As the grouping together of several apartments on the ground-floor rendered the whole building less compact and less defensible, the practice soon rose, especially in the better _manoirs_, of making apartments above. This upper apartment was called a _soler_ (_solarium_, a word supposed to be derived from _sol_, the sun, as being, by its position, nearer to that luminary, or as receiving more light from it). It was at first, and in the lesser mansions, but a small apartment raised above the chamber, and approached by a flight of steps outside, though (but more rarely) the staircase was sometimes internal. In our first cut from the Museum manuscript (No. 81), there is a soler over the chamber, to which the approach appears to be from the inside. In the early metrical tales the _soler_, and its exterior _staircase_, are often alluded to. Thus, in the fabliau _D’Estourmi_, in Barbazan, a burgher and his wife deceive three monks of a neighbouring abbey who make love to the lady; she conceals her husband in the soler above, to which he ascends by a flight of steps:-- _Tesiez, vous monterez là sus_ _En cel solier tout coiement._ The monk, before he enters the house, passes through the court (_cortil_), in which there is a sheepcot (_bercil_), or perhaps a stable. The husband from the soler above looks through a lattice or grate and sees all that passes in the hall-- _Par la treillie le porlingne._ The stairs seem, therefore, to have been outside the hall, with a latticed window looking into it from the top. The monk appears to have entered the hall by the back door, and the chamber is adjacent to the hall (as in houses which had no soler), on the side opposite to that on which were the stairs. When another monk comes, the husband hides himself under the stairs (_souz le degré_). The bodies of the monks (who are killed by the husband) are carried out _parmi une fausse posterne_ which leads into the fields (_aus chans_). In the fabliau of _La Saineresse_, a woman who performs the operation of bleeding comes to the house of a burgher, and finds the man and his wife seated on a bench in the yard before the hall-- _En mi l’aire de sa meson._ The lady says she wants bleeding, and takes her upstairs into the soler:-- _Montez là sus en cel solier,_ _Il m’estuet de vostre mestier._ They enter, and close the door. The apartment on the soler, although there was a bed in it, is not called a chamber, but a room or saloon (_perrin_):-- _Si se descendent del perrin,_ _Contreval les degrez enfin_ _Vindrent errant en la maison._ The expression that they came down the stairs, and _into the house_, shows that the staircase was outside. In another fabliau, _De la borgoise d’Orliens_, a burgher comes to his wife in the disguise of her gallant, and the lady, discovering the fraud, locks him up in the soler, pretending he is to wait there till the household is in bed--