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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.