Incidentally a study of the drawings by Jones and Webb forces the inquirer to reconsider the relations of those two men as hitherto accepted, and compels him to readjust his ideas as to some of the work he had been taught to attribute to Jones. With the seventeenth century we get into much closer touch with the designers of buildings than was possible in earlier times: in many cases we can get behind the buildings to their architects. But the chief purpose of the following pages is to trace the changes that took place in the houses themselves and their accessories, and although it would be neither possible nor desirable to omit all mention of the architects, the latter will be subsidiary to the main theme, and will be dealt with not so much biographically as by way of showing how their training, their opportunities and their idiosyncrasies affected the buildings with which they were concerned. The present and immediate purpose is to give a brief and broad outlook over the period dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters; and to that end a series of houses has been selected, separated from each other in point of date by intervals of some twenty or thirty years. The first of the series is Aston Hall (Fig. 2), which may be considered an example of how the old order lingered on. It has all the characteristics of Jacobean design, with its two pronounced wings, its curved gables, its fine chimney-stacks, and its mullioned windows: not to mention an open arcade and a forecourt with garden houses at the two outlying corners. These characteristics were gradually to disappear from houses. The plan became more compact, and wings were discarded, except that version of them which became fashionable later on, and which consisted of a separate block on either side of the main building, connected to it by a colonnade. Gables disappeared, the only approach to such features being the flat pediments which were often employed as central ornaments to the façades. Chimney-stacks became plainer, and the flues were massed into solid blocks, instead of rising in separate shafts from a common base. Mullioned windows lingered on for some years, but the mullions were of wood, and were insignificant compared with their stone predecessors. They were merely part of the wood window frame, and they disappeared almost entirely after the advent of the sash-window in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In the meantime, greater attention was paid to the cornices which made the circuit of the buildings; more especially was the topmost cornice emphasised--that from which the roof sprang. The general proportions of the building were more closely studied, and in particular the proportion of the window openings to the plain wall space. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Broadfield Hall, Hertfordshire. From a Drawing by Buckler, 1832.]