Baddesley Clinton: Architectural: Responses to Social Circumstances

In 2002, the National Trust commissioned a detailed survey of the timberwork of the moated manor house at Baddesley Clinton, coupled with an extensive dendrochronology programme. The results have radically revised our understanding of the house and of the way that its complex development reflects the changing circumstances and social expectations of its occupiers from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. The integration of documentary sources, structural analysis and tree-ring dating has enabled the house to be portrayed as the product of a quest for greater comfort and privacy, of social responses to changing family circumstances and of the exercise of dower rights by widows, resulting in several periods of joint occupancy.