St Fagans Castle: its Architectural and Landscape History

Abstract

This thesis is a study of an Elizabethan manor house called ‘St Fagans Castle’ on the outskirts of Cardiff, with a particular emphasis on its architectural and landscape history. St Fagans Castle was built circa 1569-80 by a gentleman-lawyer named Dr John Gibbon (d.1581). Through primary analysis of the building fabric, this thesis extracts a number of possible encoded meanings or ‘translations’ from its design. As one of the first Renaissance-influenced houses in Glamorgan and the whole of Wales, St Fagans is a useful case study for considering the impact of the Italian Renaissance on gentry houses in Wales in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Shortly after its completion, St Fagans Castle passed to two powerful local families in quick succession, the Herberts of Swansea in 1596 and the Lewises of Y Fan in 1616.

In 1736 St Fagans Castle came into the possession of the Windsor (later Windsor-Clive) family, the Earls of Plymouth, whose ownership continued uninterrupted until the mid-twentieth century. The fact that St Fagans was absorbed into their compositive, multi-national landholdings allows this thesis to explore such themes as absenteeism, the movement of money across estates, and colonialism. Four women feature prominently in the history of St Fagans, each of whom put their own distinctive ‘stamp’ on the house and gardens, and the broader question of how gentlewomen shaped gentry houses in the Welsh sphere is therefore considered.

This thesis contributes to recent discourse on whether there is anything architecturally distinctive about the Welsh gentry house, especially as compared with the English gentry house. St Fagans is a useful case study for considering this question as it was built shortly after the 1536-43 Act of Union between England and Wales, when Welsh gentry houses are deemed to have become Anglicised, but it also saw significant architectural and garden additions made in the Jacobean, mid-Victorian, and Edwardian periods. Furthermore, this study looks beyond the ‘estate core’ of house, designed landscape, and estate buildings in the immediate vicinity, devoting considerable sections to St Fagans’ ‘sibling’ houses, with a particular emphasis on Hewell Grange in Worcestershire, the main seat of the Windsor-Clive family, and thereby presents a new model for how further house-specific case studies might be pursued in the future.

In 1946 the house and approximately-100-acre grounds were donated to the National Museum of Wales, who were searching for a suitable site for the establishment of an open-air folk museum. The ‘Welsh Folk Museum’ was formally opened in 1948, with St Fagans Castle and its formal gardens as its central exhibit. Since then, over forty historic buildings have been re-erected on site and the museum has been renamed ‘St Fagans National Museum of History’, but Fagans Castle remains one of the foremost attractions. A comprehensive academic study of this nationally important building is overdue.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Sponsors	James Pantyfedwen Trust & Welsh Historic Gardens Trust
Supervisor	Shaun Evans (Supervisor) & Lowri Ann Rees (Supervisor)