Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

The Story of Abraham Series

Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.

Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.

Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.

•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s):

Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)

Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread

wool; silk (textile); gold thread

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 482.0 × 793.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): The Sacrifice of Isaac

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Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

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One of the most picturesque state parks in Georgia, Watson Mill Bridge contains the longest covered bridge in the state, spanning 229 feet across the South Fork River. Built in 1885 by Washington (W.W.) King, son of freed slave and famous covered-bridge builder Horace King, the bridge is supported by a town lattice truss system held firmly together with wooden pins. At one time, Georgia had more than 200 covered bridges; today, less than 20 remain.

The park is an ideal spot for an afternoon picnic or overnight stay in the quiet campground. Hiking, biking and horseback riding trails allow visitors to enjoy the thick forest and river. During summer, visitors often play in the cool river shoals just below the bridge. Watson Mill Bridge has become a popular destination for horse owners who have their own camping area near stalls.

www.gastateparks.org/WatsonMillBridge/

Photo taken 1/1/2014.

85 West 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC.

Historic Place:

The historic place, a familiar local landmark, is the large, red, wood industrial building at 85 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, built in or around 1930 and located on city-owned landin South East False Creek.

Heritage Value:

The Vancouver Salt Company Building has heritage value for representing the secondary food-processing industry and the diversification of the local economy to meet the needs of the fishery; for its architectural and structural qualities; as a rare intact survivor of the industrial buildings that once dominated South East False Creek (SEFC); and as a neighbourhood landmark. SEFC was, through much of the twentieth century, a beehive of industrial activity. Most industries located here for access to water, rail, and road transportation. Heavy industrial uses, such as sawmills and steel fabrication, prevailed. The subject site was used from the early 1900s for gravel storage.

The Vancouver Salt Co. operation was important technologically for the means of

extraction, for using False Creek to transport goods, for its contributions to other

industries, and for the way in which ownership changes illustrate patterns of international trade and corporate acquisition. Unrefined salt was shipped to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where it had been recovered from brine by solar evaporation. This unusual technique was traditional to the Bay Area, originating with the Ohlone Indians and continued by the Spanish missionaries. The Vancouver-bound salt was extracted by the Leslie Salt Refining Co. of Newark, California (acquired in 1978 by Cargill Inc.), which owned the Vancouver Salt Co. The operation changed to Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. in 1970 and was later acquired by Domtar Ltd. By the late 1980s the building was used for paper recycling: first by Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. and then by Paperboard Industries. Raw salt was unloaded at Burrard Inlet and brought by scow to False Creek, where the Vancouver Salt Co. ‘semi-refined’ it by washing, drying, grinding, and sifting it into a coarse product fit for human consumption. The original market was as a preservative for the fishery, particularly the area’s Asian-Canadian fish-packers. Subsequent uses included other kinds of food-packing, tanneries, cold-storage plants, and highway ice removal. By 1950 rail and then trucks replaced boats for receiving and shipping the salt, reflecting changes brought about by the development of wheeled transport.

The building has heritage value as a pragmatic and attractive response to the needs of the salt operation and the site. It was built about 1930, squeezed between two lumber operations and mostly on a City-owned water lot, with only the southwest corner situated above the historic high water line. The original structure, a block about 90 by 145 feet, is supported on piles. A complex roof truss system directs the loads onto columns in the lateral walls and down the centre, creating a large open space. A raised monitor roof has a clerestory to admit light and air. The expansion of the building to the north in 1954-55 (Wright Engineers Ltd.) speaks to the growing demand for salt and the evolving refinery technology. New equipment was accommodated in part by building a roof over the existing 35-foot-deep apron at the rear, the former loading dock. The gable-roofed eastern portion held four large brine tanks, and the shed-roofed western part became a dry storage shed. A new hopper and conveyor were installed by the 1st Avenue loading dock, since the raw salt now arrived by truck. The conveyor may have necessitated raising the roof, which would date the tall silo-like cap at the front to this time. Minor alterations were made in 1970 for the Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. (Richard E. Cole, Engineer). The replacement of the salt-processing machinery with paper-shredding equipment in 1987 reflects the growing importance of the recycling industry. Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. also clad the sides with galvanized steel and cut new doors in the north elevation (De Guriby Ltd., Engineers, and Amundson Construction Co. Ltd). The building stands empty today, displaying physical evidence of its evolution and its uses.

Character-defining Elements:

- Broad building with a medium-sloped roof and gable at the front (south)

- Monitor roof, with a clerestory containing a row of 15-pane windows and cedar

ventilation louvres

- Taller, silo-like, gable-roofed feature at front of monitor

- Small-paned windows on the front elevation

- Loading dock at the front, protected from the weather by a shed roof

- Wood stud walls, covered externally with diagonal sheathing and horizontal

finished siding

-

- Large, open interior space, interrupted only by a row of columns down the centre

- Elaborate roof truss and knee braces, composed of wood members with metal

fastenings and hardware

- Two salt hoppers along the side wall (inside the building)

- Profile of main gable and monitor roof seen from the rear (north)

- Location on the axis of Manitoba Street

- Wetland beneath building

- City of Vancouver

World Bridge Number 01-60-01.

