THE COURSE OF MEDIÆVAL BUILDING IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
The king, of course, may be supposed to have had unlimited means at his
disposal for the improvement of his houses, and to have been better
able than less exalted personages to gratify his wishes; but his
subjects were also actuated by the same desires, and an examination
of the large houses of the fourteenth century shows a considerable
advance in the provision of rooms for special purposes, and indicates
that the old restricted accommodation was no longer sufficient for the
changing habits of the time. This expansion of the house was general,
and was not confined to any particular district. To mention a few
instances, there are in the North Alnwick Castle, built by the Percys
about 1340, of which all but the external walls has been modernised;
and Raby Castle, the home of the Nevills, Earls of Westmorland, built
about 1378, also largely modernised. In the Midlands are Kenilworth
Castle, almost rebuilt by John of Gaunt in the closing years of the
fourteenth century; Warwick Castle, also almost entirely rebuilt by
Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a few years earlier; Broughton
Castle in Oxfordshire, built by the De Broughtons about the beginning
of the fourteenth century; Drayton House in Northamptonshire, by Simon
de Drayton in 1328; and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, where the greater
part of the work is of this period. In the South is Penshurst Place for
which a licence to crenellate was granted to John de Pulteney in 1341.
The smaller houses of this period do not, of course, show such
extensive improvements as the large places just mentioned, nevertheless
in them may be seen the same tendency towards greater civilisation.
Even in the far North, where the disturbed state of the Border retarded
the development of household comfort, we have the commodious house of
Naworth in Cumberland, and the smaller house of Yanwath in Westmorland.
In Yorkshire is Markenfield Hall; in Cheshire, Baguley, of which little
besides its timber hall is left; in Northamptonshire the small but
fine house at Northborough; in Berkshire is Sutton Courtney, so much
altered, however, as to have lost its original character; while in
Somerset is the very curious “Castle” of Nunney, where the rooms are
placed over each other more after the fashion of the earlier keeps than
of the long and low manor houses which were by this time the prevailing
type.
In all these houses the hall was still the chief apartment, but it is
supplemented by more subsidiary rooms than are to be found in earlier
examples. The references in contemporary literature and documents
are not numerous, but we have already seen that at Oakham in the
Inquisition of 1340 the house consisted of a hall, four chambers, and
a kitchen. If we turn to Chaucer, who lived during a large part of
the fourteenth century, dying in 1400, we find in the few incidental
references to domestic arrangements which occur that the hall was by
far the most important room, although it had “chambers” and a “bower”
to supplement it.
It is perhaps from the “Cook’s Tale of Gamelyn” that the best idea of
a house may be gained, with its gatehouse, courtyard, and turreted
hall. He tells us how his muscular hero Gamelyn, the prototype of
Shakespeare’s Orlando, came with his friends to his ancestral home,
held by his false brother, and how the gate was shut and locked against
them by the porter, who resolutely refused them admission to the
courtyard. Gamelyn, however, smote the wicket with his foot, broke the
pin and effected an entrance. The porter he chased across the yard,
broke his neck and threw him into a well. He and his friends then made
merry with the brother’s meat and wine, while the latter hid himself
in a “little turret,” for which we owe him our thanks, as showing that
such features had a use. Meanwhile the gate had been flung open to
admit all who cared to go in “or ride,” a touch which brings home to us
the fact that hardly any of these gatehouses were wide enough to admit
wheeled vehicles, which of course were somewhat rare in those days;
the entrances were contrived only for foot passengers and horsemen.
Presently the fortunes of the day changed, Gamelyn was overpowered and
bound to a post in the hall, and the false brother emerged from the
“selleer” (solar) to taunt him. For two days and nights Gamelyn stood
bound without meat or drink, but then, thinking he had fasted too long,
he besought Adam the “spencer” to free him. Adam hesitated to let him
go out of “this bour,” but ultimately consented, and took him into
the “spence” and gave him supper. The spence was the pantry, and the
spencer the presiding genius of that place. It would be beside the mark
to enter into the details of Gamelyn’s further adventures, suffice it
to say that by Adam’s advice he let himself appear to be still bound
to the post; the hall presently filled with his brother’s guests who
cast their eyes on the captive as they came in “at hall door.” At a
preconcerted signal, Gamelyn and Adam possessed themselves of some
stout cudgels which the good spencer had provided, and between them
they cudgelled the whole company, taking especial delight in dealing
with the “men of holy Church.”
