Early Houses (_Cont._)
For many centuries the houses of the villeins and cottiers did not
alter very much in their general plan. You will remember that in
those old pit-dwellings the hearth and its fire were the centre
of the home. The room, or space round the fire, gradually became
larger, especially in the houses of the thanes and eorls, till we
get the hall, with the hearth in the middle and the hole in the
roof to let out the smoke.
All through the later Saxon and Danish times, and in the Norman
period, the hall was the most important part of the house. As
the years went on, and the style of building altered, the walls,
the windows, and the roof became more beautiful and ornamental,
becoming most magnificent in the fourteenth century, or Decorated
Period. Gradually other buildings were added to the hall for
comfort and convenience.
[Illustration: _Diagram of the Shape of a Villein's House_]
So far as we know, the house or hut of the villein was a very
simple affair before the time of the Norman Conquest. Two pairs of
poles were set up, sloped, and joined at the top, and connected by
a ridge pole as shown in the illustration. The space between was
then filled in by other poles and wattle-work. This was plastered
with clay, and covered with turf or rough thatch. There seems to
have been a pretty regular length for this building, which was long
enough to take four stalls for oxen. That required about sixteen
feet and was called a "bay". The villein and his oxen were all
housed under one roof at first. When another bay was added, the
size of the house was doubled, and so on. In the course of time the
houses were improved; side walls were raised of wood framing, and
the sides were filled in with wattle and covered with clay.
[Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, HATFIELD
[See page 71]]
As the years went on, these houses or huts grew out of date, and
were replaced by others in much the same style, but gradually
improving in comfort and workmanship. In the villages there was
not much alteration down to the fourteenth century. When a house
in a manor or village was pulled down, and was to be rebuilt, the
manor court kept a sharp eye upon the building operations to see
that the new walls did not encroach upon the highway, or upon the
lord's land. No addition could be made to the house without the
consent of the overlord. Customs in the villages changed very, very
slowly, and so it is that, though the houses in out-of-the-way
villages have been rebuilt over and over again, there are many
lath-and-plaster houses standing now round village greens, built
between two and three hundred years ago, on old foundations which
date back to Saxon times.
We gave as an instance on p. 26 the case of Exton, in Rutland.
There the houses even to-day, in spite of the fact that they
have often been rebuilt and somewhat modified in the course of
centuries, occupy the same sites as they did in Saxon times. No
one would dream of laying out a village on those lines to-day, and
in the great changes which we know are greatly needed in housing
all over the country, and which are bound to affect every village
in the land more or less and to change the whole aspect of these
old-world villages, it will be well if some _specimens_, at least,
can be preserved to us, so that those yet to come may be able to
see how our ancestors for many generations were housed. But the
health of the people will have to be safeguarded most carefully,
and much of that which is old will have to give place to that which
is new.
[Illustration: _Old House, Cleveland, Yorkshire_
_The remains of a common type of rural dwelling in the Middle
Ages. The wooden frame which supported the steep-pitched roof can
be seen._]
So for many hundreds of years an ordinary village house was, to
our way of thinking, a very wretched, comfortless place. Even as
late as the time of Queen Elizabeth a countryman's house is thus
described:--
"Of one bay's breadth, God wot, a silly cote,
Whose thatchèd spars are furred with sluttish soote
A whole inch thick, shining like blackmoor's brows
Through smoke that down the headlesse barrel blows.
At his bed's feete feaden[11] his stallèd teame,
His swine beneath, his pullen[12] o'er the beam."
[11] _feaden_, that is, feed.
[12] _pullen_, that is, poultry.