The bridge in Fallasburg was built in 1871 by Jared N. Brazee and Joseph H. Walker.

They purchased timber from a mill in Greenville and floated the logs down the Flat River to Fallasburg.

The Fallasburg Bridge is one of four bridges to be built with the patented Brown truss system. All these bridges happen to be in Michigan. Along with the Fallasburg Bridge, the White's Bridge and the Ada Bridge are still standing today; all built with the Brown truss design.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

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View of the truss system being installed on the roof the Cannon Building's west wing. The protective roof covering system will surround the existing roof during the demolition of the fifth floor.

Phase 1 of the Cannon Renewal Project began in January 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in November 2018. The entire west side of the building, from the basement to the fifth floor, is closed. Work includes demolishing and rebuilding the fifth floor, conserving the exterior stonework and rehabilitating the individual office suites.

Full project details at www.aoc.gov/cannon.

-----

This official Architect of the Capitol photograph is being made available for educational, scholarly, news or personal purposes (not advertising or any other commercial use). When any of these images is used the photographic credit line should read “Architect of the Capitol.” These images may not be used in any way that would imply endorsement by the Architect of the Capitol or the United States Congress of a product, service or point of view. For more information visit www.aoc.gov/terms.

Reference: 464734

This is the interior of the Fisher Covered Railroad Bridge in Wolcott, Vermont USA. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbwalsh/5351261269/ is an exterior shot.)

I used Photomatix to bring out the details, and as you can see nothing connects the railbed with the structure of the bridge. I believe this must be a modification that happened in 1968 when the bridge was preserved. The crisscross pattern on the side is the Town-Pratt truss system. The trusses usually hold up not only the roof and walls, but support the full weight of the bridge and everything that crosses it.

For maps to all the covered bridges in Vermont and the rest of the U.S. visit coveredbridgemap.com .

♡2010 by James P. Walsh II. Please copy and share.

more about the copyheart

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Call us for details and bookings +92-321-4268177 +92-324-4921459 +92-333-4645869

#Brands #Iftikhar_Thakur #zafri_Khan #Corporate_Events #Media_Wall #Best_Corporate_Event_Planner #Designer #Event_Designing #3D_Maping #Ghoost_Projection #Papia #Molfix #Ayeza_Khan #Kashif #Comedian #Company_CEO #Singer_Sanam_Marvi #Multimedia #Projector #Trussing_system #Ghoost_maping #best_event_planners_in_Lahore #event_organizer_in_Lahore #event_planners_in_Pakistan #Photography #Videographer #Interior_designer #Exterior_designer #Decor #Catering #Multimedia #Weddings #Social_Events #flowers_decor #dance_floor #Party_Planner #dance_party_Organizer #Wedding_Coordinator #Stages_Designer #House_Lighting #Fresh_flowers #Artificial_Flowers #Marquees #marriage_hall #hall_decor #area_decor #groom #bride #Mehndi #Car_hire #Sofa_Decoration #Hire_Venue #Honeymoon #Asian_wedding_Designers #Simple_Stage #gazebo #stage_decoration #events_management #baarat #barat #walima #valima #reception #mehndi #mayon #dance_floor #walkway_decor #pathway_decor #wooden_walkway #truss #disco_lights #dj #mehndi_dance #photographers #catering_services #food_services #wedding_food #wedding_jewelry #wedding_cake #wedding_designers #wedding_decoration #wedding_services #flowers_decor #masehri_decor #Caterers_in_Lahore #events_specialists #Quality_Food_Suppliers

#Grand_Opening_Ceremony #Hayat #Familia #Molfix #Papia #PC_Hotel_Lahore

Follow us on Instagram @a2zevents and @DclassyClicks

Call us for details and bookings +92-321-4268177 +92-324-4921459 +92-333-4645869

#Brands #Iftikhar_Thakur #zafri_Khan #Corporate_Events #Media_Wall #Best_Corporate_Event_Planner #Designer #Event_Designing #3D_Maping #Ghoost_Projection #Papia #Molfix #Ayeza_Khan #Kashif #Comedian #Company_CEO #Singer_Sanam_Marvi #Multimedia #Projector #Trussing_system #Ghoost_maping #best_event_planners_in_Lahore #event_organizer_in_Lahore #event_planners_in_Pakistan #Photography #Videographer #Interior_designer #Exterior_designer #Decor #Catering #Multimedia #Weddings #Social_Events #flowers_decor #dance_floor #Party_Planner #dance_party_Organizer #Wedding_Coordinator #Stages_Designer #House_Lighting #Fresh_flowers #Artificial_Flowers #Marquees #marriage_hall #hall_decor #area_decor #groom #bride #Mehndi #Car_hire #Sofa_Decoration #Hire_Venue #Honeymoon #Asian_wedding_Designers #Simple_Stage #gazebo #stage_decoration #events_management #baarat #barat #walima #valima #reception #mehndi #mayon #dance_floor #walkway_decor #pathway_decor #wooden_walkway #truss #disco_lights #dj #mehndi_dance #photographers #catering_services #food_services #wedding_food #wedding_jewelry #wedding_cake #wedding_designers #wedding_decoration #wedding_services #flowers_decor #masehri_decor #Caterers_in_Lahore #events_specialists #Quality_Food_Suppliers

View of the truss system being installed on the roof the Cannon Building's west wing. The protective roof covering system will surround the existing roof during the demolition of the fifth floor.

