Elizabeth Craven, Coombe Abbey and the Gothic Tradition
Soon after Elizabeth Berkeley married William Craven in 1767 he inherited the title of Lord Craven and this ancestral home, Coombe Abbey, near Coventry in Warwickshire. This tinted drawing taken from the South side was published in 1810, by which time Elizabeth Craven's son had inherited Coombe Abbey. The house stood in a beautiful deer park, part of which still exists. This much earlier drawing done by Daniel King in 1656 shows the structure and layout of the building very clearly. Coombe Abbey was, like so many English aristocratic country houses, constructed out of the ruins of a pre-Reformation monastery. The Gothic cloister of the original monastery is still clearly visible in the central quadrangle of the building. The pointed arches of the windows and regular pattern of vaulting from an original covered walkway resemble what you would see in a convent in Italy or in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges today. The Tudor additions make the buil...