7. But in Saxon times the _art_ of brick-making was lost, and Saxons and Normans, it appears, were quite ignorant of it. There is an old brick house--Little Wenham Hall, in Suffolk--which is believed to have been built in the latter part of the thirteenth century. That is the oldest brick house in England. In the fifteenth century the art of brick-making had been rediscovered, and it seems to have been imported from Flanders. The old palace at Hatfield is one of the brick buildings of this period; but brick did not come much into use until quite a century later. In the county of Middlesex, where there is found clay which is very suitable for brick-making, the art was not used to any great extent till the time of King James I. After the Great Fire of London, in the year 1666, there was a great demand for bricks, and the use of that material has quite changed the character of the houses in our towns and villages. [Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, HATFIELD (page 84)] =Summary.=--The oldest buildings in a town are usually the church, the town-hall, and alms-houses. Most of the houses with gabled roofs and plastered fronts do not go back farther than the time of Queen Elizabeth. There are a very few houses older than this: one at Lincoln, called the Jew's House, dates back to the twelfth century. Wood was the common material for house-building; but in _stone districts_, like the Cotswolds, stone took the place of wood. Brick is now the _ordinary_ material for house-building. The Romans made and used tiles, but the art was lost. The earliest _brick_ houses, like Little Wenham Hall in Suffolk, were built of material brought from Holland. The art of brick-making began to revive in this country in the fifteenth century, but was not very extensively practised till after the Great Fire of London, in 1666, in the neighbourhood of the metropolis. CHAPTER XXIII EARLY HOUSES (_Continued_) 1. For many centuries the houses of the villeins and cottiers did not alter very much in their general plan. You will remember that in those old pit-dwellings the hearth and its fire was the centre of the home. The room, or space round the fire, gradually became larger, especially in the houses of the thanes and eorls, till we get the hall, with the hearth in the middle, and the hole in the roof to let out the smoke. 2. All through the later Saxon and Danish times, and in the Norman period, the hall was the most important part of the house. As the years went on, and the style of building altered, the walls, the windows, and the roof became more beautiful and ornamental, becoming most magnificent in the fourteenth century, or Decorated Period. Gradually other buildings were added to the hall for comfort and convenience.