With the opening of the new century we get at Burton Agnes, in Yorkshire (1602-10), a repetition of the same leading idea which we have been following for a hundred and fifty years (Fig. [52]). We have the screens at the end of the hall, the kitchens on the left, and the bay window, the family rooms and grand staircase at the head of the hall. The family apartments have increased in number. The tendency was towards having separate apartments for various uses, and on plans of the time we not infrequently find a "dining parlour" specially named. The introduction of this refinement marks the dwindling importance of the hall. The latter is ceasing to be the centre of family life, and becoming merely an entrance. The daïs end is no longer the comfortable place it was, with its bay window and the fireplace close by: it is becoming pierced with doors, and draughty. The family find it more comfortable to have a separate room for their meals, and the servants' quarters are becoming more self-contained. The old usages of the hall are being discontinued.
53.—Aston Hall, near Birmingham. Ground Plan (1618-35).
54.—Aston Hall, Warwickshire. North Wing.
This change is quite apparent in the last plan of the series, that of Aston Hall, in Warwickshire (1618-35). The hall is still central, the kitchen is in one wing, the family rooms in the other, supplemented by a row at the back of the hall (Fig. [53]). But the hall itself is now merely an entrance—it has ceased to be a living-room; it is entered from the middle of the side, no longer at the end, where indeed the fireplace now finds itself: there is no daïs and no bay window. This is a revolution which it has taken more than a century to produce, counting from the first appearance of the Italian influence. The change no doubt was effected from the inside more than the out: from the gradual alteration of habits, rather than from the wish to Italianize our English plans. But the two tendencies co-operated with each other and combined to lead English designers further and further away from the old traditions.
Although the hall shows a departure from the old lines of planning, the general arrangement adheres to them. The symmetrical wings, the mullioned windows, the turrets (Fig. [54]), the forecourt with its lodges at the corners, and the open arcade on the south front, are all in keeping with Elizabethan and Jacobean methods, and offer a striking contrast to the work at Rainham Hall, in Norfolk, which was built by Inigo Jones in 1630, five years before Aston was finished.
The disappearance of the hall as a living-room, and its adoption as a vestibule, mark a great change in our domestic architecture. The tie with the mediæval past is loosened, and with the almost contemporaneous departure of the mullioned window it is severed altogether; there is nothing now to prevent English designers from assimilating their buildings ever more and more to the models which they sought direct in Italy, without being diverted from their purpose by what they passed in intermediate countries.