The Country House Revealed

Our great country houses.

The most familiar and yet intriguing sights Britain has to offer.

Standing like sentinels in the landscape.

Hundreds of thousands of us visit them every year,

but not all are open to the public.

I've been granted the privileged opportunity

to pass through the portals of six of our greatest country houses

normally hidden from public view.

They've seen five centuries of British history

up close and personal.

The families who built these houses

played their part in great affairs of state.

Central to their dreams, the great house,

the ultimate status symbol,

but all too often also the ultimate money drainer.

Few of these families went the distance,

but their houses did, with their secrets intact.

This is their story, but it's also our story,

for these houses offer a guided tour of our nation's hidden history.

Ripped By mstoll

Back in the Middle Ages, it would have been madness

to build anything so fanciful, so ostentatious,

so open to attack as a beautiful, undefended country house.

They owe their birth to two primal forces,

peace after decades of war

and to the all too human desire to show off.

It began in England 500 years ago.

Country houses were a creation of the Tudor age,

taking root across the landscape.

I'm on my way to explore one of the earliest.

South Wraxall Manor.

This house and the power hungry family that built it, the Longs of Wiltshire,

brutally embodied the spirit of late medieval and Tudor England.

Ruthless opportunism, new money, social climbing.

This really is one of England's most special and secret homes.

It didn't just spring into the world fully formed as you see it today.

Its origins lie in this early 15th century Great Hall

with its projecting porch

and then, over the next 180 years or so, the house grew

to reflect the expanding fortunes of the Long family.

Beginning as a kind of medieval starter home,

just a few small rooms clustered round a central hall,

South Wraxall blossomed into one of the most beautiful homes in Wiltshire.

It's a hidden gem, with its lush interiors,

exquisite decoration and a wealth of sumptuous fireplaces,

all perfectly preserved through the centuries.

But Wraxall also stands as a monument

to Long family's ruthless rise to the top.

The simple country folk who reinvented themselves

as a hardnosed dynasty of national statesmen.

The house was an extension of their personality.

Ostentatious but brutal and determined.

Its beauty marks a darker tale of violence, even murder.

A darkness hinted at above the front door itself.

Up there on the oldest part of the house is a startling series of gargoyles.

One shows a beast, a lion or a dog, devouring a naked man head first.

Another shows a man being devoured feet first, or perhaps vomited up.

What can these mean?

Are they warnings? Or are they declarations of intent?

Wraxall's hideous beasts seem to be saying to all who approach,

"Don't mess with me."

These terrifying gargoyles were probably the brainchild of Robert Long,

the man whose fierce ambition gave birth to this house,

where he ruled as its first lord of the manor.

Oh! This is tremendous. It's like going back in time.

This is a stupendous medieval Great Hall,

the beating heart of the home.

It's so well preserved. A magnificent relic of our ancient past.

Look, up here there's a terrific traceried window

and then, my word, the roof timbers.

This mighty truss up here,

and between the trusses, these delightful cusped panels.

All of this, of course, was to do more than kept the rain out.

It was to be seen and admired,

to express status, taste and power.

This is very much a medieval design statement.

A statement of Robert Long's enormous egotism and drive,

for he was both a new moneyed hotshot lawyer and a Wiltshire MP,

the first of over 70 Longs who made their way into Parliament.

On high days and holidays,

he would have wined and dined distinguished guests here,

holding court in his own private fiefdom.

In the centre of the hall, just about here,

would have been originally a roaring open fire

with the smoke curling up past the roof timbers

and leaving through a hole right up there.

People sitting here would have seen, through the smoke, strange beings.

Now, in the church of this period,

those beings would most likely have been angels

but here, they're smirking

impish, apes or monkeys.

Seems to me there's an anti-clerical joke going on here,

because in that corner is a carving of a monk.

So there's a pun, monks are monkeys and monkeys are monks.

Long clearly had a wicked sense of humour.

But it wasn't just Robert Long's sense of humour that was wicked.

The story of Wraxall and the relentless rise of the Long dynasty

is a tale of generations of double crossing and dodgy dealing.

Here, you've a copy of the Longs' family tree,

compiled in the 17th century.

