Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster, represents a solution to the problem of how to create a visually unified and consistently decorated interior. It also represents the transformation into architectural form of the tradition of epideictic rhetoric - the elaborate praising of personages of high degree. Furthermore, it was the most important structure built in the early sixteenth century in England. It is surprising, therefore, that little attention has been paid to it by modern scholars.

Professor Lethaby, writing in 1906 and again in 1925, attributed the design of Henry VII’s Chapel to Robert Vertue. More recently, Professor Webb and Mr Harvey have suggested that the vaulting was designed by William Vertue, c. 1510. These attributions to the Vertues are based on the fact, among others, that Robert Vertue was the first named in a list of the King’s three master masons who gave an estimate for a proposed tomb for Henry VII in 1506.

The eighteenth-century church establishment was unromantic about religion. The efforts of its divines, from Archbishop Tillotson onwards, were devoted to proving the good sense and practical virtues of Christianity, not probing its mysteries. The huge medieval churches it had inherited were almost embarrassing in their unsuitability to the worship of that time. Wren had summed up the requirements for a cathedral - ‘a Quire, Consistory, Chapter House, Library, Preaching-auditory’

Four days after the taking of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Charles Villette proposed that henceforth on that day, a ‘national festival’ be held. Between that time and the final official determination of the programme for a festival, various circumstances occurred which made the first 14 July celebration more than a commemoration of the event which began ‘the epoch of our resurrection’. When, in early June 1790, the National Assembly decided in favour of a celebration to take place in Paris on the coming 14 July the occasion was to be a Festival of Federation.

Between 1790 and 1835 more than sixty books illustrating designs for small to moderately large houses were published. All of these, but particularly those devoted entirely or in part to cottage designs, have a particular interest for the historian for the evidence they contain of changing tastes and ideas through this period of social upheaval. While individual designs for such modest buildings are only occasionally remarkable, these books taken as a group give a striking picture of the designer’s intentions, and in some cases a glimpse of his own circumstances as well.

Able architects can often be charming correspondents. This was frequently the case in late Victorian England, and since letters do much to prevent misconceptions and anachronisms creeping into the way that Victorian architecture is thought about and explain the living reality of the conditions under which architects then operated, their publication can be valuable. Since the last war John Brandon-Jones has published three such sets of letters, revealing particularly much of the personalities of Philip Webb and C. F. A. Voysey. This is an attempt to do for Norman Shaw what Mr Brandon-Jones has done for them. The following selection of twenty-three letters is chosen from a large set of transcriptions I have made in connection with a forthcoming biography of Shaw. I have included letters on a variety of subjects and from different periods of his life rather than a coherent group of letters on a single theme, and have tried to avoid more than the slightest overlap with letters to be quoted in the biography. The most significant omission is a pair of letters written to J. D. Sedding in 1882 in which Shaw bewails the state of architecture at length and criticizes his own performances. Throughout the selection I have emended Shaw’s jerky punctuation at will, to make the letters more readable. Two of them (Nos 1 & 10) are abbreviated, the first quite extensively.