Phase 1 of the Cannon Renewal Project began in January 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in November 2018. The entire west side of the building, from the basement to the fifth floor, is closed. Work includes demolishing and rebuilding the fifth floor, conserving the exterior stonework and rehabilitating the individual office suites.

Full project details at www.aoc.gov/cannon.

-----

This official Architect of the Capitol photograph is being made available for educational, scholarly, news or personal purposes (not advertising or any other commercial use). When any of these images is used the photographic credit line should read “Architect of the Capitol.” These images may not be used in any way that would imply endorsement by the Architect of the Capitol or the United States Congress of a product, service or point of view. For more information visit www.aoc.gov/terms.

Reference: 464729

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

The Union Covered Bridge, built in 1871, spans the Elk Fork of the Salt River on the Paris-to-Fayette road in Monroe County, Missouri. Joseph C. Elliot built the bridge, which is the only covered bridge left in Missouri representing the Burr-arch truss system. Theodore Burr, who created the Burr-arch design, built so many bridges using that design that he is called by many the father of American bridge building. The other remaining covered bridges in Missouri used the Howe-truss design. The timbers used in the Union Covered Bridge are fashioned from local oak and fastened together largely with treenails or trunnels, with a few bolts and nails added for strength. Hand-riven clapboard siding and wooden shingles enclosed the bridge. The bridge is 120 feet long, 17 1/2 feet wide and has an entrance 12 feet high - high enough to admit a wagonload of hay.

In 1968 a partial restoration was completed using materials from the Mexico Covered Bridge which was destroyed the year before by flood waters. In 1970 the Union bridge was closed after structural timbers were damaged by overweight trucks. A total restoration was completed in 1988. The bridge was entered on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. In 2008, some siding was removed as an emergency measure when the bridge was threatened by severe flooding. Removal of the lowest siding allowed the stream to flow freely through the understructure of the bridge, thus sparing it the full force of the current. The bridge was saved, but the removed siding is still missing while funds for repair are sought.

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Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

The Story of Abraham Series

Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.

Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.

Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.

•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s):

Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)

Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread

wool; silk (textile); gold thread

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements:

482.0 × 770.0 cm (whole object)

488.0 × 793.0 cm (whole object)

480.0 × 780.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s):

The Departure of Abraham

The Separation of Abraham and Lot

Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge in New York City and is one of the oldest roadway bridges in the United States. Started in 1869 and completed fourteen years later in 1883, it connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, spanning the East River. It has a main span of 1,595.5 feet (486.3 m) and was the first steel-wire suspension bridge constructed. It was originally called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge and the East River Bridge, but it was later dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge, a name coming from an earlier January 25, 1867 letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and formally so named by the city government in 1915. Since opening, it has become an icon of New York City and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972.

Although the Brooklyn Bridge is technically a suspension bridge] it uses a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge design. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The limestone was quarried at the Clark Quarry in Essex County, New York. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, and delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.

The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorages. New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge's Manhattan anchorage in order to fund the bridge. Opened in 1876, the vaults were used to store wine, as they were always at 60 °F (16 °C). This was called the "Blue Grotto" because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance. When New York magazine visited one of the cellars in 1978, it discovered on the wall a "fading inscription" reading: "Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long."

The New York and Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. Thousands of people attended the opening ceremony, and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display. Since the New York and Brooklyn Bridge was the only one across the East River at that time, it was also called East River Bridge.

Chromolithograph of the "Great East River Suspension Bridge", (Brooklyn Bridge), by Currier and Ives, 1883.

On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost US$15.5 million in 1883 dollars (about US$393,964,000 in today's dollars) to build, and an estimated 27 men died during its construction.

On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a woman falling down the stairway caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.

At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built—and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".

At the time the bridge was built, engineers had not yet discovered the aerodynamics of bridge construction. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, known as Galloping Gertie, in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished or been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

The Story of Abraham Series

Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.

Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.

Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.

•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s):

Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)

Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread

wool; silk (textile); gold thread

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 482.0 × 770.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): The Departure of Abraham

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85 West 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC.

The building was renovated to the present configuration just prior to 2010 Olympics.

Historic Place:

The historic place, a familiar local landmark, is the large, red, wood industrial building at 85 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, built in or around 1930 and located on city-owned land in South East False Creek.

