Page:Cornwall; Cambridge county geographies.djvu/145

 ARCHITECTURE DOMESTIC 129 by the hall led in the reign of Elizabeth to an alteration, and the halls were ceiled over, so that the upper portion could be used for bedrooms and passage. Before her reign the usual form of a house was quadrangular, that is to say a court surrounded by buildings entered by a gate, with the hall and principal portions of the house opposite the entrance gate. But in the reign of Elizabeth it became the fashion to form the house in the shape of the letter E. In her father's reign it often had the shape of the letter H with the open ends closed by slight walls. Cornwall possesses very few stately houses. At the close of the seventeenth century a schoolmaster at Trebartha filled a folio with sketches of the ancient manor-houses of the neighbourhood of the Tamar ; picturesque old mansions of the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Nearly every one has disappeared. The squirearchy of Cornwall, flush of money, through tin, pulled down their old residences and built mansions in the Georgian period, totally devoid of interest. Of the old houses few remain except as farm houses. They were, however, never so magnificent as those in the counties where bricks and easily dressed stone existed. But still there remain Cothele, unaltered, the beautiful house of Lord Mount Edgcumbe on the Tamar ; Basil, the manor-house of the Trevelyans, much mutilated by the barbarous hand of a modern architect; Trecarrel, near Launceston, an old Tudor mansion with a noble hall, never completed ; Place, near Padstow, formerly Prideaux Castle, the Elizabethan residence of the Prideaux Brunes, very stately, and with a dining room rich in carved oak ; Lanherne, built in 1580, a small manor-house of the G. c. 9