Brympton d'Evercy (alternatively Brympton House) is a Grade I listed manor house near Yeovil in the county of Somerset, England. The house has been called the most beautiful of its kind in England; in 1927, Christopher Hussey, near the start of a 50-year career as an architectural authority, termed it "the one which created the greatest impression and summarises so exquisitely English country life qualities."Country Life, Saturday, 7 May 1927. The house has belonged to six families since its construction: the D'Evercys, Stourtons, Sydenhams, Fanes, Weeks (1992–2008), and Glossops (since 2008).
History Building was begun by the D'Evercy family about 1220 and proceeded slowly into the 18th century. For 750 years it remained little known or recorded. For a few years after the Second World War it held a boys' school, before being reclaimed by its owners as a private house. This it remains, although it is occasionally hired out as a location for filming or a hospitality event.
The complex of buildings consists of the mansion, its stables and other outbuildings, the parish church and a puzzling building known as the Priest House. Little remains of the original D'Evercy manor built between 1220 and 1325, as the present house has evolved on the same site.
Brympton d'Evercy was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Brunetone, meaning "brown enclosure", from the Old English brun and tun.
The village of Brympton is larger today than at any time in its history. Until the 20th century, it barely qualified as a village, having been largely deserted in the 14th century. Its few cottages were scattered along the drive to the secluded mansion, a few of which can be discerned in the view by Knyff (illustrated right). Today a new urban area known as Brympton is a suburb of Yeovil and encroaches on the seclusion of the house.
In Somerset and adjoining Dorset, many such houses as Brympton d'Evercy contain wings in several architectural styles by unrecorded local architects and builders. Their owners were nearly all related to each other in some way, and competition among them was great. As a result, the wings in various houses can be almost identical, having been constructed by the same builder, rather than an architect, using drawings based on the works of the master architects from as far afield as Rome. This applies particularly from the 17th century onwards.
Various owners of Brympton d'Evercy were related to the Stourtons of Preston Plucknett, the Pouletts of Hinton House, the Phelips of Montacute House, and the Strangways of Melbury House. The "county" families not actually akin were usually close friends, so that architectural ideas would be exchanged along with local gossip in frequent visits between them. Before the 17th century, the architect's profession was unknown, Sir John Summerson has observed: all houses were built by local builders following the ideas of their patrons. Inigo Jones, perhaps the first widely noted English architect, introduced Palladian ideals to English architecture: his Banqueting House at Whitehall of 1619 set a standard and was much copied. By the 1630s his ideas had permeated as far as Somerset.
In the grander families, there was generally a Member of Parliament, or as in the case of the Earls of Ilchester, the head of the family kept a London house. These more travelled members of provincial society would return to their Somerset estates and country houses with recent architectural ideas. Occasionally one of the richer county families would employ a renowned architect, such as John Webb, Jones's son-in-law. Born in Somerset, Webb moved to London, but after his cosmopolitan success worked in Dorset at Kingston Lacy – a new mansion, built by the Banks family to replace Corfe Castle, destroyed by Cromwellian troops in the Civil War. At Wilton House in neighbouring Wiltshire, Inigo Jones himself is believed to have put much into the design.
Once introduced into Somerset practice, the new genres of architecture were interpreted by local draughtsmen and masons, then applied, often haphazardly, to the old houses of the local gentry. In this way Brympton d'Evercy and its neighbours slowly evolved.
Architectural appraisal
For 250 years from 1434, the Sydenham family slowly created Brympton d'Evercy as it appears today. Each generation enlarged and altered the house according to whim or current fashion. The -long west front (shown at the top of the page) was built in the late Tudor period. Two large windows on either side of the door provide light for the double-height Great Hall, which was much increased in size by the new west front. The older north wing adjacent to the great hall probably contained the private rooms of its builder, John Sydenham.
The architecture of the house is as diverse as the people who influenced its appearance over 400 years. It is built entirely of the same local, golden-yellow hamstone found only in the buildings of a few villages close to Yeovil.
For the first few years of ownership, the Sydenhams appear content with the way it was when purchased from d'Evercy heirs. However, considerations of privacy and comfort that spread in English domestic architecture from the mid-15th century began to be applied, if only for the immediate family of the head of household. These are reflected at Brympton d'Evercy in the first major building works of the Sydenhams in 1460.