Heritage Value:

The Vancouver Salt Company Building has heritage value for representing the secondary food-processing industry and the diversification of the local economy to meet the needs of the fishery; for its architectural and structural qualities; as a rare intact survivor of the industrial buildings that once dominated South East False Creek (SEFC); and as a neighbourhood landmark. SEFC was, through much of the twentieth century, a beehive of industrial activity. Most industries located here for access to water, rail, and road transportation. Heavy industrial uses, such as sawmills and steel fabrication, prevailed. The subject site was used from the early 1900s for gravel storage.

The Vancouver Salt Co. operation was important technologically for the means of

extraction, for using False Creek to transport goods, for its contributions to other

industries, and for the way in which ownership changes illustrate patterns of international trade and corporate acquisition. Unrefined salt was shipped to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where it had been recovered from brine by solar evaporation. This unusual technique was traditional to the Bay Area, originating with the Ohlone Indians and continued by the Spanish missionaries. The Vancouver-bound salt was extracted by the Leslie Salt Refining Co. of Newark, California (acquired in 1978 by Cargill Inc.), which owned the Vancouver Salt Co. The operation changed to Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. in 1970 and was later acquired by Domtar Ltd. By the late 1980s the building was used for paper recycling: first by Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. and then by Paperboard Industries. Raw salt was unloaded at Burrard Inlet and brought by scow to False Creek, where the Vancouver Salt Co. ‘semi-refined’ it by washing, drying, grinding, and sifting it into a coarse product fit for human consumption. The original market was as a preservative for the fishery, particularly the area’s Asian-Canadian fish-packers. Subsequent uses included other kinds of food-packing, tanneries, cold-storage plants, and highway ice removal. By 1950 rail and then trucks replaced boats for receiving and shipping the salt, reflecting changes brought about by the development of wheeled transport.

The building has heritage value as a pragmatic and attractive response to the needs of the salt operation and the site. It was built about 1930, squeezed between two lumber operations and mostly on a City-owned water lot, with only the southwest corner situated above the historic high water line. The original structure, a block about 90 by 145 feet, is supported on piles. A complex roof truss system directs the loads onto columns in the lateral walls and down the centre, creating a large open space. A raised monitor roof has a clerestory to admit light and air. The expansion of the building to the north in 1954-55 (Wright Engineers Ltd.) speaks to the growing demand for salt and the evolving refinery technology. New equipment was accommodated in part by building a roof over the existing 35-foot-deep apron at the rear, the former loading dock. The gable-roofed eastern portion held four large brine tanks, and the shed-roofed western part became a dry storage shed. A new hopper and conveyor were installed by the 1st Avenue loading dock, since the raw salt now arrived by truck. The conveyor may have necessitated raising the roof, which would date the tall silo-like cap at the front to this time. Minor alterations were made in 1970 for the Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. (Richard E. Cole, Engineer). The replacement of the salt-processing machinery with paper-shredding equipment in 1987 reflects the growing importance of the recycling industry. Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. also clad the sides with galvanized steel and cut new doors in the north elevation (De Guriby Ltd., Engineers, and Amundson Construction Co. Ltd). The building stands empty today, displaying physical evidence of its evolution and its uses.

Character-defining Elements:

- Broad building with a medium-sloped roof and gable at the front (south)

- Monitor roof, with a clerestory containing a row of 15-pane windows and cedar

ventilation louvres

- Taller, silo-like, gable-roofed feature at front of monitor

- Small-paned windows on the front elevation

- Loading dock at the front, protected from the weather by a shed roof

- Wood stud walls, covered externally with diagonal sheathing and horizontal

finished siding

-

- Large, open interior space, interrupted only by a row of columns down the centre

- Elaborate roof truss and knee braces, composed of wood members with metal

fastenings and hardware

- Two salt hoppers along the side wall (inside the building)

- Profile of main gable and monitor roof seen from the rear (north)

- Location on the axis of Manitoba Street

- Wetland beneath building

- City of Vancouver

but had to hold off now because of the gale force wind gusts and there is gale force wind expected tomorrow as well

The white frames are the trusses

the green netting is safety netting

After the trusses are in place the placement of 16mm thick glass panels will go on top and a fabric membrane underneath.

======================

Elegant understated and with respect to the unique site was the brief

Its a 36 000 square metre hanging roof, supported by an outer compression ring and inner tension ring

One of the major factors considered during the design of the roof was Cape Town’s notorious wind, particularly the South Easter.

The turbulence created by these winds is higher than most strong winds, and was therefore a significant factor in the roof’s design.Most of the wind, and resulting turbulence, comes not from the sea, but from Table Mountain and Signal Hill, and the design had to be amended accordingly.

One of the main design elements to prevent wind damage is the use of heavy glass for the roof, while another is the use of a truss system on top of the compression ring, which will reduce turbulence. It also helps create the shape of the roof, and distributes the uneven loads evenly onto the cables.

The design of the roof also had to take into account heavy rainfalls, and ensure that the water drains to the two lowest points effectively.

Rainfall run-off from the roof will be collected in ponds and used for the irrigation of the golf course on the surrounding Green Point Common.

