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Prodigy house


Prodigy house is a term for large and showy English Tudor and Jacobean houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either "noble palaces of an awesome scale" or "proud, ambitious heaps" according to taste. The prodigy houses stretch over the periods of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture, though the term may be restricted to a core period of roughly 1570 to 1620. Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm. Many are therefore close to major roads, often in the English Midlands.

The term originates with the architectural historian Sir John Summerson, and has been generally adopted. He called them "...the most daring of all English buildings." The houses fall within the broad style of Renaissance architecture, but represent a distinctive English take on the style, mainly reliant on books for their knowledge of developments on the Continent. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was already dead before the prodigy houses reached their peak, but his much more restrained classical style did not reach England until the work of Inigo Jones in the 1620s. For ornament, French and Flemish Northern Mannerist decoration was more influential than Italian.

Elizabeth I travelled southern England in annual summer "progresses", staying at the houses of wealthy courtiers; however she never went north of Worcester or west of Bristol, though by the end of her reign there were many large houses beyond these self-imposed boundaries. The hosts were expected to house the monarch in style, and provide sufficient accommodation for about 150 travelling members of the court, for whom temporary buildings might need to be erected. Elizabeth was not slow to complain if she felt her accommodation had not been appropriate, and did so even about two of the largest prodigy houses, Theobalds House and Old Gorhambury House (both now destroyed).


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