The 1460 wing This first expansion of the original d'Evercy house, probably on the site of the present staircase hall ("K" on plan), occurred in 1460, when the Sydenhams added the south-west block ("B" on plan). This held the house's first reception rooms other than the hall, consisting of a solar and retiring or withdrawing rooms for the lord of the manor and his family. Until then the whole household would have lived and dined together in the hall. This wing has been much altered, having been given a new window arrangement in the 17th century, when the south wing was built. However, it retains its original mock battlements, which betray its age, as does a slight irregularity in the placements of the windows, compared to the perfect symmetry of the adjoining, later south wing.
The Priest House
In the late 15th century, a free-standing earlier structure (marked "E" on plan) was much enhanced; it flanks the mansion almost as though it were a wing of the house itself. Its origins and uses have long been debated. Possibly this was the chantry said to have been built by the D'Evercy family. Though it is known traditionally as the Priest House, its entrance faces away from the church, into the former forecourt of the 15th-century house. According to one account, "It may originally have been a range of lodgings for retainers or guests."Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480–1680 (1999), p. 258 . Whatever its original use, it seems certain that it was remade as a dower house by Joan Stourton, who had married John Sydenham in 1434, not realising that her own son would predecease her, so allowing her to remain in the main house for the rest of her life.
The building is a rare example of a complete small medieval country house, an oblong structure on two floors, the upper containing a hall, solar and bedroom, while the lower for servants had no internal means of reaching the upper floor, to which access was obtained by a newel staircase in a turret opening outside. The house, obviously designed for a person of refinement, had unusually good sanitation in the form of two garderobes; the wooden chutes were still in existence in the early 20th century. The siting of the garderobes here facing the church reinforces the idea that this was the rear of the house; no such arrangement would have been made if this were truly the Priest's House. In the 17th century its principal room on the upper storey was given a decorative plaster ceiling.
Upstairs is a tessellated Roman pavement of blue lias limestone and red tile. This was excavated in 1923 by Ralegh Radford from a building near Westland Road in Yeovil.
The North or Henry VIII wing The next major addition to the house was the north wing ("C" on plan). Its turret, oriels and external sculpted moulding make it almost a miniature country house in itself. This wing has remained largely unchanged since it was built about 1520.Nicholas Cooper dates this wing to 1534. However, 1534 was when John Sydenham made the house over to his son, and document detailing the gift mentions the already completed wing as "the nether parlour and the two chambers over". Christopher Hussey dates the wing to about 1520. John Sydenham wished to retain an independent lodging at the house after its handover. He built for himself three floors with a room on each, its own external entrance and staircase turret – a house within a house. Architecturally it must have been strikingly modern at the time. The façade is richly ornamented with coats-of-arms and tracery. The roof line is castellated, the battlements purely for ornament, not defence. The two upper floors have large oriel windows; between these is the finely sculpted the coat of arms of King Henry VIII. This the Sydenhams were permitted displaying due to their relationship to the Stourton family, who claimed connections with the blood royal. Thus this part of the house is sometimes called the Henry VIII wing, though the King never visited. Of all the house's varied wings, this north is probably the most architecturally accomplished, displaying the most up-to-date traits and flamboyance of contemporary Tudor architecture.
West Front
The central section of the west front contains on the ground floor the hall (marked "A" on the plan); the rear section of the hall almost certainly was once the great hall of the original smaller d'Evercy manor rebuilt by the Sydenhams in 1450. The great hall, though, did not achieve its present size until the building of the west front ("F" on plan) in the late 16th century. The new front projects further forward than the previous, so that the older turret of the north wing became less obvious, as three-quarters of its mass was absorbed into the enlarged hall. The west front has two large mullioned double-height windows flanking the principal entrance. The present glazed Gothick castellated porch (G on plan) was added in 1722, when the existing 15th-century porch was moved into the garden, given an extra storey and transformed into a clock tower ("H" on plan). The hall's central open fire, was replaced by a fireplace complete with chimney, so that it became possible to place a second floor above the hall.
The kitchen wing The next major addition, still in 16th century, was the kitchen block ("O" on plan), notable for its huge proportions and barrel vaulted roof, suggesting an original function less humble than a kitchen. The kitchen is on two levels, the upper reached by a flight of short steps from the lower at each side of its width, yet the space does not appear ever to have been divided. From the kitchen range projects a turret (on the right hand between O and K on the plan) containing a spiral staircase, crowned by a belfry. This would have originally given a second access to the upper floor of the original house, now replaced by the Palladian south wing. From the kitchen stretches another wing ("P" on plan) of indeterminate date (no later than 1690). This seems always to have been known as the Farmhouse and inhabited by the family of the home-farm tenant. It may possibly have been intended as a secondary or service wing, or even part of a grander, never-completed scheme.
South Front and wing