=Summary.=--There were ruins in every town and nearly every village in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Gradually the stones were carted away for building purposes and for road-mending. There were many restrictions on building new houses. Most of the quaint old houses, with overhanging stories and high-pitched roofs, belong to the time of Queen Elizabeth. They were built on older foundations. The wood-work in later times has been in some cases filled in with brickwork, in others covered with boarding or hung with tiles. In those houses the chimney is usually at one end of the house, and the queer little window on one side shows where the chimney-corner once was. [Illustration: An Elizabethan Interior] CHAPTER XLI LARGER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN HOUSES 1. We have said that the Tudor period was a time of building of big houses and mansions. Every county in England has some such houses to show. Many of them were built of =stone=, some partly of =brick and stone=. Their style shows that the English or old fashion of Gothic building was dying out. Italian ideas and Italian ornament were coming into favour. No doubt one reason why so much of the old work was ruthlessly destroyed was because it was out of fashion. It is astonishing, even in these days, how much good work is destroyed just because it has gone out of date. Among the most famous of these houses we may mention Burleigh House "by Stamford Town", Haddon Hall, and Knebworth; and, belonging to a rather later date, Hatfield House. [Illustration: Photo. Photochrom Co., Ltd. HADDON HALL, FROM THE STEPS (page 163)] 2. For a big house the idea was to build it round a quadrangle. Smaller houses were in plan very like the half-timbered houses of the yeomen, only on a larger scale, and more richly ornamented. The hall and its wings were extended considerably, and, with a handsome porch, formed in plan a big capital =E=, thus:-- [Illustration] Some people have thought that this plan was chosen in honour of Queen Elizabeth, but the truth is that it was the most convenient form, and fitted in best with the ideas of the time. It had grown up quite naturally, in the course of many generations, from the simple hall with the hearth in the middle, the beginnings of which we saw in the huts of the pit-dwellers. 3. Quite early in the fourteenth century =brick= had begun to come into use for building, but the first bricks were probably imported from Flanders. Hull, which had been founded by King Edward I, had many buildings of brick, and by about the year 1320 it had brick-yards of its own. Flemish weavers were encouraged to settle in England by King Edward III, and they used brick in buildings which they set up. There are a good many houses in the eastern counties and in Kent still standing, which show Flemish and Dutch ideas.