The Growth of the English House / A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800

by J. Alfred Gotch

24. Plan of Haddon Hall, Derbyshire.

It is of great interest to see here the work of various hands, and to realise how, generation after generation, the owners did what they could to bring their ancient home up to the prevailing standard of comfort and beauty. But the particular point which is of interest now is that although much of the existing work is of later date, yet it is clear that in the fourteenth century Haddon was of almost the same extent as we see it to-day. Civilisation had taken many strides since its little neighbour, the Peak Castle, had been built.

It is curious to observe on a plan of the house how much thicker the external walls are than the internal, and how few windows look outwards; they nearly all look into the courts, and of those that look out over the country most are of later date. The plan also shows very clearly how the disposition of the hall follows the orthodox lines. It is entered through a porch at the end of one of its sides; the porch leads into the “screens”; on the right is the hall entered through a panelled wood screen with two openings. On the left are three doorways—one to the buttery, one to the kitchen passage, and the third to the pantry. At the end of the screens is a door leading into the upper court. The kitchen department is large, rambling, and ill-lighted, but when the house was in full occupation an enormous amount of work had to be done here, and doubtless the fire itself sufficiently supplemented the scanty daylight.

At the upper end of the hall is a range of rooms of two storeys, devoted to the use of the family; and doubtless in the fourteenth century it was already of two storeys, although apparently it only extended at that period from the front or west side of the hall as far eastwards as to overlap the east side of the upper court. It is difficult to disentangle these rooms from the additions and alterations of later years, for in the early part of the sixteenth century the rooms immediately contiguous to the south end of the hall were improved, and a new range was built on the top of the curtain wall, which ran from the hall wing westwards to the chapel. Again, towards the close of the same century, the long gallery was built over the ground floor rooms forming the south side of the upper court, and apparently this wing was prolonged in order to give that extreme length to the gallery which was so characteristic of Elizabeth’s time. This prolongation carried the south front beyond the line of the east front, an arrangement very unlikely to have been adopted while the house was still fortified.

Another curious and instructive feature is the gallery or gangway which is carried along the east side of the hall. This is not an original gallery, but was erected in order to connect the south rooms with those on the north, which previously had been completely severed from each other by the lofty hall.

Haddon Hall, therefore, taken as a fourteenth-century dwelling, shows that protection from casual attack was still essential, but that there was a great amount of separate accommodation for the members of the household. The rooms, however, were arranged without much regard to convenience. They were placed in long and somewhat straggling ranges of single apartments leading one into the other. Privacy was much more studied than it had been in the preceding centuries, but it was provided to a degree that falls far short of modern requirements.

The fact that the only entrance through which a wheeled vehicle could enter the place was a secondary archway up the hill beneath the Eagle Tower, brings home to us again the fact that the usual means of locomotion was at that time either on foot or on horseback.

The view (Fig. 25) is taken in the lower courtyard, looking towards the great hall. The entrance door is placed in a projecting porch, over which a low tower is carried up. The staircase to the upper part of the tower is in an octagonal turret, which rises in picturesque fashion sufficiently high above the roof to give access to the leads. To the right of the porch is the great chimney-stack of the hall, now deprived of its original tall shaft. Beyond the chimney is one of the fourteenth-century windows of the hall with simple but characteristic tracery. Then comes the projecting end of the dining-room with its early sixteenth-century window of many lights in width, but only one in height; above this is a later window, not so wide, but divided into three lights as to its height. The return wing on the right contains the rooms built early in the sixteenth century over the original wall of the twelfth century. The interest of the composition is increased by the absence of large windows on the ground floor of this wing, where, as the plan indicates, there was no need to have them.

25. Haddon Hall, Derbyshire (View in the Lower Courtyard).