Construction work on the R430-million roof started in September 2008 , with the erection of the first compression ring and will be completed in Sept. 2009

That white building is the 5 star Radisson SAS Hotel behind the stadium right on the edge of the Atlantic ocean

www.capetown.radissonsas.com/

Workers install a truss system on the roof the Cannon Building's west wing. The protective roof covering system will surround the existing roof during the demolition of the fifth floor.

Phase 1 of the Cannon Renewal Project began in January 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in November 2018. The entire west side of the building, from the basement to the fifth floor, is closed. Work includes demolishing and rebuilding the fifth floor, conserving the exterior stonework and rehabilitating the individual office suites.

Full project details at www.aoc.gov/cannon.

-----

This official Architect of the Capitol photograph is being made available for educational, scholarly, news or personal purposes (not advertising or any other commercial use). When any of these images is used the photographic credit line should read “Architect of the Capitol.” These images may not be used in any way that would imply endorsement by the Architect of the Capitol or the United States Congress of a product, service or point of view. For more information visit www.aoc.gov/terms.

Reference: 464258

85 West 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC.

Historic Place:

The historic place, a familiar local landmark, is the large, red, wood industrial building at 85 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, built in or around 1930 and located on city-owned land in South East False Creek.

Heritage Value:

The Vancouver Salt Company Building has heritage value for representing the secondary food-processing industry and the diversification of the local economy to meet the needs of the fishery; for its architectural and structural qualities; as a rare intact survivor of the industrial buildings that once dominated South East False Creek (SEFC); and as a neighbourhood landmark. SEFC was, through much of the twentieth century, a beehive of industrial activity. Most industries located here for access to water, rail, and road transportation. Heavy industrial uses, such as sawmills and steel fabrication, prevailed. The subject site was used from the early 1900s for gravel storage.

The Vancouver Salt Co. operation was important technologically for the means of

extraction, for using False Creek to transport goods, for its contributions to other

industries, and for the way in which ownership changes illustrate patterns of international trade and corporate acquisition. Unrefined salt was shipped to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where it had been recovered from brine by solar evaporation. This unusual technique was traditional to the Bay Area, originating with the Ohlone Indians and continued by the Spanish missionaries. The Vancouver-bound salt was extracted by the Leslie Salt Refining Co. of Newark, California (acquired in 1978 by Cargill Inc.), which owned the Vancouver Salt Co. The operation changed to Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. in 1970 and was later acquired by Domtar Ltd. By the late 1980s the building was used for paper recycling: first by Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. and then by Paperboard Industries. Raw salt was unloaded at Burrard Inlet and brought by scow to False Creek, where the Vancouver Salt Co. ‘semi-refined’ it by washing, drying, grinding, and sifting it into a coarse product fit for human consumption. The original market was as a preservative for the fishery, particularly the area’s Asian-Canadian fish-packers. Subsequent uses included other kinds of food-packing, tanneries, cold-storage plants, and highway ice removal. By 1950 rail and then trucks replaced boats for receiving and shipping the salt, reflecting changes brought about by the development of wheeled transport.

The building has heritage value as a pragmatic and attractive response to the needs of the salt operation and the site. It was built about 1930, squeezed between two lumber operations and mostly on a City-owned water lot, with only the southwest corner situated above the historic high water line. The original structure, a block about 90 by 145 feet, is supported on piles. A complex roof truss system directs the loads onto columns in the lateral walls and down the centre, creating a large open space. A raised monitor roof has a clerestory to admit light and air. The expansion of the building to the north in 1954-55 (Wright Engineers Ltd.) speaks to the growing demand for salt and the evolving refinery technology. New equipment was accommodated in part by building a roof over the existing 35-foot-deep apron at the rear, the former loading dock. The gable-roofed eastern portion held four large brine tanks, and the shed-roofed western part became a dry storage shed. A new hopper and conveyor were installed by the 1st Avenue loading dock, since the raw salt now arrived by truck. The conveyor may have necessitated raising the roof, which would date the tall silo-like cap at the front to this time. Minor alterations were made in 1970 for the Arden Vancouver Salt Co. Ltd. (Richard E. Cole, Engineer). The replacement of the salt-processing machinery with paper-shredding equipment in 1987 reflects the growing importance of the recycling industry. Belkin Paper Stock Ltd. also clad the sides with galvanized steel and cut new doors in the north elevation (De Guriby Ltd., Engineers, and Amundson Construction Co. Ltd). The building stands empty today, displaying physical evidence of its evolution and its uses.

Character-defining Elements:

- Broad building with a medium-sloped roof and gable at the front (south)

- Monitor roof, with a clerestory containing a row of 15-pane windows and cedar

ventilation louvres

- Taller, silo-like, gable-roofed feature at front of monitor

- Small-paned windows on the front elevation

- Loading dock at the front, protected from the weather by a shed roof

- Wood stud walls, covered externally with diagonal sheathing and horizontal

finished siding

-

- Large, open interior space, interrupted only by a row of columns down the centre

- Elaborate roof truss and knee braces, composed of wood members with metal

fastenings and hardware

- Two salt hoppers along the side wall (inside the building)

- Profile of main gable and monitor roof seen from the rear (north)

- Location on the axis of Manitoba Street

- Wetland beneath building

- City of Vancouver

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Transcript of display:

Anne Boleyn

The Most Happy

circa 1501-1536

Beheaded

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn took great personal interest in building work on the great Hall. Before they visited in December 1533, carpenters were given candles so that they could work into the night on the new ceiling!

