British Country Houses, Gardens, and Castles: Home

Keep variant spellings in mind when searching Orbis and the library databases.

Putting a search term in quotation marks; e.g., "Robert Adam", will search that exact term.

Consider using alternate search terms such as:

"Abbey", "Castle", "Court", "Fort" "Hall", "House", "Manor", "Palace", "Park", "Place", "Tower"

Truncate your searches if possible. If you use truncation, which almost every index allows (look to see if it is *, #, ?, or some other symbol), you will gather more results and save searching time. For example, searching feudal* searches two terms at once: feudal and feudalism.

What this is

This page is intended to guide users through the resources needed to study British Castles, Country Houses and Gardens. The tabs at the top of this guide help to navigate the primary and secondary sources essential to the study of these historic structures. There are also tabs that pertain to specific topics of study.

The Yale Center for British Art, which holds the richest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, has a unique collection of primary and secondary resource information and this guide includes specific tabs devoted to accessing and researching the collections of the Center.

Who we are

Kraig Binkowski
Chief Librarian, Reference Library and Archives

The Reference Library and Archives are located on the second floor of the Center, 1080 Chapel Street. We are open to the public and an appointment is not needed to use the collections. The Library is non-circulating and holds materials in a variety of formats supporting the study of British art and culture, with a focus on British art of the 17th century to the present and is ideally positioned to facilitate research in British history of art.

The Reference Collections are now accessible alongside the art collections of the Center. From the Center's newly designed website, the all collection search function brings relevant reference materials together with works of art from the collection. 

Additionally, the entire holdings of the Reference Library are represented in Orbis, Yale's online catalogue. In this manner, the Reference Library collections can be accessed in relation to the wide breadth of all the library collections at Yale.