This glimpse into a fourteenth-century mansion is the longest which
Chaucer vouchsafes; we read elsewhere of “halls, chambers, kitchens,
and bowers,” and the “chamber” is occasionally mentioned as the
alternative room to the hall so far as the owner and his wife are
concerned. The difference between a “bower” and a “chamber” does not
emerge very clearly. Adam, as we have seen, speaks of the hall as
“this bour,” but as a rule the term is applied to a room in order
to distinguish it from that apartment. It seems quite clear that to
Chaucer the hall was the chief room, almost synonymous with the house,
the other rooms he mentions being the merest accessories.
The most complete and most interesting house of this period is the
well-known Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. It consists of two courts (Fig.
24), the hall being placed in the wing which divides them. It is thus
protected on both of its long sides and is thereby enabled to have
larger windows than if it had been on an outside wall. The exterior
walls of the earlier parts of Haddon have comparatively few windows
in them, and these of small size; and as the kitchen is one of the
rooms so lighted it is dark, in spite of a larger window inserted
in the sixteenth century, to a degree which horrifies housewives of
the present day. Haddon being built on the slope of a hill could not
be protected by a moat, hence it was more than ever necessary to be
careful about external apertures. Some parts of Haddon are of the
twelfth century, including much of the west wall, portions of the
chapel (at the south-west corner), and the lower parts of the south
and east walls and of the Peverel or Eagle tower; the licence granted
to Richard de Vernon to fortify his house of Haddon with a wall 12
ft. high without crenellations is still preserved. This licence was
granted by John, Earl of Morteigne, who, in 1199, became King John. The
extent of this early work shows that already in the twelfth century
there was a large house here, its area being little less than at the
present day. But during the fourteenth century it was practically
rebuilt on the lines which now remain, inasmuch as work of this period
is to be found over the whole building. The extent of the house, and
particularly the multiplicity of rooms, go to show how vastly the
desire for comfort had increased by this time. Much other work was done
in later years; the chapel was either enlarged or altered, and a range
of rooms was added or rebuilt in the fifteenth century. In the early
part of the sixteenth many of the rooms were embellished and modernised
by Sir George Vernon, “the King of the Peak”; and yet later his
daughter Dorothy and her husband Sir John Manners built the beautiful
long gallery on the top of earlier rooms and laid out the garden with
its picturesque terraces and noble flight of steps.
[Illustration: 24. Plan of Haddon Hall, Derbyshire.]
It is of great interest to see here the work of various hands, and to
realise how, generation after generation, the owners did what they
could to bring their ancient home up to the prevailing standard of
comfort and beauty. But the particular point which is of interest now
is that although much of the existing work is of later date, yet it
is clear that in the fourteenth century Haddon was of almost the same
extent as we see it to-day. Civilisation had taken many strides since
its little neighbour, the Peak Castle, had been built.
It is curious to observe on a plan of the house how much thicker
the external walls are than the internal, and how few windows look
outwards; they nearly all look into the courts, and of those that look
out over the country most are of later date. The plan also shows
very clearly how the disposition of the hall follows the orthodox
lines. It is entered through a porch at the end of one of its sides;
the porch leads into the “screens”; on the right is the hall entered
through a panelled wood screen with two openings. On the left are
three doorways--one to the buttery, one to the kitchen passage, and
the third to the pantry. At the end of the screens is a door leading
into the upper court. The kitchen department is large, rambling, and
ill-lighted, but when the house was in full occupation an enormous
amount of work had to be done here, and doubtless the fire itself
sufficiently supplemented the scanty daylight.
At the upper end of the hall is a range of rooms of two storeys,
devoted to the use of the family; and doubtless in the fourteenth
century it was already of two storeys, although apparently it only
extended at that period from the front or west side of the hall as
far eastwards as to overlap the east side of the upper court. It is
difficult to disentangle these rooms from the additions and alterations
of later years, for in the early part of the sixteenth century the
rooms immediately contiguous to the south end of the hall were
improved, and a new range was built on the top of the curtain wall,
which ran from the hall wing westwards to the chapel. Again, towards
the close of the same century, the long gallery was built over the
ground floor rooms forming the south side of the upper court, and
apparently this wing was prolonged in order to give that extreme length
to the gallery which was so characteristic of Elizabeth’s time. This
prolongation carried the south front beyond the line of the east front,
an arrangement very unlikely to have been adopted while the house was
still fortified.
