It is perhaps from the “Cook’s Tale of Gamelyn” that the best idea of a house may be gained, with its gatehouse, courtyard, and turreted hall. He tells us how his muscular hero Gamelyn, the prototype of Shakespeare’s Orlando, came with his friends to his ancestral home, held by his false brother, and how the gate was shut and locked against them by the porter, who resolutely refused them admission to the courtyard. Gamelyn, however, smote the wicket with his foot, broke the pin and effected an entrance. The porter he chased across the yard, broke his neck and threw him into a well. He and his friends then made merry with the brother’s meat and wine, while the latter hid himself in a “little turret,” for which we owe him our thanks, as showing that such features had a use. Meanwhile the gate had been flung open to admit all who cared to go in “or ride,” a touch which brings home to us the fact that hardly any of these gatehouses were wide enough to admit wheeled vehicles, which of course were somewhat rare in those days; the entrances were contrived only for foot passengers and horsemen. Presently the fortunes of the day changed, Gamelyn was overpowered and bound to a post in the hall, and the false brother emerged from the “selleer” (solar) to taunt him. For two days and nights Gamelyn stood bound without meat or drink, but then, thinking he had fasted too long, he besought Adam the “spencer” to free him. Adam hesitated to let him go out of “this bour,” but ultimately consented, and took him into the “spence” and gave him supper. The spence was the pantry, and the spencer the presiding genius of that place. It would be beside the mark to enter into the details of Gamelyn’s further adventures, suffice it to say that by Adam’s advice he let himself appear to be still bound to the post; the hall presently filled with his brother’s guests who cast their eyes on the captive as they came in “at hall door.” At a preconcerted signal, Gamelyn and Adam possessed themselves of some stout cudgels which the good spencer had provided, and between them they cudgelled the whole company, taking especial delight in dealing with the “men of holy Church.” This glimpse into a fourteenth-century mansion is the longest which Chaucer vouchsafes; we read elsewhere of “halls, chambers, kitchens, and bowers,” and the “chamber” is occasionally mentioned as the alternative room to the hall so far as the owner and his wife are concerned. The difference between a “bower” and a “chamber” does not emerge very clearly. Adam, as we have seen, speaks of the hall as “this bour,” but as a rule the term is applied to a room in order to distinguish it from that apartment. It seems quite clear that to Chaucer the hall was the chief room, almost synonymous with the house, the other rooms he mentions being the merest accessories.