The sources for understanding the physical building at Thornbury and its environs generally fall into three categories: primary sources regarding its construction; observations of its decay over time; and writings about the edifice after its various renovations. In the first group are literary descriptions and drawings by chroniclers or surveyors from the 16th through 18th century that provide first-hand accounts of the property. These begin with the chronicles of John Leland whose Itinerary describes his travels across England and Wales from 1539-43 including a visit to Thornbury Castle shortly after Buckingham’s death (Leland, 1745: 94-5). In 1832 the office of the Gothic revival architect, Augustus Pugin, created a series of beautifully detailed architectural drawings of Thornbury Castle, published in Volume 2 of his Examples of Gothic Architecture (Pugin and Pugin, 1850: v.2, 28-30, pl.30-44). These drawings, along with the accompanying description by his friend and fellow architect Edward James Willson, provide the best comprehensive images of the building before the renovation by Anthony Salvin in 1849. This publication intended to show-case selected buildings as clear and excellent examples of England’s Gothic architecture for contemporaries to imitate (v.2, 28) and omitted the deterioration that they would have observed at the edifice. I am indebted to the article by A.D. Hawkyard (1977: 51-8) which studies the transactions relating to the purchase of material and payment to various tradespeople to reconstruct the building up of the castle. His work delineates the management of a complex project and considers the influences of the site and existing buildings, the collection of raw materials, scaffolding, floors and windows, carpentry and even hardware by a variety of trades. In the 1834 issue of Archaeologia, (311-41) John Gage published the observations made by Henry VIII’s surveyors in 1521 (after the Third Duke of Buckingham’s execution) which give accounts of the materials, state of completion of the project and the general wonderment at the works. Included in the publication are a register of activities, guests and meals at the castle in 1507 when the project was in its infancy, bringing the social dimension of the work to light.  Finally, since much of the original building is still standing, the final source for first-hand accounts of the property come from my own various visits to the property including an enlightening walk-about with local historian Meg Wise along with Sandi Shallcross from the Thornbury District Museum.

The decay of Thornbury Castle is recorded by a variety of antiquarians whose drawings have provided me with a kind of time-lapse series of etchings and a somewhat romantic image of decay which reveal the castle as the edifice is slowly deconstructed by time, stone by stone.  As much as instructions and descriptions can illuminate the construction of a building, the decay over time can tell us even more about how a building was assembled. These descriptions at Thornbury begin with the first-hand observations recorded in drawings by the English topographers and printmakers Samuel and Nathaniel Buck in 1732. Their work depicts the exterior of Thornbury Castle and provides the first visual image of the building – a view after nearly 200 years of abandonment. In 1772, the artist Samuel Hooper Sparrow produced several engravings of Thornbury Castle which were published by Francis Grose in The Antiquities of England and Wales and these depict a farmer with his sheep grazing in the inner courtyard and shrubbery growing in the stone walls. Further, Horace Walpole, antiquarian, poet and art historian whose “imagination found a strange beauty in the Middle Ages” (1910: 71) after his somewhat humorous 1774 visit described “Thornbury, of which the ruins are half-ruined,” (Walpole and Cunningham, 1747: Letter 70) Walpole determines where he might find someone inside by looking for a window with intact glazing, implying that the glazing in the grand windows was no longer in place.  The etchings by Samuel Lysons of Thornbury Castle first published in 1791 include views of the garden walls and window mullions decaying with shrubbery growing over the building, along with a partial view of the original Great Hall. Artists flocked to draw the building (among others) as England’s enthusiasm for ruins took hold in the early 19th century, and Thornbury Castle attracted their attention. The engraver John Le Keux and draftsman F. Mackenzie drew the southern garden wall of the castle collapsed and completely overgrown along with large plants on the rooftops and in crevices of the building (Britton, 1814: 156). In 1824, in the lithographs by F. Calvert by draftsman Samuel Ireland, the pastoral landscape around the castle is overtaking the image of the castle, showing as much interest in nature as in the decay of the castle. Richard Ellis’s History of Thornbury Castle indicates that by the date of his publication in 1839, much of the building as described and drawn by Pugin in 1832 has been taken down (Ellis, 1839: 32). Three hundred years after Buckingham’s death, Henry Howard returned to live at Thornbury Castle following the renovations by the architect Anthony Salvin in 1849.

To understand the building and gardens at Thornbury and its relations to other buildings of its time I have looked to the works of several authors, including architectural historian Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (1978: 1-80) which weaves the changes in social life and material culture of early modern life in England into the evolving form and construction of buildings, including work at Thornbury Castle.  Malcolm Airs in The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History (1998: 26-53, 148-177) has been of great assistance in understanding the shift toward a more peaceful way of life that occurred with the end of the War of Roses and which influenced building design in England and, the effects this had on builders, building processes, materials and the craftspeople involved. Concerning the buildings in the immediate area around Thornbury Castle, I have regularly turned to Anthony Emery’s comprehensive survey Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales 1300-1500: Volume 3, Southern England which provides drawings, descriptions and historical context for the transformation of the building typologies in the early modern period; this volume alone covers over 750 houses from the area, including a detailed survey of Thornbury Castle (2006: 183-189). This detailed building investigation is complimented by Gloucestershire 2: The Vale and the Forest of Dean by David Verey and Alan Brooks. This work is particularly revealing in its narrow geographical focus (from Bath to Chepstow across the Severn up to Tewkesbury) covering both sides of the Severn, and includes geological maps showing available materials which are a vital part of the material narrative of architecture, including the town and castle at Thornbury (2002: 747-759). By starting with the forests, stones and clays that are available to local artisans, the book conveys the integrated nature of materials, environments and culture. Maurice Howard’s The Early Tudor Country House – Architecture and Politics 1450 – 1550 (1987) ties together ideas of material, workmanship and the migration of craft and ideas across the continent and into England with the changing political landscape, and has served as an overall framework for the confluence of craft migration and ideas. Neil Guy and Bill Woodburn’s article “Thornbury Castle – Renaissance Plaace or stronghold of a feudal barron?” has also been invaluable (2005: 205-234). Finally, I have used John Harvey’s English Mediaeval Architects, which describes the known corpus of master masons, carpenters and other craftspeople working in England as well as the buildings and chronology of their works, to understand the family of craftspeople involved at Thornbury Castle.

Sir Robert Cook’s West Country Houses published in 1957 provides interesting documentation of 51 houses from the area built between the 12th to 18th centuries. In the same year as he published the book, Cook’s father purchased Anthelhampton House in Dorset, first constructed as a Tudor hall in 1493. This personal engagement with an early Tudor building invited his imagination to speculate on its previous form: throughout the publication, Cooke matches various historic etchings (many from his own collection) against contemporary photographs often taken from the same angle, creating a tension between the form of the building past with its current state. In a twist of this process, Cooke inserts an etching of Thornbury Castle by W.H. Waltham (48) which offers “a reconstruction the west front,” an image of what the castle might have looked like had Buckingham been able to finish it. The drawing assembles a symmetrical “completed” design by starting with the forms of the existing building and combining them with other Thornbury details drawn in historic etchings. By placing the image beneath the decaying view by Lysons from 1798, the author fills the visual “voids in space and time” to create a kind of ideal geometrical form. While perhaps interesting as a conjectural formal analysis, I would like to propose that reconstruction embrace other factors beyond only form or material, including the full sensorium and emplacement in a particular time, informed by the people and culture: a story which I will now begin to unfold.