Another curious and instructive feature is the gallery or gangway which
is carried along the east side of the hall. This is not an original
gallery, but was erected in order to connect the south rooms with
those on the north, which previously had been completely severed from
each other by the lofty hall.
Haddon Hall, therefore, taken as a fourteenth-century dwelling, shows
that protection from casual attack was still essential, but that there
was a great amount of separate accommodation for the members of the
household. The rooms, however, were arranged without much regard to
convenience. They were placed in long and somewhat straggling ranges
of single apartments leading one into the other. Privacy was much
more studied than it had been in the preceding centuries, but it was
provided to a degree that falls far short of modern requirements.
The fact that the only entrance through which a wheeled vehicle could
enter the place was a secondary archway up the hill beneath the Eagle
Tower, brings home to us again the fact that the usual means of
locomotion was at that time either on foot or on horseback.
The view (Fig. 25) is taken in the lower courtyard, looking towards
the great hall. The entrance door is placed in a projecting porch,
over which a low tower is carried up. The staircase to the upper part
of the tower is in an octagonal turret, which rises in picturesque
fashion sufficiently high above the roof to give access to the leads.
To the right of the porch is the great chimney-stack of the hall, now
deprived of its original tall shaft. Beyond the chimney is one of the
fourteenth-century windows of the hall with simple but characteristic
tracery. Then comes the projecting end of the dining-room with its
early sixteenth-century window of many lights in width, but only one
in height; above this is a later window, not so wide, but divided into
three lights as to its height. The return wing on the right contains
the rooms built early in the sixteenth century over the original wall
of the twelfth century. The interest of the composition is increased by
the absence of large windows on the ground floor of this wing, where,
as the plan indicates, there was no need to have them.
[Illustration: 25. Haddon Hall, Derbyshire (View in the Lower
Courtyard).]
Another great house, dating largely from late in the fourteenth
century, is Kenilworth Castle, which, though primarily a place of
strength, has much that is interesting purely as domestic architecture.
It has been held by kings and great nobles; some of the most celebrated
names in English history are linked with its story; it has withstood
sieges, when its walls enclosed despairing and disease-stricken men; it
has witnessed the most gorgeous pageants of a gorgeous age. Reality and
romance have vied to make it famous. It is worthy of far more careful
study than can be bestowed upon it here, where it can only be briefly
used to throw its light on the progress of domestic architecture
through some four centuries. As a fortified place of dwelling it goes
back to Saxon times; as a stone house it was occupied between four
and five hundred years; it has been a ruin for nearly three hundred.
In extent the site is very considerable, embracing some eight or nine
acres of fortified enclosure (Fig. 26), but the walls, the towers, and
the gateways which made its defences; the ditches, the moat, and the
pool or lake which further secured it, do not fall within the range
of the present inquiry; it is only the inner or upper ward which need
detain us. The earliest of the buildings which form this ward is the
great keep, situated at the north-east corner, the home of the family
in Norman times. In its main characteristics it resembled the other
large keeps which have been already described (Chapter II.), and its
date may be placed at the end of the third quarter of the twelfth
century. There must have been other contemporary buildings somewhere
in the vast enclosure, mostly of wood, but some also of stone: they
have, however, all disappeared, and it is only from scattered fragments
of early work that their character can be surmised. Doubtless during
the next two centuries the descendants of the builders, the Clintons,
or those who displaced them--the king, Simon de Montfort, Edmund, Earl
of Lancaster, son of Henry III., Roger Mortimer, and the rest--added to
the meagre and comfortless accommodation of their predecessors. Indeed
it is on record that large sums were expended on buildings and repairs
during the reigns of John and Henry III. But anything they may have
built must have been swept away in the great rebuilding undertaken by
John of Gaunt towards the end of the fourteenth century, about 1392;
and it is not improbable from the irregular shape of the plan that his
new buildings followed the main lines of those they superseded. By far
the greater part of the upper ward is of this date. Starting from the
west end of the keep, the kitchens on the north (now almost entirely
gone), the great hall on the west, the white hall and other chambers
on the south, are all John of Gaunt’s work. Where he left off, Dudley,
Earl of Leicester, began, nearly two hundred years later; and although
Leicester’s buildings are fairly large in themselves, they are small in
comparison with those of “time-honoured Lancaster.”
[Illustration: 26. Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire.
Ground Plan.
