Milton's Cottage
Encyclopedia
Milton's Cottage is a timber framed
Timber framing
Timber framing , or half-timbering, also called in North America "post-and-beam" construction, is the method of creating structures using heavy squared off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden pegs . It is commonplace in large barns...

 16th century building located in the Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....

 village of Chalfont St Giles
Chalfont St Giles
Chalfont St Giles is a village and civil parish within Chiltern district in south east Buckinghamshire, England, on the edge of the Chilterns, 25 miles from London, and near Seer Green, Jordans, Chalfont St Peter, Little Chalfont and Amersham....

.

In 1665 John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 and his wife, moved into the cottage to escape the Plague
Great Plague of London
The Great Plague was a massive outbreak of disease in the Kingdom of England that killed an estimated 100,000 people, 20% of London's population. The disease is identified as bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted through a flea vector...

 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Despite the fact that Milton spent less than a year at the cottage, it is important because of it being his only extant residence. While at the Grade 1 listed sixteenth-century cottage Milton completed his best known work, Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

; the seeds for Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained is a poem by the English poet John Milton, published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theological themes...

 were also sown here. Milton's friend Thomas Ellwood
Thomas Ellwood
Thomas Ellwood was an English religious writer.He was born in Oxfordshire, the son of a rural squire. Educated at Lord Williams's School, he later joined the Quakers and became a friend of William Penn and John Milton. However, he was persecuted for his faith and spent some time in prison. His...

called the cottage "that pretty box in St. Giles".

The ground floor of the cottage is now a museum dedicated to Milton and his works. The four museum rooms contain the most extensive collection in the world on open display of 17th Century first editions of John Milton's works, both poetry and prose. Tours vividly describe and explore the extraordinary career of this blind genius in his refuge from the plague, where he wrote some of the finest poetry. The thoughts of John Milton and the diverse nature of his published works are the evidence that demonstrates why he leaves such an enduring legacy.

The cottage's garden is also open to the public and is planted in a traditional style.

Royal Interest

Queen Victoria opened the subscription list for the purchase of the Cottage in 1887. The Cottage and garden have been honoured by visits from Her Majesty the Queen, Her Late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Her Late Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret Countess of Snowdon; and His Royal Highness, the Duke of Gloucester on separate occasions. To celebrate the quatercentenary of Milton's birth in 2008, Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall also visited.

External links



John Milton Links
  • http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/milton/index.html -Luminarium
  • http://www.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/ - Milton Review
  • John Milton Reading Room
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