Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

As time went on, at the end of the thirteenth century, and in the succeeding centuries, a greater refinement of domestic customs was introduced, and other apartments were added.[144] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the walls of the hall were built a little higher, and an upper floor put in so as to convert the roof into a sleeping loft, lighted by a couple of dormer windows; and this plan of a central hall with a loft over, its longer side to the front, flanked by a two-story building at one end with its gable to the front flush with the hall, and another building at the other end of the hall containing the offices, was the general plan of the houses of the middle classes of the people. Thousands of them, more or less disguised by later additions, still remain all over the country.

Plan of Rectory House, West Dean, Sussex.

Rectory House, West Dean.

Few of the old rectory houses are left in their original condition. There is a good example of the hall at Weston Turville, Bucks.[145] The parsonage house at West Dean, Sussex, of the thirteenth century, is described and figured in Turner’s “Domestic Architecture.” It is built of stone; in plan a hall with a story over it, and the soler at the upper end, approached by a stone newel stair built in a projecting buttress on the north side. The windows of the story over the hall are lancets, those of the hall have a curious kind of tracery. The upper chamber or soler has a good fireplace and chimney-piece of stone, with deeply splayed windows.

Pre-reformation Clergy House, Alfriston.
(By kind permission of the publishers of the Builder.)

There is a parsonage house at Alfriston, within three miles of Dean, Sussex, of the fourteenth century, so unchanged and well preserved that it has been made over to the National Trust for Preserving Places of Historic Interest. It has the usual hall, constructed of oak framing, the interstices being filled with “wattle and dab,” open to the roof with large cambered tie-beams and moulded king-posts. At the upper end of the hall is the soler, of two stories.