Old English House
7. The spaces between the uprights were then filled in with lath and plaster, flush with the wood-work. In some parts of the country brick was used instead, set in a herring-bone fashion. In later times, when the lath and plaster had decayed, the spaces were often filled in with brickwork laid in the ordinary way. Then again, in other cases the wood-work of the house shrank and left gaps between the lath and plaster and the wood, so the whole of the outside has been covered with plaster, or weather-boarded and painted or tarred, or hung over with tiles.
8. The windows were small, and sometimes in the upper story one was built out, forming an oriel. The roofs were high pitched, in many cases tiled, but more often thatched. In these old houses the chimney-stack is a great feature outside, and the huge fireplace, with its wide chimney-corners, takes up half the house-place inside. From most of these nowadays the old hearth is gone, and a small chimney-breast has been bricked up to take a modern range; but the old chimney-corner, with its funny little window, can usually still be traced.
9. There are quite a large number of village inns of this kind. Very often these are the oldest and most picturesque buildings left in a village, except the church. It is these old-fashioned houses which make village scenery so pleasing to the eye after the dreary rows of bunches of brick, with holes in them for windows, covered in with slate, which fill the streets of our towns, all alike and all ugly.
Summary.—There were ruins in every town and nearly every village in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Gradually the stones were carted away for building purposes and for road-mending. There were many restrictions on building new houses. Most of the quaint old houses, with overhanging stories and high-pitched roofs, belong to the time of Queen Elizabeth. They were built on older foundations. The wood-work in later times has been in some cases filled in with brickwork, in others covered with boarding or hung with tiles. In those houses the chimney is usually at one end of the house, and the queer little window on one side shows where the chimney-corner once was.
An Elizabethan Interior