Altri luoghi di Severus nei libri, Dai libri, interviste, Pottermore e saggi dei fan

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Malfoy Manor (1)

Malfoy Manor - with or without estate and tenant farms - is we are told in Wiltshire. It is referred to generally as "the manor". The gates to the grounds of the manor house are wrought iron in (usually) a curling, abstract design. They let onto one side of a country lane which has a high, neatly-trimmed yew hedge on the Malfoy side and rather wild brambles and overhanging trees on the other. The hedges curl inwards to edge a long, wide, straight, gravel-floored driveway leading up to the house, and seem to be flat-topped - peacocks walk about on top of them. Beyond the hedge there is a garden with a fountain, big enough to be quite audible.

The house itself is described as "handsome" but the downstairs windows have diamond panes - if these aren't original then they are the very height of naffness. We are nowhere told that the house is particularly large, as manor houses go: the word "mansion" implies a house of some size, but the Prophet may be exaggerating for dramatic effect. Broad stone steps lead up to a large, stone-floored hallway, richly and expensively decorated and carpeted, and lined with pale-faced presumably ancestral portraits. A heavy wooden door with a bronze handle leads to "the next room" which suggests the layout of the ground floor isn't very complex.

This "next room" is a wide drawing room with dark purple walls bearing more portraits. There is an ornate marble fireplace which has a very large, twiddly gilded mirror over it, and a chandelier of crystal and chains - not an especially big one, since it lands on Hermione and Griphook and doesn't do them much damage.

Despite the reputation of Malfoy Manor in fanfiction, there evidently isn't a dungeon on the premises. We know Ollivander is a prisoner there for months - he's heard being tortured downstairs in a scene set during July and is still there the following Easter - yet he, and Luna, are being kept in an ordinary cellar: one which evidently has a small window, since once Harry's eyes have adjusted he is able to make out shadowy figures. This cellar is directly under the drawing room, and it sounds as though it, or an annexe of it, doubles as the secret chamber under the drawing-room floor where the Malfoys hide stuff they don't want the Ministry to know about.

We also know that the Dark Lord has complained before about having his torture-victim making noises underneath the meeting room, yet Ollivander hasn't been moved to another underground room, which suggests there isn't one. You would expect there to be basement rooms more or less all the way underneath the old part of the house, yet there seems to be a cellar or cellars only under the drawing room - so although it's not absolute, it sounds as though the drawing room occupies most of the ground floor and Malfoy Manor really isn't very large. It has at least two large, handsome rooms, but probably not all that many rooms: when you take into account that a manor house would usually be only two or three storeys (plus cellars), the Malfoys probably have less living space than the Weasleys.

This is supported by the fact that we never definitely see any room at Malfoy Manor mentioned except for the hall, drawing room and cellar. The long, firelit room where Draco was compelled to torture Rowle might or might not be the drawing room but the large room (big enough for quite a large gathering to kneel around their lord) opening off the hall, where Voldemort had his hissy fit and killed several followers after he learned that the Hufflepuff cup had been stolen, probably is.

18thC facade of Iford Manor © Phil Williams at Geograph

Edited by Ida59 - 10/5/2019, 19:03

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Malfoy Manor (2)

How old is Malfoy Manor? According to Pottermore the Malfoys came over with William the Conqueror and were given their core piece of land in Wiltshire at that time, later adding to it and forming a manor by buying up neighbouring Muggle lands. So the current manor house, or a previous building on the same site, has been in the family for a thousand years.

They are said to be one of the richest wizarding families (how rich is that?), which sits oddly with Yaxley's comment that the peacocks show Lucius is "doing himself well", which rather suggests that the Malfoys have come up in the world, fairly recently. Perhaps they went through a thin patch - they might well, like many landowning families, have suffered a period in the 19th or 20th C when they were "land rich but cash poor", when their lands weren't bringing in much rent and they had no actual spending money unless they sold off part of their inheritance. [At its most extreme, one of my Victorian relatives in Ireland was a major local landlord in County Kerry who ended up going into the workhouse to save himself from starvation, because a political dispute meant that his tenants weren't paying their rent, and nobody would buy the land from him if it wasn't bringing in rent.]

