the house.

Knot gardens are made to look like a knotted piece of string,

with the hedge woven under and over itself.

Hello.

What's the idea behind a knot garden?

The concept was to try and bring some of the house

out into the garden.

So, as you can see in here, the walls are yew hedging.

And you can look down into this room from the upstairs, there.

-Why the gravel in the middle?

-To set out the pattern.

-And would they have had gravel?

Yes, it was purely ornamental. Sometimes, they used coloured gravel, if it was available.

It's interesting, it's the exact opposite of what we think of as little gardens today, isn't it,

with flowers and informal beds and this and that.

This is very, very...

-Very formal. Do you think it satisfied them?

-I think so, yes.

-What did they do - walk around them?

Just take gentle walks around on the grass.

-Oh, they walked on the grass?

-Yes.

-Oh, you don't walk inside the knot?

-No.

-So I'm in the wrong place, really.

Yes! If it was anybody else, I'd be telling you off!

Do you get bored just doing the same thing, year after year?

-No, it's quite therapeutic.

-Is it?

-Yeah, I think so anyway.

-But don't you want to go mad and change the shape?

-Oh, no, no! Heaven forbid!

The house is even more intricate than the garden -

eccentric, lively, quirky.

Most of these crazily-shaped timbers aren't needed to keep the house standing,

they're there for sheer fun and exuberance.

There's hardly a right angle or a flat surface in sight.

And here's something quite new - a long gallery,

somewhere to walk or play or dance, away from the wind and the rain.

Little Moreton Hall is the final extravagant flowering

of a kind of house that had been built in Britain for hundreds of years -

a timber frame filled with plaster.

It's based on the medieval house,

but in its energy and exuberance, it's quintessentially Elizabethan.

You won't find anything like this outside England.

Heading west, I'm leaving the world of timber and plaster

and entering the limestone belt - the Cotswolds.

Stone was always plentiful here, but was usually kept for the grander kind of buildings.

But as the Cotswolds grew rich - on wool and the weaving of cloth -

even modest houses started to be built to last.

The 17th century saw a boom at the bottom end of the scale,

partly because the wool trade was expanding,

partly because the population wasn't growing so fast

and the workers could charge more for their labour.

The result was they got richer and they could afford to buy stone for their cottages.

That's why, all over the Cotswolds now, you see houses like this.

Cottages were built simply, with thick stone walls filled with rubble.

The roofs are steep, to allow for the weight of the stone tiles, and to let the rain flow off easily.

They have heavy square chimney stacks, gables, dormers and small latticed windows.

Everything is built in the same local stone -

from the cottages to the churches and mansions,

to the walls round the fields, knitting village and countryside together.

These dry-stone walls are built without any mortar or cement to hold them together.

Why is it called dry-stone?

It's called dry, because the wall actually stays dry.

The stones are positioned so they run the water away from the wall,

so that the water will run off.

So, how do you get this neatness on the outside?

-Years of practice.

-Is that right?

-Yes.

Who is the better stone-waller - you or your father?

My father's better. I'm still learning.

-You're still learning?

-Yeah.

Is he any good at it, Richard?

-He's not bad.

-You're learning.

-He'll get there.

Wouldn't it be easier

to put posts and barbed wire,

-and cheaper?

-Yes, it would be cheaper and easier, um...

So, why do people still have stone walls?

Because they're part of the Cotswolds, they do more than a post-and-wire fence,

in as much as they create shelter for the stock,

and that's one of the reasons they were put there in the first place,

not just as a boundary, but as a shelter as well.

-Is that right?

-Yes.

At the junction of four counties - Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire,

Worcestershire and Warwickshire -

is a remarkable house that's remained untouched for 400 years.

Chastleton House was built at the turn of the 17th century by a successful wool merchant.

In the late 1940s, the last owner of Castleton used to let people come and see round the house,

and it was in a terrible state, and she used to explain, "Well, you see, we lost all our money in the war."

But she didn't mean the recent war, she meant the Civil War, 300 years earlier.

With no money for renovation, this house became frozen in time.

It preserves the design that was fashionable in the early 1600s.

The front is balanced and symmetrical.

But the odd thing is, there's something missing -

there's no front door,

which you'd expect to be there, in the middle of the house.

Instead, you go up these grand stairs...

..turn to the left, and here, hidden away, is the rather grand porch and the front door.

The peculiar layout had a purpose.

The reason is that they wanted to preserve the appearance of the medieval hall.

