Meanness of ordinary mansion-houses.
It is an error to suppose that the English gentry were lodged in stately or even in well-sized houses. Generally speaking, their dwellings were almost as inferior to those of their descendants in capacity as they were in convenience. The usual arrangement consisted of an entrance-passage running through the house, with a hall on one side, a parlour beyond, and one or two chambers above, and on the opposite side, a kitchen, pantry, and other offices.[k] Such was the ordinary manor-house of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as appears not only from the documents and engravings, but as to the latter period, from the buildings themselves, sometimes, though not very frequently, occupied by families of consideration, more often converted into farm-houses or distinct tenements. Larger structures were erected by men of great estates during the reigns of Henry IV. and Edward IV.; but very few can be traced higher; and such has been the effect of time, still more through the advance or decline of families and the progress of architectural improvement, than the natural decay of these buildings, that I should conceive it difficult to name a house in England, still inhabited by a gentleman and not belonging to the order of castles, the principal apartments of which are older than the reign of Henry VII. The instances at least must be extremely few.[m]
France by no means appears to have made a greater progress than our own country in domestic architecture. Except fortified castles, I do not find in the work of a very miscellaneous but apparently diligent writer,[n] any considerable dwellings mentioned before the reign of Charles VII., and very few of so early a date.[o] Jacques Cœur, a famous merchant unjustly persecuted by that prince, had a handsome house at Paris, as well as another at Bourges.[p] It is obvious that the long calamities which France endured before the expulsion of the English must have retarded this eminent branch of national improvement.
Even in Italy, where from the size of her cities and social refinements of her inhabitants, greater elegance and splendour in building were justly to be expected, the domestic architecture of the middle ages did not attain any perfection. In several towns the houses were covered with thatch, and suffered consequently from destructive fires. Costanzo, a Neapolitan historian near the end of the sixteenth century, remarks the change of manners that had occurred since the reign of Joanna II. one hundred and fifty years before. The great families under the queen expended all their wealth on their retainers, and placed their chief pride in bringing them into the field. They were ill lodged, not sumptuously clothed, nor luxurious in their tables. The house of Caracciolo, high steward of that princess, one of the most powerful subjects that ever existed, having fallen into the hands of persons incomparably below his station, had been enlarged by them, as insufficient for their accommodation.[q] If such were the case in the city of Naples so late as the beginning of the fifteenth century, we may guess how mean were the habitations in less polished parts of Europe.
Invention of chimneys and glass windows.
The two most essential improvements in architecture during this period, one of which had been missed by the sagacity of Greece and Rome, were chimneys and glass windows. Nothing apparently can be more simple than the former; yet the wisdom of ancient times had been content to let the smoke escape by an aperture in the centre of the roof; and a discovery, of which Vitruvius had not a glimpse, was made, perhaps in this country, by some forgotten semi-barbarian. About the middle of the fourteenth century the use of chimneys is distinctly mentioned in England and in Italy; but they are found in several of our castles which bear a much older date.[r] This country seems to have lost very early the art of making glass, which was preserved in France, whence artificers were brought into England to furnish the windows in some new churches in the seventh century.[] It is said that in the reign of Henry III. a few ecclesiastical buildings had glazed windows.[t] Suger, however, a century before, had adorned his great work, the abbey of St. Denis, with windows, not only glazed but painted;[] and I presume that other churches of the same class, both in France and England, especially after the lancet-shaped window had yielded to one of ampler dimensions, were generally decorated in a similar manner. Yet glass is said not to have been employed in the domestic architecture of France before the fourteenth century;[x] and its introduction into England was probably by no means earlier. Nor indeed did it come into general use during the period of the middle ages. Glazed windows were considered as moveable furniture, and probably bore a high price. When the earls of Northumberland, as late as the reign of Elizabeth, left Alnwick Castle, the windows were taken out of their frames, and carefully laid by.[y]
Furniture of houses.
But if the domestic buildings of the fifteenth century would not seem very spacious or convenient at present, far less would this luxurious generation be content with their internal accommodations. A gentleman's house containing three or four beds was extraordinarily well provided; few probably had more than two. The walls were commonly bare, without wainscot or even plaster; except that some great houses were furnished with hangings, and that perhaps hardly so soon as the reign of Edward IV. It is unnecessary to add, that neither libraries of books nor pictures could have found a place among furniture. Silver plate was very rare, and hardly used for the table. A few inventories of furniture that still remain exhibit a miserable deficiency.[z] And this was incomparably greater in private gentlemen's houses than among citizens, and especially foreign merchants. We have an inventory of the goods belonging to Contarini, a rich Venetian trader, at his house in St. Botolph's Lane, A.D. 1481. There appear to have been no less than ten beds, and glass windows are especially noticed as moveable furniture. No mention however is made of chairs or looking-glasses.[a] If we compare this account, however trifling in our estimation, with a similar inventory of furniture in Skipton Castle, the great honour of the earls of Cumberland, and among the most splendid mansions of the north, not at the same period, for I have not found any inventory of a nobleman's furniture so ancient, but in 1572, after almost a century of continual improvement, we shall be astonished at the inferior provision of the baronial residence. There were not more than seven or eight beds in this great castle; nor had any of the chambers either chairs, glasses, or carpets.[] It is in this sense, probably, that we must understand Æneas Sylvius, if he meant any thing more than to express a traveller's discontent, when he declares that the kings of Scotland would rejoice to be as well lodged as the second class of citizens at Nuremberg.[c] Few burghers of that town had mansions, I presume, equal to the palaces of Dumferlin or Stirling, but it is not unlikely that they were better furnished.
Farm-houses and cottages.
In the construction of farm-houses and cottages, especially the latter, there have probably been fewer changes; and those it would be more difficult to follow. No building of this class can be supposed to exist of the antiquity to which the present work is confined; and I do not know that we have any document as to the inferior architecture of England, so valuable as one which M. de Paulmy has quoted for that of France, though perhaps more strictly applicable to Italy, an illuminated manuscript of the fourteenth century, being a translation of Crescentio's work on agriculture, illustrating the customs, and, among other things, the habitations of the agricultural class. According to Paulmy, there is no other difference between an ancient and a modern farm-house than arises from the introduction of tiled roofs.[d] In the original work of Crescentio, a native of Bologna, who composed this treatise on rural affairs about the year 1300, an Italian farm-house, when built at least according to his plan, appears to have been commodious both in size and arrangement.[e] Cottages in England seem to have generally consisted of a single room without division of stories. Chimneys were unknown in such dwellings till the early part of Elizabeth's reign, when a very rapid and sensible improvement took place in the comforts of our yeomanry and cottagers.[f]