Page:Kirby Muxloe Castle near Leicester (1917).djvu/13

Rh considerable revenues from his various state offices. By his marriage he acquired further lands and revenues, and the foreign "pensions," already referred to, added considerably to his resources. He was therefore well able to indulge his taste for fine buildings, and his work at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and at Kirby gives a good idea of his conceptions of architecture. Ashby is altogether on a larger and more ambitious scale than Kirby, but in both places the principle is the same; a domestic building of moderate defensive strength has been converted into a fortified house. (It appears from the accounts that the old house at Kirby had a gatehouse and drawbridge, base towers, and middle towers.) Ashby is the stronger of the two, and much more comparable to the purely military buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the essential difference is at once evident; in the early castles defence is the first object, and convenience of inhabitation secondary, but Ashby is first of all a great man's house. Lord Hastings came into possession of Ashby in 1461, its former owner having been James Buder, Earl of Ormond, a Lancastrian who, after the battle of Towton Moor, in 1460, was beheaded at Newcastle. His estates were forfeited to the Crown, and Edward IV granted Ashby to Lord Hastings. A third Hastings estate in Leicestershire was Bagworth, and on 17 April 1474 Lord Hastings obtained a licence to fortify his three houses of Ashby, Bagworth, and Kirby, and to make parks of 3,000 acres at the first, and of 2,000 acres at each of the others. If anything was done at Bagworth it was not carried far, for Leland, writing about 1540, says that he only saw there "the Ruines of a Manor Place, like a Castelle building." This might very aptly be applied to Kirby to-day; but at Bagworth the site is now marked by mounds only. Kirby, as we know from the building accounts which are fortunately extant, was not begun till 1480, and was left unfinished at Lord Hastings' death. The work at Ashby was well advanced before Kirby was begun, and Ashby remained the principal seat of the family. Its great tower, which is only comparable in England to Lord Cromwell's great tower at Tattershall, is even in its present mutilated state a magnificent thing, and a lasting witness to the wealth and power of its first owner. A fourth building in the county, finer and more important than even Ashby, received very different treatment at his hands. This was Belvoir Castle, granted to him in 1461 as forfeited Lancastrian property, having belonged to Thomas, Lord de Ros. Leland's account of the matter is as follows: "Believer Castelle," he says, "was put in keeping to