Longthorpe Tower is a 14th-century three-storey tower in the Longthorpe area of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England. It is famous for its well-preserved set of medieval murals.
Details Longthorpe tower is located in the village of Longthorpe, now a residential area of Peterborough in the United Kingdom, about two miles (3 km) to the west of the city centre. At the start of the 14th century, Robert Thorpe built the tower as an extension to an existing fortified manor house.
Thorpe had worked his way to relative wealth through the local Peterborough Abbey, and the tower may have been something of a status symbol.Pettifer, p.167; Pounds, p.284
The tower has three stories, and the first floor was originally designed as a living space for Thorpe.Pounds, p.284
The tower is best known for its English medieval wall paintings, carried out around 1330.Emery, p.475 The paintings show religious, secular and moral themes and the quality is comparatively good for a provincial work.Pettifer, p.167; Emery, p.475 The paintings were whitewashed over around the time of the Reformation and remained hidden until their rediscovery in the 1940s.Pettifer, p.167 Historian Clive Rouse considers that "no comparable scheme...of such completeness and of such early date exists in England".Pounds, p.284
The property is now owned by English Heritage and is a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Monument protected by law.
See also Castles in Great Britain and Ireland List of castles in England Thorpe Hall
References
Bibliography Emery, Anthony. (2006) Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500: Southern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . Pettifer, Adrian. (2002) English Castles: a Guide by Counties. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. . Pounds, Norman John Greville. (1994) The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: a social and political history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
Further reading
Books
Salter, Mike, 2001, The Castles of East Anglia (Malvern) p. 21 Taylor, Alison, 1986, Castles of Cambridgeshire (Cambridge) King, D.J.C., 1983, Castellarium Anglicanum (London: Kraus) Vol. 2 pp. 319–20 Fry, P.S., 1980, Castles of the British Isles (David and Charles) p. 256 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 1961, Buildings of England: Northamptonshire (Penguin) pp. 284–5 Downman, E.A., 1906, in Serjeantson, R.M., Ryland, W. and Adkins, D. (eds), VCH Northampton Vol. 2 pp. 456–7, 459 Turner, T. H., 1851, Some account of Domestic Architecture in England (Oxford) Vol. 1 p. 153
Journal articles Casagrande, Gino and Kleinhenz, Christopher, 1985, 'Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Wheel of the Five Senses in Longthorpe Tower' Traditio Vol. 41 p. 311-27 [Fletcher], 1969, Medieval Archaeology Vol. 13 p. 273 Rouse, E.Clive and Baker, Audley, 1955, 'The wall-paintings at Longthorpe Tower' Archaeologia Vol. 96 pp. 1–57 Country Life Vol. 101 p. 604 Yun, Bee, 2007, 'A Visual Mirror of Princes: The Wheel on the Mural of Longthorpe Tower' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 70 pp. 1–32
Guidebooks 2001, Longthorpe Tower Cambridgeshire (English Heritage) Rouse, E.Clive, 1949 and 1987, Longthorpe Tower (HMSO)
External links English Heritage site