Pottermore calls the Malfoys one of "many other progenitors of noble English families" but the evidence suggests that while they are landed gentry, "society", they aren't aristocracy. There's no mention of any of them having a title, and according to Pottermore they made their money through financial wheeler-dealing and trading in Muggle stocks, not through being granted extra lands in return for good service over the centuries. And even as landed gentry, they weren't all "gentlemen" - at least one of Lucius's direct male ancestors was in trade (newspapers) in the seventeenth century.

Their snooty manner also suggests they are upper middle class with pretensions. There's a saying about class here in Britain that "The people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter" - and the Malfoys mind about class far too much to actually have any.

Nevertheless, owning a very old house does confer social cachet, and the manor house may be very old, if not quite as old as their possession of the land it stands on. The current house could be at least partly ancient, or they could have pulled down the original and replaced it with a new build at some point, as so many wealthy families have done over the centuries. The decor in the drawing room, with the marble fireplace and the twiddly mirror, sounds eighteenth century or even Victorian, but the rather simple plan, the diamond panes (if they are original and not fake) and the presence of house-elves make it sound a lot older than that.

Tudor side view of Iford Manor © David Anstiss at Geograph

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Malfoy Manor (3)

The way the big drawing room is spoken of as if it is the only room off the hall, and the corridor which leads to the cellars is accessed by going through the drawing room, may mean that this was once a Mediaeval-style hall house with only one huge room plus vestibule on the ground floor, in which case the diamond-paned windows would be authentic. Some eighteenth century houses were also built with only a few rooms on the ground floor of the main block: for example Road Hill (now Langham) House, a Georgian country house in Wiltshire which was the scene of a notorious Victorian murder, consists of a square three-storey house the ground floor of which is almost entirely taken up by the entrance hall, a medium-sized drawing room, a library and the foot of the main stair, and then the dining room and the kitchen, laundry etc. form an adjacent single-storey extension with a door off the hall, and which wraps around the right side and part of the back of the main block. Iford Manor (see below), also in Wiltshire, a Tudor house which was extensively re-worked and given a new facade in the eighteenth century, has a similar-looking though smaller extension which may well house a dining room.
So, whether Malfoy Manor is a genuinely Mediaeval or Tudor house which was re-worked and re-decorated in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, or an eighteenth or nineteenth century house fitted with fake Mediaeval windows, either way it probably has a main building consisting of two or three above-ground storeys with very few but large rooms on the ground floor (and only the one cellar under that main block), and then the dining room, kitchen and other work-rooms in a single-storey block at the side. The stair down to the cellar is probably part of the main block: the bottom end of a small back stair intended for use by servants living in the attic. The hallway lets onto the drawing room and the front stairs and probably nothing else; then there is another door from the drawing room onto a corridor which gives access to the kitchen/dining-room block, as well as to the steps down to the cellar. You would expect there to be at least a small library, but the way the drawing room is described as "the next room", as if the hall leads to the drawing room and nowhere else, probably means that the library too is accessed through the drawing room.

There do not seem to be very many manors in Wiltshire - it's really not manor territory - but it's possible Malfoy Manor was at least partially modelled on Iford Manor, which has a famously beautiful early twentieth century Italianate garden called the Peto Garden. Of course, the details are different - Iford Manor has a Georgian front and a Tudor back, whereas Malfoy Manor seems to have a partially Tudor or even Mediaeval exterior and a Georgian interior. But whether it's the model for Malfoy Manor or a happy coincidence, Iford gives us something to work from when envisioning the Malfoys' probably-not-all-that-big, mixed-period Wiltshire manor house, complete with single-storey extension.

Gates leading to Iford Manor, by Nabakov at Wikipedia