1. Site of Kitchens.
2. The Strong Tower.
3. The White Hall.
4. Garde-robe Tower.
5. Leicester’s Buildings.
6. Henry VIII.’s Lodgings.
7. Elizabethan Gatehouse.]
The range of chambers built by John of Gaunt shows how enormously
domestic requirements had increased since the days when the restricted
accommodation of a keep had sufficed for the housing of the lord and
his family; or those when the subsidiary rooms attached to so fine a
hall as that at Oakham were merely four “chambers” and a kitchen. The
great hall, 90 ft. long by 45 ft. wide, occupied nearly the whole of
the west front. It stood on a vaulted undercroft (see section, Fig.
27), and was entered at the north end of its east side up a flight of
steps, which eventually led into the “screens.” To the right or north
of the entrance were the buttery, the kitchen, and other servants’
quarters. Beyond them, and projecting on the west front, was a tower
called the Strong Tower, used as a place of detention for persons
of consequence, some of whom have here, as others in the Tower of
London, left melancholy mementoes of weary hours in the shape of their
coats-of-arms scratched upon the walls.
[Illustration: 27. Kenilworth Castle. The Great Hall (_cir._ 1392).
The upper figure shows the plan of one side: the lower is the
longitudinal section through the hall and undercroft.]
[Illustration: 28. Kenilworth Castle.
A Window of the Great Hall.]
The hall itself was a noble apartment, admirably built in the best
period of the Perpendicular style, lighted by large and lofty windows
(Figs. 27, 28), and covered with an open timbered roof, which has long
since disappeared. It must have been one of the finest halls of its
time. At the upper or daïs end there is, on the east side, an octagonal
bay window, with a fireplace in the south-west corner; while on the
west is a tower, used on this floor as a buffet, and giving access by
a passage to the range of rooms on the south front which were rooms
of state and family apartments. About midway along their south front
stood a large _garde-robe_ tower. The two towers which project
from the west front and balance each other at either end of the hall
are a foretaste of the symmetry which was, in later years, to play
so important a part in the disposition of great houses. The general
arrangement of the hall, with the kitchens at one end and the family
rooms at the other, conforms to the usual type so frequently mentioned,
which may also be seen very clearly at Haddon. The bay window at the
daïs end is an early example of an arrangement which afterwards became
universal. The hall fire was not placed on the floor in the middle of
that apartment, but in two fireplaces, one in either side wall about
half way between the screen and the daïs.
The planning is, as usual, wasteful; the same accommodation might have
been obtained with far less outlay and much more convenience, and a
study of Elizabethan plans shows how far more surely and much more
cheaply the designer of that day obtained his effects than did his
predecessor of the fourteenth century.
[Illustration: 29. Kenilworth Castle--View from the North-west.
(The keep is on the left; the great hall on the right.)]
There can be no doubt that the Elizabethan designer aimed at effect as
well as at convenience of arrangement. But it is doubtful how far the
designer of the fourteenth century had both these objects in view. No
doubt he sought for effect in each building; that is to say, he strove
to produce a noble hall, an impressive tower, a pleasant range of minor
buildings. But his general arrangements were mostly haphazard; he built
as circumstances dictated, either following the lines of previous
buildings, or hurriedly placing his new rooms where at first sight they
seemed to be wanted, without much caring whether they came awkwardly
or not. He probably had an eye for the picturesque, for it is doubtful
whether all the towers and turrets which broke his sky-line were built
for necessity. Here at Kenilworth he displayed, as already remarked,
some feeling for symmetry on the west front. When Leicester came to
build his addition on the east, towards the end of the sixteenth
century, there can be little doubt that considerations of symmetry
dictated the form of the buildings, for instead of adopting the long
and low fashion then so much in vogue, he piled his rooms up in order
to balance the lofty mass of the ancient keep. This is very apparent
on a view made in 1620,[2] where these two large blocks are joined by
a low range of buildings called “Henry VIII.’s Lodgings,” which have
since then been entirely destroyed.
The view (Fig. 29) shows the Norman keep on the left, and the range
containing the fourteenth-century hall on the right. The difference
of treatment between the two periods is plainly visible. The keep is
massive and stern with but few windows; the hall is lighter and more
graceful, partly owing to its lofty windows, and partly to the vertical
lines of its turrets and projections.
So far the hall has been the principal room that has claimed attention,
although at Haddon and Kenilworth we find it supplemented by other
chambers for the use of the family and servants. The latter, however,
had not yet assumed any special architectural importance; in this
respect the most notable building, next to the hall, appears to have
been the kitchen.
