DURHAM: arcading on south side of Constable’s hall
If Henry II. may be given the chief credit for the construction of rectangular keeps in castles, Henry III. was almost as active in building halls. The finest example of his work now remaining is at Winchester. At the Tower of London, at Scarborough, and at Newcastle, the name alone of his halls, rectangular buildings with high-pitched roofs, remains. But, in and after his reign, the hall and the adjacent domestic buildings became a fixed feature of the plan of the castle. In castles which, up to this time, may have possessed small and inconvenient halls, or possibly halls built merely of timber, new and more permanent domestic buildings were constructed. Thus, at Rockingham castle, the beautiful doorway of the thirteenth-century hall ([205]), with deeply undercut mouldings and jamb-shafts with foliated capitals, still forms the entrance to the house of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the hall of which is probably of the exact dimensions of its medieval predecessor.[239] In castles which are the most perfect examples of fortification, such as Caerphilly or Conway, the hall forms an integral part of the plan, filling its natural place in the design; and of these, Caerphilly was completed about the end of the reign of Henry III. The enthusiasm of Henry for fine architecture, domestic as well as ecclesiastical, was imitated by many of his powerful subjects; and it is actually from this period that we may trace that prominence of the domestic element in our castles which was eventually cultivated at the expense of fortification.
Rockingham Castle; Doorway of hall
In the dwelling-houses, often of palatial size, which grew up within castles, and reached their perfect development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the main apartments, in addition to the hall, were the great chamber, the kitchen with its offices, and the chapel. The normal plan, as already shown, was that of the first-floor hall, with the great chamber at one end, and the kitchen at the other. The plan of the chapel was not fixed, but, where it formed part of the block of buildings, it is usually found in connection with the great chamber end of the hall.
The main points of the hall may be briefly recapitulated. The entrance was invariably in the side wall next the bailey, at the end nearest the usual place for the kitchen. This end was screened off from the hall by curtains or by a wooden partition containing one or more doors. This shut out draught; while the passage thus formed was generally covered by its own ceiling, the space above forming a gallery, which was entered from a vice at a corner of the end wall. At the further end of the hall was the daïs with the high table, at right angles to which were placed the long tables in the body of the hall. The hall was covered by a high-pitched timber roof, the principals of which were borne by corbels in the side walls. In early examples, warmth was supplied by a large hearth in the middle of the floor, a little below the daïs, the smoke from which escaped through a louvre in the roof above; but it became customary to make a fireplace in one of the side walls.[240] Light was admitted through window-openings in the side wall next the ward; but, where the outer wall of the castle was secure from attack, as at Warwick or Ludlow, windows were made there also. These windows were usually of two lights, divided by a mullion, with simple tracery in the head. They also had a transom, below which they were closed by shutters, the upper part of the window alone being glazed. In the hall at Ludlow, the date of which is about 1300, there were three two-light windows next the ward, while the curtain was pierced by three single-light openings. The hearth stood in the body of the hall just below the daïs, and was carried by a pier in the cellar beneath. In the fifteenth century the middle window next the ward was blocked, and a fireplace inserted: the hearth was then removed. The hall formed the chief living-room of the house, and in it the majority of the lord’s retinue not only had their meals, but slept.
The great chamber, as time went on, became the nucleus of a number of private apartments. In the most simple examples, it is a rectangular apartment behind the daïs, communicating with it directly through a doorway on one side of the end wall. Where the hall occupied the ground floor, a vice, or, as at Warkworth, a straight stair, furnished an entrance to it. At Ludlow, where the kitchen was a detached building, and at Stokesay ([207]), there was a first-floor chamber at both ends of the hall. The domestic buildings at Ludlow are very symmetrically arranged, the hall, in the middle, being slightly recessed between two projecting blocks of building, each with a chamber on the first floor ([195]). Of these, that at the east end of the hall, behind the daïs, was evidently the more important; and, in the fifteenth century, it was on this side that an additional block of private apartments was built. From each floor of the great chamber block a large garde-robe tower was entered: this tower projects from the north curtain of the castle, and was added when the earlier hall was remodelled and the hall and its adjoining blocks assumed their present shape.
