Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) EditionReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) Edition
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
Many types of people besides the nobility and knights now had property
and thus were considered gentry: female lines of the nobility, merchants
and their sons, attorneys, auditors, squires, and peasant-yeomen. The
burgess grew rich as the knight dropped lower. The great merchants lived
in mansions which could occupy whole blocks. In towns these mansions
were entered through a gate through a row of shops on the
street.Typically, there would be an oak-paneled great hall, with
adjoining kitchen, pantry, and buttery on one end and a great parlor to
receive guests, bedrooms, wardrobes, servants' rooms, and a chapel on
the other end or on a second floor. A lesser dwelling would have these
rooms on three floors over a shop on the first floor. An average
Londoner would have a shop, a storeroom, a hall, a kitchen, and a
buttery on the first floor, and three bedrooms on the second floor.
Artisans and shopkeepers of more modest means lived in rows of
dwellings, each with a shop and small storage room on the first floor,
and a combination parlor-bedroom on the second floor. The humblest
residents crowded their shop and family into one 6 by 10 foot room for
rent of a few shillings a year. All except the last would also have a
small garden. The best gardens had a fruit tree, herbs, flowers, a well,
and a latrine area. There were common and public privies for those
without their own. Kitchen slops and casual refuse continued to be
thrown into the street. Floors of stone or planks were strewn with
rushes. There was some tile flooring. Most dwellings had glass windows.
Candles were used for lighting at night. Torches and oil-burning
lanterns were portable lights. Furnishings were still sparse. Men sat on
benches or joint stools and women sat on cushions on the floor. Hall and
parlor had a table and benches and perhaps one chair. Bedrooms had beds
that were surrounded by heavy draperies to keep out cold drafts. The
beds had pillows, blankets, and sheets. Clothes were stored in a chest,
sometimes with sweet-smelling herbs such as lavender, rosemary, and
southernwood. Better homes had wall hanging and cupboards displaying
plate. Laundresses washed clothes in the streams, rivers, and public
conduits. Country peasants still lived in wood, straw, and mud huts with
earth floors and a smoky hearth in the center or a kitchen area under
the eaves of the hut.
In 1442, bricks began to be manufactured in the nation and so there was
more use of bricks in buildings. Chimneys were introduced into manor
houses where stone had been too expensive. This was necessary if a
second floor was added, so the smoke would not damage the floor above it
and would eventually go out of the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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