ALMS HOUSES: COMMONHALL LANE, CHESTER.
It is on reaching the spacious times of Queen Elizabeth that there is no longer any paucity but a positive profusion, and there ensues an embarras de choix in the examples available.
Her reign and that of her immediate successors constituted what may perhaps be called the classic era of half-timbered architecture. A period of not much more than a hundred years sufficed for the style to attain its zenith and reach its decline and passing in the seventeenth century.
The frequency with which one comes across the royal cipher E. R. and the many corroborative arms and date panels, both in Cheshire and elsewhere, bring to mind the marvellous outburst of energy and activity that marked her times in all departments of life, one of whose outlets was in the building operations of the period, and especially in the domestic direction, some of the evidences of which we are now concerned with. England, as has been truly said, is awake after the slumber of the Middle Ages, and for a brief period the national life blazes with unprecedented brilliance and splendour.
Adherence to the traditional manner of timber building in Cheshire would be accounted for and be encouraged by the abundant supplies of the requisite raw material still available; for this and the adjoining counties of Shropshire and Lancashire, where this type of building also flourished, were at a safe distance from the iron-smelting works and ship-building yards which made such inroads on the woods and forests in other parts of the kingdom.
In the attractive appearance of those Elizabethan erections, that Baconian dictum (certainly challengeable, at all events, from an architect’s standpoint), “houses are built to live in and not to look on,” found plenty of contemporary refutation in the picturesque and delightful halls of this county.
As in the Edwardian Baggily Hall, so in its Elizabethan successors the “great hall” continued to be the chief feature, the principal pivot, so to say, of the general plan. But, whereas in the earlier examples it was invariably open right up to the roof, it gradually began to be divided into two storeys by the interposition of a floor. One consequence of this change was the disappearance of the minstrels’ gallery and the dais. The cause of the decline in importance of the great hall may partly have been the introduction of Italian ideas, but was mainly due to the alteration in the habits of life. The progress of civilisation brought with it the multiplication of apartments, and hence the space once entirely occupied by the lofty hall could no longer be afforded.
