had not young Hereward slain the bear before it reached them. In fact, the lady’s chamber was still only a detached room, probably with a very weak door, which was not capable of withstanding any force. The Harleian Manuscript, No. 603 (in the British Museum), contains several illustrations of Anglo-Saxon domestic architecture, most of which are rather sketchy and indefinite; but there is one picture (fol. 57, v^o.) which illustrates, in a very interesting manner, the distribution of the house. Of this, an exact copy is given in the accompanying cut, No. 12.[3] The manuscript is, perhaps, as old as the ninth century, and the picture here given illustrates Psalm cxi., in the Vulgate version, the description of the just and righteous chieftain: the beggars are admitted within the inclosure (where the scene is laid), to receive the alms of the lord; and he and his lady are occupied in distributing bread to them, while his servants are bringing out of one of the bowers raiment to clothe the naked. The larger building behind, ending in a sort of round tower with a cupola, is evidently the hall--the stag’s head seems to mark its character. The buildings to the left are chambers or bowers; to the right is the domestic chapel, and the little room attached is perhaps the chamber of the chaplain. [Illustration: _No. 12. Anglo-Saxon Mansion._] It is evidently the intention in this picture to represent the walls of the rooms as being formed, in the lower part, of masonry, with timber walls above, and all the windows are in the timber walls. If we make allowance for want of perspective and proportion in the drawing, it is probable that only a small portion of the elevation was masonry, and that the wooden walls (_parietes_) were raised above it, as is very commonly the case in old timber-houses still existing. The greater portion of the Saxon houses were certainly of timber; in Alfric’s colloquy, it is the carpenter, or worker in wood (_se treo-wyrhta_), who builds houses; and the very word to express the operation of building, _timbrian_, _getimbrian_, signified literally to construct of timber. We observe in the above representation of a house, that none of the buildings have more than a ground-floor, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the houses of all classes. The Saxon word _flór_ is generally used in the early writers to represent the Latin _pavimentum_. Thus the “variegated floor” (_on fágre flór_) of the hall mentioned in Beowulf (l. 1454) was a paved floor, perhaps a tessellated pavement; as the road spoken of in an earlier part of the poem (_stræt wæs stán-fáh_, the street was stone-variegated, l. 644) describes a paved Roman road. The term upper-floor occurs once or twice, but only I think in translating from foreign Latin writers. The only instance that occurs to my memory of an upper-floor in an Anglo-Saxon house, is the story of Dunstan’s council at Calne in 978, when, according to the