In the ceiling, you can see their initials, coats of arms, and Anne’s personal badge—a crowned falcon.

This stone badge from the original vault of the Anne Boleyn Gatehouse shows Anne’s crowned falcon. The wooden screen behind is carved with the interlocking initials A{nne} and H{enry}.

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

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St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church - 1889

924 Douglas Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

2011.08.07

***

Description of Historic Place

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church is a landmark red-brick structure, located at the corner of Douglas and Broughton Streets in downtown Victoria. The Church is notable for its prominent corner tower, which is situated at a bend in Broughton Street and terminates the view to the west. The church displays a number of distinctive features, including crow-stepped gables, a variety of projections and towers, corner tourelles, and a picturesque roofline. Three sets of double entry doors are set in round-arched openings. At the rear there is a curved two-storey projecting bay.

Heritage Value

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church is valued as a symbol of Victoria's ecclesiastical history and is representative of the ethnicity of its early immigrants. Victoria’s first Presbyterian church opened in 1862, but in 1866 the new congregation of St. Andrew's was formed with the blessing of the Church of Scotland. Their early ministers were integral in fostering Presbyterianism on Vancouver Island and in the interior of the province. From the earliest days of settlement, Victoria’s population had a high proportion of Scots. As the population of the city grew, so did this congregation, necessitating a larger place of worship. The cornerstone of this new building was laid on March 7, 1889 and the building was dedicated on January 12, 1890. When the United Church of Canada was formed in 1925, this congregation declined to join, and stayed with the Presbyterian Church of Canada, where it remains today.

The prominent site, massive size and lavish construction of this church, the largest in Victoria at the time of its construction, symbolized the importance of Scots in the social structure of the city. St. Andrew’s was associated with many notable members of Victoria’s society. Members of the congregation included pioneer industrialist, coal baron, politician and railway builder Robert Dunsmuir (1825-1889). Dunsmuir died before the church was complete, and his family donated the rose window in the church and the two flanking windows in his honour. All three windows were made by A. Linneman of Frankfurt am Main and shipped over to Victoria. Robert Burns McMicking (1843-1915) incorporated the Victoria Electric Illuminating Company with a group of local investors, which in 1883 introduced the first commercial electric lights in Canada and lit up the streets of Victoria. McMicking had the church provided with electric light, a rarity, as there was only one other church on the continent that was powered with electric light. Premier John Robson (1824-1892) was an elder of the church, and his funeral was held at St. Andrew’s.

St. Andrew's is valued as an important example of Late Victorian ecclesiastical architecture with distinctive Scottish Baronial elements as well as innovative structural engineering. It was designed by architect Leonard Buttress Trimen (1846-1892), who came to Victoria in 1887. He had a prolific, but short career, designing commercial and residential buildings, and the church was his most prominent commission. The style of St. Andrew’s is the Scottish response to the Jacobethan Revival in nineteenth-century England, and was a popular style for Scottish country houses. Drawing on the characteristics of fortified medieval tower houses and castles in Scotland, the style employs such elements as battlements, tourelles, and conical roofs as a declaration of national identity. Polychrome red and black banding demonstrates an awareness of contemporary architectural trends in England. The interior retains its distinctive amphitheatre seating with surrounding balcony, wrought-iron balustrades, and high vaulted ceiling; interior features have remained in notably intact original condition. The organ, in a round-arched surround inscribed with the text 'The Lord is in His Holy Temple – Let All the Earth keep Silence', is on axis with the entrance to the sanctuary. It retains some of the components from the organ that originally stood in the first St. Andrew’s, made by S.R. Warren & Son, Toronto. There are stained glass windows on the side and rear walls, including the large rose window. The church is also a highly sophisticated example of late Victorian-era construction, with massive brick structural walls; reputedly a million bricks were used to build the church. The complex roof truss system displays an early use of metal tension rods, which allowed the sanctuary to be spanned without interior columns.

Source: City of Victoria Planning and Development Department

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church include its:

- location at the corner of Douglas and Broughton Streets in the heart of downtown Victoria

- siting on the property lines with minimal setback

- ecclesiastical form, scale, and massing as expressed by its picturesque, asymmetrical composition, grand entry, corner tower, and varied gabled and conical roof forms

- masonry construction as expressed by its polished red-granite columns at the entrance with carved sandstone bases and capitals; massive red-brick structural walls; courses of blackened brick; and elaborate details such as a variety of rubbed and angled bricks, corbelled arcades, and tall brick chimneys

- Scottish Baronial-style details such as: tourelles, crow-stepped gables and conical roofs; polychrome brickwork; and a variety of round-arched and segmental-arched window and door openings, some with herringbone nogging above

