Although the first germ of the house of to-day is to be found in the Norman keep, its more direct ancestor was the fortified manor house. The chief room here, as in the keep, was the hall; indeed it was of greater relative importance in the manor house than in the castle. In the latter it had rooms of equal size above and below it, rooms which must have helped to lessen the pressure on its space. In the former it was not so much the heart of the house as the house itself. It was often the only considerable room in the building, supplemented by a kitchen and a “chamber” or two. So overmastering was its importance that the house was called “the hall,” a designation which, to this day, is applied to the principal house in a parish. There were, however, supplementary rooms, some for the master, and some for the servants; in the earlier examples, indeed, the plural is hardly admissible; there was one for the master, called the “solar,” and there was a kitchen, or a kitchen department, which was the headquarters of the servants. The hall lay between the two; at one end was the kitchen with whatever it had of pantry and buttery; at the other was the solar, a small room for the private occupation of the lord--a room generally upstairs, and over a cellar or store place. Other rooms there were none. The hall was the house; everybody lived there when indoors, everybody ate there, everybody slept there. Knight, and page, and household squire, Loitered through the lofty hall, Or crowded round the ample fire. The household stores, if put away anywhere, went to the cellar; the food was cooked in the kitchen, there was a pantry where it was kept when not in the kitchen, there was a buttery where the drink was served: the lord, when he desired privacy, sought his solar. The rest of the household presumably never had privacy even if they desired it. It was an elementary state of things, and the story of domestic architecture is made up of the efforts to obtain greater privacy and more comfort. It was a long and gradual development. The hall remained for centuries the centre and kernel of the house; but at one end of it the solar gradually swelled into suites of apartments for the family; at the other, the kitchen grew into the servants’ wing, with scullery, larders, pantry, and many other subdivisions. When we remember this primitive type of plan and then look at the plan of an Elizabethan manor house (usually quite simple in its arrangements), it becomes less difficult to imagine the stages through which it must have passed since the time of the hall, solar, and kitchen; and it is easy, on the other hand, to see how the simple Elizabethan plan grew into the complicated arrangements necessary for our comfort to-day.