The hall, then, being pre-eminently the principal room, requires our first attention. It was necessarily of large size, and it was lofty. In the majority of instances it was of one storey with an open timber roof, and consequently it completely separated from each other the subsidiary rooms built at either end of it. This is observable down to Elizabethan days, when the family apartments and the servants’ quarters had each grown into a considerable wing of at least two storeys in height. Each wing had to have its own staircases, and on the upper floor the hall interposed an impassable barrier between the two ends of the house. The hall was planned so that the entrance was at the servants’ end, where most of the traffic was. The bulk of the floor space was thus left clear for the tables, and for the purposes of daily life. The lord and his family sat at the “high table” at the upper end, farthest away from the draughty entrance. There was at this end a raised platform some 6 inches high, called the daïs, and it was on the daïs that the high table was placed. Judging from the floor levels of the earliest houses, there would not seem to have been a daïs, unless it were a movable platform. Through the wall at the upper end a doorway led to the family room or rooms. The two long sides of the hall were usually free from any buildings, and were occupied by the windows. At Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, however--a splendid house of the Lovels, now in hopeless ruin--the lofty hall was flanked on one side with a building of two storeys. The windows on the opposite side were large and long, set fairly high up in the thick wall, of fine Perpendicular design, and finished at the top with the usual simple tracery. Those on the side flanked by the two-storey building were so much curtailed by it as to retain nothing below the tracery.