At the top is Robert Long,

who died in 1446,

but of course families do not spring from nowhere

and we now understand that Robert Long's father was a chap called Long Thomas,

a man embroiled in the rustling of livestock.

So clearly at this stage in the 15th century,

the Longs have a rather chequered history.

More detail is provided by the history of Parliament.

Robert Long, "The founder of an important Wiltshire family."

Oh, he was apparently of quite lowly origins

and Robert was set up by one of the old Lords Hungerford,

a big local family

and, indeed, through his connection he became wealthy,

he became a man of prestige and a man of power in his own right.

Of course, we know that he used that power, when he felt like it,

in a very unscrupulous manner.

Says that here as well, he was abusive.

He could fleece clients of their fees. So there we have it.

This beautiful house founded on fortune

made in the most corrupt manner by a most conniving fellow.

But don't just take my word for it.

To get a bigger understanding of how this combative,

upwardly mobile family forced its way to the top,

I'm off to meet one of their modern descendents, Sara Morrison.

Well, we are surrounded by portraits of generations of Longs.

What do you think it meant for them, South Wraxall?

Their background is, well, shall we say chequered?

What do you know about that?

Well, it always struck me

when one heard, probably, apocryphal stories as a child,

that they were the most frightful cads

and probably quite classy thieves, cattle thieves in particular.

I think that's rather an honourable origin.

I mean, that's a perfectly good learning curve for any family.

Robber barons have a great history in this country.

I always fancied that the original Long was such a classy cattle thief,

that he was eventually rewarded by being given his pile of grey stones

- called the Manor House. - Yes.

My Long relations still existed when I was a child,

pooh-poohed it 'cause they liked to think

they were more respectable than that, but certainly as a child,

it seemed to me that the right way to start in life

was stealing other people's cows.

And they seem to have been involved

in law

and parliament,

almost professional Members of Parliament.

The perfect beginning for maximum mischief making

on at least a county scale, if not a national scale.

To be lawyers and politicians and hand in glove with local business

is a very good mixture for either making a great deal of money or going to jail

and I should think they probably did both in equal quantities.

But I think all of them had a pretty devious self-serving touch,

most particularly when it came to choosing who they married.

I think they enriched their genes quite profitably,

literally and metaphorically, at almost every stage.

They were efficient breeders, efficient marriers

and efficient

self-serving individuals.

In 1490,

Robert Long's nephew Thomas inherited Wraxall manor.

In a mere 50 years,

the Longs had become contenders in aristocratic circles,

enabling Thomas to marry Margerie, daughter of Sir Geoffrey Darrell,

the wealthy owner of the nearby estate of Draycot.

Wraxall was becoming a showpiece for a family on the make,

hungry for recognition, climbing the social ladder.

Thomas's main contribution to the fabric of South Wraxall

is this splendid symbolic gatehouse.

It is very much tangible evidence of the new luxuries and freedoms

of the English country house

and very different to gatehouses of earlier periods,

which are serious bits of defensive architecture,

with battlements, moats and watchtowers.

His gatehouse was a reflection of the huge changes of English society,

brought about by Henry VII's reign and the dawn of the Tudor era.

The old Feudal order gave way to peace and prosperity.

No need now for the castellated fortifications of a war-like age.

It was goodbye to the drawbridge, hello to the welcome mat.

So the gatehouse was no longer a place to repel enemies.

It was more of a porter's lodge.

The porter would come here and look through the little squint windows

to see who was coming and report back to the people in the main house.

All, really, I suppose the early, very early 16th century

equivalent to a modern day video surveillance system.

Visitors passing through Thomas's gatehouse

would have been struck by one particular detail.

A carving of a fetterlock,

an ancient padlock used to shackle prisoners.

The fetterlock was the ancestral crest of Draycot,

the estate Thomas eventually inherited through his marriage,

so he just nabbed it as the Long's first badge of honour.

At the time, only high class families could display heraldic devices,

so by putting the fetterlock on the gatehouse,

Thomas was making it clear to all people that the Longs had arrived.

They'd been elevated in stature and grandeur.

Elevated, in fact, into royal circles.

In 1496, Thomas helped Henry VII

to capture the treacherous pretender to the throne, Perkin Warbeck.

He was knighted at the wedding of Prince Arthur,