+Hospitals+ like that of St. Jean at Angers (late twelfth century), or those of Chartres, Ourscamps, Tonnerre, and Beaune, illustrate how skilfully the French could modify and adapt the details of their architecture to the special requirements of civil architecture. Great numbers of charitable institutions were built in the middle ages--asylums, hospitals, refuges, and the like--but very few of those in France are now extant. Town halls were built in the fifteenth century in some places where a certain amount of popular independence had been secured. The florid fifteenth-century +Palais de Justice+ at +Rouen+ (1499-1508) is an example of another branch of secular Gothic architecture. In all these monuments the adaptation of means to ends is admirable. Wooden ceilings and roofs replaced stone, wherever required by great width of span or economy of construction. There was little sculpture; the wall-spaces were not suppressed in favor of stained glass and tracery; while the roofs were usually emphasized and adorned with elaborate crestings and finials in lead or terra-cotta. +DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE.+ These same principles controlled the designing of houses, farm buildings, barns, granaries, and the like. The common closely-built French city house of the twelfth and thirteenth century is illustrated by many extant examples at Cluny, Provins, and other towns. A shop opening on the street by a large arch, a narrow stairway, and two or three stories of rooms lighted by clustered, pointed-arched windows, constituted the common type. The street front was usually gabled and the roof steep. In the fourteenth or fifteenth century half-timbered construction began to supersede stone for town houses, as it permitted of encroaching upon the street by projecting the upper stories. Many of the half-timbered houses of the fifteenth century were of elaborate design. The heavy oaken uprights were carved with slender colonnettes; the horizontal sills, bracketed out over the street, were richly moulded; picturesque dormers broke the sky-line, and the masonry filling between the beams was frequently faced with enamelled tiles. [Illustration: FIG. 127.--HOUSE OF JACQUES CŒUR, BOURGES. (After Viollet-le-Duc.)]