The screen here, the entrance there, into this big hall, where all the life of the house would take place.

But, in fact, this house had given up communal living, this wasn't used for eating.

The family didn't sit here on this dais.

They lived their life in private.

The days of the master's family and their servants living together in a great hall were over.

Now, the family wanted rooms of their own.

It was the start of a trend that led to the layout of the houses we build nowadays,

though we don't, perhaps, build quite on this scale.

The great glory of this room is the ceiling -

brilliant white against these dark oak panels.

And beautifully worked plaster - bunches of grapes,

roses, and then these bosses of plaster,

which look like icing sugar dripping from the ceiling.

Chastleton has a rather special place in the history books.

It was here that the rules of one version of croquet, as it's played today, were first laid down.

-Oh.

-Well, done! Go on, Barbara.

-Can I have a go?

-Yes, of course.

-Are you going to be black?

-Black, yes. ..Thank you.

-Yes, red next.

-Do you trust me with your ball?

It's an awkward angle,

and I can't see the lie of the land right.

That's good, very good.

-That'll be all right, won't it?

-Yes.

Now, if you hit that, you're disqualified, aren't you?

-It's black now.

-You don't play the proper rules!

-Oh, oh, yes, we do!

-What?

-You've just got to go through here.

Oh! I don't believe it.

I don't understand how you get any pleasure from it.

It's all... I thought it was all to do with cheating, aggro,

bullying - it's a nasty game.

-You're talking about the David Dimbleby game!

-The David Dimbleby game! Exactly, yes!

Queen Elizabeth died after 45 years on the throne, and her successor was very different.

James I was intelligent and well educated, but he ran a court riddled with scandals over sex and money.

The age of pleasure showed no sign of coming to an end.

Architecture in the age of James became ever more sophisticated,

even in the rural Cotswolds,

full of graceful curves and finely sculpted columns.

For the last leg of my journey,

I'm going to see a particularly bold example of this ornate style.

Lodge Park, near Sherborne in Gloucester,

was built for the aristocratic sport of deer coursing,

the chasing of deer, by hounds, along a racecourse.

A deer coursing event still takes place here once a year.

Lodge Park was built in the early 17th century.

It was a grandstand for watching the sport, designed to entertain guests in luxury.

It looks more suited to be part of a royal palace in the capital than a country racetrack.

The guests sort of come first into this hall, with its fireplace,

and then, through this very fine arch, up to the grandstand above.

Here, in the great room, there would have been food and drink laid out for refreshment,

and then, out through the doors onto the balcony to watch the racing.

Now, we think the dogs are going down, they're into slips, now they're both...

So, we've got Juno running in the red collar, with Murdo running in white.

And I don't know who you're going to put your money on, but let the best hound win.

STARTER'S GUN

Nowadays, instead of a deer, the hounds chase a bit of old fur.

In the 1600s, the deer was chased to a ditch,

where the dogs would have to stop and the deer would jump and get away.

But if a bet of £20 or more was made, it became a fleshing course,

the ditch was bypassed, and the race was won by the dog that killed the deer.

James I would have found this very tame.

He once charged after the hounds on horseback. When the deer was brought down, in his excitement, leapt off,

slit the deer's throat,

cut open its belly and climbed inside the deer,

covering himself and all his companions in blood.

No period of British history had seen such extravagance,

in buildings created for pleasure and comfort and show.

But this world of aristocratic luxury was soon to come to an end.

In 1642, Britain was plunged into civil war -

monarchists against republicans, Cavaliers against Roundheads.

A speaker in Parliament said, "These are days of great shaking."

And the destruction was terrible - 100,000 people killed, 10,000 buildings destroyed.

And then, in 1649, the monarchy abolished, and Charles I executed.

Oliver Cromwell and his puritan revolutionaries

brought a halt to an era of grand and lavish building.

What they built couldn't have been more different.

Littlecote Chapel, on the borders of Wiltshire and Berkshire,

was built by one of Cromwell's most ardent supporters during the Civil War.

It was converted from a medieval hall to a simple room of prayer,

and plainly - even severely - furnished.

This chapel is simplicity itself, purged of every decoration -

no stained glass, no paintings on the wall, no altar.

Instead, dominating the chapel,

the pulpit.

At the heart of their religion was not music and ceremony,

but preaching and reading the Bible.

In other words, focusing, quite simply, on the Word of God.

A century after Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries,

the religious revolutionaries were on the march again - this time, vowing to turn the world upside-down.

They promised that Britain would never be the same again.

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