Longthorpe Tower

Longthorpe Tower is a 14th-century three-storey tower in the village of Longthorpe, famous for its well-preserved set of medieval murals.

Details
Longthorpe tower is located in the village of Longthorpe, now a residential area of Peterborough in the United Kingdom, about two miles (3 km) to the west of the city centre. At the start of the 14th century, Robert Thorpe built the tower an extension to an existing fortified manor house; Thorpe had worked his way to relative wealth through the local Peterborough Abbey, and the tower may have been something of a status symbol. The tower has three stories, and the first floor was originally designed as living space for Thorpe.

The tower is best known for its English medieval wall paintings, carried out around 1330. The paintings show religious, secular and moral themes and the quality is comparatively good for a provincial work. The paintings were whitewashed over around the time of the Reformation and remained hidden until their rediscovery in the 1940s. Historian Clive Rouse considers that "no comparable scheme...of such completeness and of such early date exists in England".

The property is now owned by English Heritage and is a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Monument protected by law.

Books

 * Salter, Mike, 2001, The Castles of East Anglia (Malvern) p21
 * Taylor, Alison, 1986, Castles of Cambridgeshire (Cambridge)
 * King, D.J.C., 1983, Castellarium Anglicanum (London: Kraus) Vol2 p319-20
 * Fry, P.S., 1980, Castles of the British Isles (David and Charles) p256
 * Pevsner, Nikolaus, 1961, Buildings of England: Northamptonshire (Penguin) p284-5
 * Downman, E.A., 1906, in Serjeantson, R.M., Ryland, W. and Adkins, D. (eds), VCH Northampton Vol2 p456-7, 459
 * Turner, T. H., 1851, Some account of Domestic Architecture in England (Oxford) Vol1 p153

Journal articles

 * Casagrande, Gino and Kleinhenz, Christopher, 1985, 'Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Wheel of the Five Senses in Longthorpe Tower' Traditio Vol41 p311-27
 * [Fletcher], 1969, Medieval Archaeology Vol13 p273
 * Rouse, E.Clive and Baker, Audley, 1955, 'The wall-paintings at Longthorpe Tower' Archaeologia Vol96 pp1–57
 * Country Life Vol101 p604
 * Yun, Bee, 2007, 'A Visual Mirror of Princes: The Wheel on the Mural of Longthorpe Tower' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol70 pp1–32

Guidebooks

 * 2001, Longthorpe Tower Cambridgeshire (English Heritage)
 * Rouse, E.Clive, 1949 and 1987, Longthorpe Tower (HMSO)