- other exterior features such as three sets of double entry doors set in round-arched openings; wooden doors with iron strap hinges; sheet metal cupola with round dome; sheet metal finials; and metal name and date sign above side entry on Broughton Street

- windows such as: round-arched windows with diamond-leaded coloured glass, fixed stained glass windows; large rose window; double-hung wooden sash windows, some 12-over-12 and some with original stained glass; and bull’s eye windows in the corner tower with diamond-leaded coloured glass

- substantially intact interior with original features such as: amphitheatre seating with curved pews on a raked fir floor; wood-lined segmental-vaulted ceiling; pipe organ; balcony with wrought-iron balustrades; wooden panelling, floors and trim; and staircases with massive newels and lathe-turned balusters

- interior roof structure including heavy timber trusses with iron tension rods

- memorials and dedications, including the Dunsmuir memorial windows, the cornerstone of the first St. Andrew’s Church, and a plaque commemorating Robert Burns McMicking

Source: www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=14788...

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel

#Grand_Opening_Ceremony #Hayat #Familia #Molfix #Papia #PC_Hotel_Lahore

Follow us on Instagram @a2zevents and @DclassyClicks

Call us for details and bookings +92-321-4268177 +92-324-4921459 +92-333-4645869

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#Grand_Opening_Ceremony #Hayat #Familia #Molfix #Papia #PC_Hotel_Lahore

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Workers continue to build the truss system on the roof the Cannon Building's west wing. The protective roof covering system will surround the existing roof during the demolition of the fifth floor.

Phase 1 of the Cannon Renewal Project began in January 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in November 2018. The entire west side of the building, from the basement to the fifth floor, is closed. Work includes demolishing and rebuilding the fifth floor, conserving the exterior stonework and rehabilitating the individual office suites.

Full project details at www.aoc.gov/cannon.

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This official Architect of the Capitol photograph is being made available for educational, scholarly, news or personal purposes (not advertising or any other commercial use). When any of these images is used the photographic credit line should read “Architect of the Capitol.” These images may not be used in any way that would imply endorsement by the Architect of the Capitol or the United States Congress of a product, service or point of view. For more information visit www.aoc.gov/terms.

Reference: 464976

www.lostbridges.org/details.aspx?id=NH/29-04-01&loc=n

Bollman Bridge

West Salisbury Street Bridge (Bollman Bridge) was constructed around 1835. It crossed the canal prism to provide a more direct route from the town to the ferry. This route was an alternate to Potomac Street, now blocked by the busy canal industries and Williamsport Basin.

The bridge was designed by self-taught engineer Wendell Bollman for the canal company. The single-lane, vehicular bridge featured rubble stone abutments, an iron truss system, and a wooden deck. The NPS has undertaken several projects to improve the bridge condition and safety.

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park

Williamsport Cultural Landscape Inventory report

Cultural Landscapes

#Grand_Opening_Ceremony #Hayat #Familia #Molfix #Papia #PC_Hotel_Lahore

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924 Douglas Street, Victoria, BC.

Statement of Significance:

Description of Historic Place:

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church is a landmark red-brick structure, located at the corner of Douglas and Broughton Streets in downtown Victoria. The Church is notable for its prominent corner tower, which is situated at a bend in Broughton Street and terminates the view to the west. The church displays a number of distinctive features, including crow-stepped gables, a variety of projections and towers, corner tourelles, and a picturesque roofline. Three sets of double entry doors are set in round-arched openings. At the rear there is a curved two-storey projecting bay.

Heritage Value:

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church is valued as a symbol of Victoria's ecclesiastical history and is representative of the ethnicity of its early immigrants. Victoria’s first Presbyterian church opened in 1862, but in 1866 the new congregation of St. Andrew's was formed with the blessing of the Church of Scotland. Their early ministers were integral in fostering Presbyterianism on Vancouver Island and in the interior of the province. From the earliest days of settlement, Victoria’s population had a high proportion of Scots. As the population of the city grew, so did this congregation, necessitating a larger place of worship. The cornerstone of this new building was laid on March 7, 1889 and the building was dedicated on January 12, 1890. When the United Church of Canada was formed in 1925, this congregation declined to join, and stayed with the Presbyterian Church of Canada, where it remains today.

The prominent site, massive size and lavish construction of this church, the largest in Victoria at the time of its construction, symbolized the importance of Scots in the social structure of the city. St. Andrew’s was associated with many notable members of Victoria’s society. Members of the congregation included pioneer industrialist, coal baron, politician and railway builder Robert Dunsmuir (1825-1889). Dunsmuir died before the church was complete, and his family donated the rose window in the church and the two flanking windows in his honour. All three windows were made by A. Linneman of Frankfurt am Main and shipped over to Victoria. Robert Burns McMicking (1843-1915) incorporated the Victoria Electric Illuminating Company with a group of local investors, which in 1883 introduced the first commercial electric lights in Canada and lit up the streets of Victoria. McMicking had the church provided with electric light, a rarity, as there was only one other church on the continent that was powered with electric light. Premier John Robson (1824-1892) was an elder of the church, and his funeral was held at St. Andrew’s.

