The ground floor was still dark and difficult of access, lighted only by a few rare lancet-windows, and given over to store-rooms, bath-rooms, ice-houses, and suchlike uses. It communicated, by means of trap-doors, with the cellars and dungeons underneath. Philippe de Vigneulles, in his chronicle, has left us an unforgettable account of his imprisonment, well on in the fifteenth century, in a dungeon of this kind. There were no kitchens within the house, for the cooking was done in a round high-roofed building, like a baptistry, in an outer court, near the servants’ quarters; but sometimes the sick-chambers were situate on this dark, quiet, unfrequented ground floor, which preserved the tradition of its inaccessibility by the absence of any entrance on a level with the ground. A broad double flight of marble steps led from the court to the portal on the first floor. In any London suburb we still may see modest villas thus entered by a flight of steps raised above a high basement, which are, doubtless, quite unconscious of their direct descent from the keep of the twelfth century, entered only by a ladder reared against the front, or by knotted ropes let down from the first-floor window! By the 14th century, however, the _Perron_ of the country-house was an object of great architectural dignity. It generally opened into a long gallery, or _loggia_, or verandah, occupying all one side of the keep: a sort of first-floor cloister, with clustered ogival windows looking on the court below; in fact, the lineal descendant of the Gallo-Roman peristyle or diambulatorium. I believe that in America it is still common. Here the squires and dames used to loiter, “regardant bas en la cour les joueurs de paume jouer.” Half the action of the novel of John of Saintré passes “ès galleries;” and no portion of the castle is more frequently cited by early poets. The Count of Foix received Master Jehan Froissart as he was walking after dinner in his gallery. In fact, the chief use of these _loggia_, _loges_, or _laube_, appears to have been as a promenade or loitering-place when it was too hot or too wet to meet in the orchard just beyond the walls. A very beautiful gallery of the Middle Ages is still preserved in the castle of Wartburg. In the larger castles this gallery or _loggia_ was sometimes distinct from the keep. Together with the great dining-hall (“sänger-saal” or “mandement”), where the lord sat in justice and received his guests, it formed a lower church-like building, in style much like an Oxford chapel, placed beside the keep and less strongly fortified. These separate halls were only used in time of peace. They were already well known in the thirteenth century, for in the palace of Percival-- “La sale fu devant la tour Et les loges devant la sale.” And we read in the _Lai de Lautrec_-- “Prochaines eurent leurs maisons Et leurs sales et leurs donjons.”