103. Old Somerset House, in the Strand. (Now demolished.)
End façade of Courtyard.
104. Elevation and Plan of a House (unnamed).
From the Thorpe Collection.
The last of the series (Fig. 104) shows the beginning of a change in the hall. The screen is no longer a continuous partition cutting off a passage. It has shrunk to something that is a mere projection from the side walls, affording no shelter from the cross-traffic of the front door. Indeed the front door, which formerly had been the common entrance for the whole household, was gradually being reserved for the family and the guests, the servants being provided with a separate entrance of their own. The elevation is an interesting specimen of Elizabethan design in half-timber.
The arrangement of the hall shown in this example greatly detracts from its comfort as a living room, in spite of the fact that the retention of the daïs (indicated by the hatched line across the hall) points to its use as such. It is a first step in the direction of using the hall as a vestibule and not as a room. A more striking instance of this change is to be found at Aston Hall near Birmingham (finished in 1635). Thorpe’s plan of it shows the great hall following the ancient lines with the entrance at one end into the screens. But when built the front door was placed centrally at once with the façade and the hall. This new position, delivering the traffic into its centre, wholly precluded the use of the hall as a living room; it became in fact a vestibule. With this change the link with mediævalism was severed. It marks in a striking manner the parting of the ways; the change from the old to the new; the closing of the long chapter of domestic planning which began in the early days of the twelfth century; the final abandonment of the principle which had dominated house planning for five hundred years.
Overlapping Thorpe in point of date, but out-living him by a good many years—so far as the uncertainty surrounding the lives of such simple persons enables us to judge—was the John Smithson whose drawings[4] have been preserved with as much care as those of Thorpe. He died in 1634, and was buried at Bolsover: he left a son, Huntingdon Smithson, who also was an architectural designer. The Smithson collection rivals the other in interest. It does not afford quite so vivid an insight into the methods of the house planner; but it contains a greater variety of subjects. It shows equally clearly the change which was taking place in the disposition of the chief rooms: how the hall was being deposed from its pre-eminence; and how corridors were becoming more frequent. The principal apartments include no new names: they consist still of the hall, the parlour, the great chamber, the withdrawing-room, the chapel, and the long gallery. The houses still have terraces and arcades, and are still flanked by courts. The courtyard type and the