St. Andrew's is valued as an important example of Late Victorian ecclesiastical architecture with distinctive Scottish Baronial elements as well as innovative structural engineering. It was designed by architect Leonard Buttress Trimen (1846-1892), who came to Victoria in 1887. He had a prolific, but short career, designing commercial and residential buildings, and the church was his most prominent commission. The style of St. Andrew’s is the Scottish response to the Jacobethan Revival in nineteenth-century England, and was a popular style for Scottish country houses. Drawing on the characteristics of fortified medieval tower houses and castles in Scotland, the style employs such elements as battlements, tourelles, and conical roofs as a declaration of national identity. Polychrome red and black banding demonstrates an awareness of contemporary architectural trends in England. The interior retains its distinctive amphitheatre seating with surrounding balcony, wrought-iron balustrades, and high vaulted ceiling; interior features have remained in notably intact original condition. The organ, in a round-arched surround inscribed with the text 'The Lord is in His Holy Temple – Let All the Earth keep Silence', is on axis with the entrance to the sanctuary. It retains some of the components from the organ that originally stood in the first St. Andrew’s, made by S.R. Warren & Son, Toronto. There are stained glass windows on the side and rear walls, including the large rose window. The church is also a highly sophisticated example of late Victorian-era construction, with massive brick structural walls; reputedly a million bricks were used to build the church. The complex roof truss system displays an early use of metal tension rods, which allowed the sanctuary to be spanned without interior columns.

Source: City of Victoria Planning and Development Department

Character-Defining Elements:

Key elements that define the heritage character of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church include its:

- location at the corner of Douglas and Broughton Streets in the heart of downtown Victoria

- siting on the property lines with minimal setback

- ecclesiastical form, scale, and massing as expressed by its picturesque, asymmetrical composition, grand entry, corner tower, and varied gabled and conical roof forms

- masonry construction as expressed by its polished red-granite columns at the entrance with carved sandstone bases and capitals; massive red-brick structural walls; courses of blackened brick; and elaborate details such as a variety of rubbed and angled bricks, corbelled arcades, and tall brick chimneys

- Scottish Baronial-style details such as: tourelles, crow-stepped gables and conical roofs; polychrome brickwork; and a variety of round-arched and segmental-arched window and door openings, some with herringbone nogging above

- other exterior features such as three sets of double entry doors set in round-arched openings; wooden doors with iron strap hinges; sheet metal cupola with round dome; sheet metal finials; and metal name and date sign above side entry on Broughton Street

- windows such as: round-arched windows with diamond-leaded coloured glass, fixed stained glass windows; large rose window; double-hung wooden sash windows, some 12-over-12 and some with original stained glass; and bull’s eye windows in the corner tower with diamond-leaded coloured glass

- substantially intact interior with original features such as: amphitheatre seating with curved pews on a raked fir floor; wood-lined segmental-vaulted ceiling; pipe organ; balcony with wrought-iron balustrades; wooden panelling, floors and trim; and staircases with massive newels and lathe-turned balusters

- interior roof structure including heavy timber trusses with iron tension rods

- memorials and dedications, including the Dunsmuir memorial windows, the cornerstone of the first St. Andrew’s Church, and a plaque commemorating Robert Burns McMicking

Canada's Historic Places

Great Hall

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

A History of the Great Hall

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

Thirteen Fragments of Armorial Tapestry Borders

Thirteen fragments of detached borders of tapestries made from 1500 to 1547 from the collections of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. One is woven with repeating motifs of the royal arms and a crowned portcullis, separated by balusters, against a diapered ground. Others are woven with various armorials, including the arms of the See of York, of Cardinal Wolsey as archbishop of York, and of the two Sees of York and Canterbury. During the late nineteenth-century re-presentation of the Tudor apartments at Hampton Court Palace these borders were hung against the gallery of the Great Hall and around the walls of the Great Watching Chamber. It is not known which tapestries they were originally intended to surround. Tapestries played a fundamental role in the decoration of Henry VIII’s palaces. At his death in 1547 his collection contained over two thousand pieces. These were hung for short periods wherever the court was in residence and were carried about the country as it progressed between palaces. From the late seventeenth century, the disposition of tapestries in the royal palaces became more permanent, but there were none the less periodic rearrangements involving reduction or enlargement, either by detaching the borders or, more drastically, by cutting the pictorial field itself. These borders were probably woven in the Netherlands, but it is also possible that the royal “arras maker” responsible for the upkeep of the royal tapestries had workmen capable of producing tapestry of this quality. Because the royal Tudor arms remained unchanged after the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, the borders may conceivably date from the reign of his father, Henry VII. Catalogue entry from Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, London 2002.

•Provenance: Probably made for Henry VIII. Recorded in the "Withdrawing Room" in 1659, from 1849 a selection has been hung in the Great Hall.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s): Netherlands (nationality); English (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

oSubject(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547); House of Tudor

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool tapestry

wool

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 66.0 × 226.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): Armorial panel