In early times the kitchen, as already said, was detached from the
house, and often of so temporary a nature that no examples have
survived; but in later years it became one of the most important and
substantially built parts of the house. It was still frequently a
detached or outlying building of one lofty storey, connected with the
house, as at Raby Castle in Durham, the Abbot’s kitchen in Durham
itself (1368), the Abbot’s kitchen at Glastonbury (_c._ 1400),
that at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire (_c._ 1470), and that at
Burghley House, Northamptonshire (_c._ 1550). But more often it
was incorporated with the house itself, and had rooms over it as at
Haddon Hall (fourteenth century), and South Wingfield (1435–40).
[Illustration: 30. The Kitchen, Glastonbury Abbey.
Plan and Section.]
At Glastonbury the kitchen is square, each corner being occupied by
a fireplace the arch over which carries a wall, converting the space
above into an octagon (see plan, Fig. 30). The octagon is carried up to
a height of some 20 ft., and is then vaulted on eight stone ribs up to
a ventilating shaft (see section, Fig. 30). The height from the floor
to the bottom of the ventilating shaft is 41 ft.; the kitchen itself
is 33 ft. 10 in. square. The flues from the fireplaces were apparently
carried up into chimney-shafts, which stood on the triangular space
between the square corners of the building and the octagonal roof, but
the shafts have entirely disappeared (Fig. 31). The remains of the
walls which connected this kitchen with the adjacent buildings are
still visible.
Illustration: 31. The Kitchen, Glastonbury Abbey (_cir._ 1400).]
The kitchen at Stanton Harcourt is not quite so elaborate. It is
nearly square on plan, being 25 ft. 9 in. one way, by 25 ft. 6 in. the
other--considerably smaller, therefore, than the Glastonbury example
(see plan, Fig. 32). There seems to have been no special flue from the
fireplace, which must have been on an open hearth, the smoke finding
its way up to the roof, and thence through louvred openings. The height
here is nearly as great as that at Glastonbury, being 39 ft. to the
bottom of the roof. The roof is octagonal on plan, the four corners
of the square building being gathered over on squinches. It is of
wood covered with stone slates, and is carried on eight curved half
principals which meet in the centre. The lower part of the roof is
vertical, and is filled with windows and louvre boards for the escape
of the smoke on alternate forces of the octagon (see section, Fig. 32).
Above the vertical part, it slopes up to a great heraldic finial. The
top of the stone walls is battlemented, the space between the parapet
and the octagonal lantern forming a kind of parapet walk, access to
which is obtained up a circular staircase placed in a square projecting
turret at one corner (Fig. 33). There are the usual two ovens (one
large and one small) in the thickness of the wall, and there is also
a recess probably used as a cupboard. There is a door in each corner,
three for access from other parts of the building, and one leading to
the staircase. So much of the original building has been destroyed that
its exact connection with the kitchen cannot now be traced. As a rule
this connection was fairly direct to the lower end of the hall.
[Illustration: 32. The Kitchen at Stanton Harcourt--Plans, Elevation,
and Section.]
The great kitchen at Burghley House is constructed after the old
manner, and is vaulted in stone. This has led to the statement that it
is part of a pre-existing abbey, but there is no reason to suppose that
it antedates the early parts of the house, which were in building about
the year 1550.
[Illustration: 33. Sketch of the Kitchen at Stanton Harcourt.]
There is not much to be said about the other type of kitchen, such as
remains at Haddon and South Wingfield. It was a large apartment, and
usually furnished with several vast fireplaces. At South Wingfield
there were three, two of which are shown in Fig. 34. At the back of one
of these are the two ovens. None of the examples quoted have windows
of any great size, a fact which points to the fire itself having
been depended on to supplement the scanty daylight. As in many other
respects so in the kitchens, the great colleges at Oxford and Cambridge
afford the best existing illustrations of the internal economy of a
mediæval house. They still have to cater for some hundreds of people
daily, and so it was in the abbeys and great houses of the Middle
Ages. In an abbey kitchen the number for whom cooking was required was
sometimes as much as seven or eight hundred. In a nobleman’s house,
such as Lord Burghley’s, the number was less, it is true, but it must
have amounted to one or two hundred. In smaller houses the requirements
were not nearly so great, and kitchens of more modest dimensions were
sufficient.
[Illustration: 34. Fireplaces in the Kitchen, South Wingfield Manor
House (_cir._ 1435–40).]