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I.—The Wall-Paintings at Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough, Northants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2011

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The paintings which were fully uncovered during 1946 in the Great Chamber of the house known as Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough, are the most important domestic mural paintings of the medieval period in England. Here is preserved a unique example of the appearance of the private apartment of a man of means and taste in the early fourteenth century, and some indication also of the learning and moral ideas of his period. By means of painstaking research scholars have recovered much information about the paintings in Westminster and the other royal palaces. (See in particular T. Borenius, ‘The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry III’, in Journ. of the Warburg and Courtauld Insts. vi (1943), 40–50.) There are also a few mentions of paintings of a secular character in other buildings, but almost nothing now survives. The uncovering of the magnificent series of paintings at Longthorpe Tower, which is not a particularly large or important dwelling, suggests that mural painting of a hitherto unimagined richness and elaboration must have been usual in the castles and great houses of the English nobility during the medieval period.

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1955

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