Although the first germ of the house of to-day is to be found in the Norman keep, its more direct ancestor was the fortified manor house. The chief room here, as in the keep, was the hall; indeed it was of greater relative importance in the manor house than in the castle. In the latter it had rooms of equal size above and below it, rooms which must have helped to lessen the pressure on its space. In the former it was not so much the heart of the house as the house itself. It was often the only considerable room in the building, supplemented by a kitchen and a “chamber” or two. So overmastering was its importance that the house was called “the hall,” a designation which, to this day, is applied to the principal house in a parish. There were, however, supplementary rooms, some for the master, and some for the servants; in the earlier examples, indeed, the plural is hardly admissible; there was one for the master, called the “solar,” and there was a kitchen, or a kitchen department, which was the headquarters of the servants. The hall lay between the two; at one end was the kitchen with whatever it had of pantry and buttery; at the other was the solar, a small room for the private occupation of the lord—a room generally upstairs, and over a cellar or store place. Other rooms there were none. The hall was the house; everybody lived there when indoors, everybody ate there, everybody slept there.
Knight, and page, and household squire,
Loitered through the lofty hall,
Or crowded round the ample fire.
The household stores, if put away anywhere, went to the cellar; the food was cooked in the kitchen, there was a pantry where it was kept when not in the kitchen, there was a buttery where the drink was served: the lord, when he desired privacy, sought his solar. The rest of the household presumably never had privacy even if they desired it. It was an elementary state of things, and the story of domestic architecture is made up of the efforts to obtain greater privacy and more comfort. It was a long and gradual development. The hall remained for centuries the centre and kernel of the house; but at one end of it the solar gradually swelled into suites of apartments for the family; at the other, the kitchen grew into the servants’ wing, with scullery, larders, pantry, and many other subdivisions. When we remember this primitive type of plan and then look at the plan of an Elizabethan manor house (usually quite simple in its arrangements), it becomes less difficult to imagine the stages through which it must have passed since the time of the hall, solar, and kitchen; and it is easy, on the other hand, to see how the simple Elizabethan plan grew into the complicated arrangements necessary for our comfort to-day.
The hall, then, being pre-eminently the principal room, requires our first attention. It was necessarily of large size, and it was lofty. In the majority of instances it was of one storey with an open timber roof, and consequently it completely separated from each other the subsidiary rooms built at either end of it. This is observable down to Elizabethan days, when the family apartments and the servants’ quarters had each grown into a considerable wing of at least two storeys in height. Each wing had to have its own staircases, and on the upper floor the hall interposed an impassable barrier between the two ends of the house.
The hall was planned so that the entrance was at the servants’ end, where most of the traffic was. The bulk of the floor space was thus left clear for the tables, and for the purposes of daily life. The lord and his family sat at the “high table” at the upper end, farthest away from the draughty entrance. There was at this end a raised platform some 6 inches high, called the daïs, and it was on the daïs that the high table was placed. Judging from the floor levels of the earliest houses, there would not seem to have been a daïs, unless it were a movable platform. Through the wall at the upper end a doorway led to the family room or rooms. The two long sides of the hall were usually free from any buildings, and were occupied by the windows. At Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, however—a splendid house of the Lovels, now in hopeless ruin—the lofty hall was flanked on one side with a building of two storeys. The windows on the opposite side were large and long, set fairly high up in the thick wall, of fine Perpendicular design, and finished at the top with the usual simple tracery. Those on the side flanked by the two-storey building were so much curtailed by it as to retain nothing below the tracery.
The entrance was generally cut off from the rest of the hall by a screen (at any rate in later years). The screen did not extend the full height of the hall, but stopped short some 10 or 12 ft. high, and was connected to the end wall by a floor, which thus at once served as a ceiling to the entrance passage, and formed a gallery, usually called the minstrels’ gallery, though indeed it may well be doubted whether in many of the smaller houses it was put to regular use, inasmuch as there was no convenient means of access. The fire was frequently, though not by any means always, placed on a hearth in the middle of the floor, yet not exactly the middle, but rather towards the end where the family sat. There are plenty of instances where the hall was warmed by a fireplace even in fairly early times. There are also instances as late as the sixteenth century of hearths being constructed on the floor. At Deene Hall in Northamptonshire, built in the time of Edward VI., there was no fireplace in the hall until the father of the late Lord Cardigan (of Balaclava fame) caused one to be made. The roof shows by the absence of cross-braces in one of its bays where the louvre for the escape of smoke used to stand.
These general dispositions were, of course, subject to variations in particular instances, but the main idea of entering the hall at its lower end, of the kitchens being at this end and the solar or family rooms at the other, is so universal as to furnish a clue to the unravelling of the mysteries of many a complicated ruin.
The finest example in England of an early hall is to be found at Oakham Castle in Rutland. It is of such a large size, 65 ft. long by 43 ft. wide, that it serves for the Law Courts of the county, the Assizes, Quarter Sessions, and County Court being all held within its four walls. The fittings necessary for these purposes rather obscure its original appearance, which was as spacious as a good-sized parish church, and very much of the same character. It is divided into what may be termed nave and aisles separated by fine bold arcades (Fig. 13).