The Growth of the English House: A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800 — John Shaqi
The Growth of the English House: A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
History
The Growth of the English House: A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800
Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
Architecture -- England; Architecture, Domestic
It is curious to observe on a plan of the house how much thicker
the external walls are than the internal, and how few windows look
outwards; they nearly all look into the courts, and of those that look
out over the country most are of later date. The plan also shows
very clearly how the disposition of the hall follows the orthodox
lines. It is entered through a porch at the end of one of its sides;
the porch leads into the “screens”; on the right is the hall entered
through a panelled wood screen with two openings. On the left are
three doorways--one to the buttery, one to the kitchen passage, and
the third to the pantry. At the end of the screens is a door leading
into the upper court. The kitchen department is large, rambling, and
ill-lighted, but when the house was in full occupation an enormous
amount of work had to be done here, and doubtless the fire itself
sufficiently supplemented the scanty daylight.
At the upper end of the hall is a range of rooms of two storeys,
devoted to the use of the family; and doubtless in the fourteenth
century it was already of two storeys, although apparently it only
extended at that period from the front or west side of the hall as
far eastwards as to overlap the east side of the upper court. It is
difficult to disentangle these rooms from the additions and alterations
of later years, for in the early part of the sixteenth century the
rooms immediately contiguous to the south end of the hall were
improved, and a new range was built on the top of the curtain wall,
which ran from the hall wing westwards to the chapel. Again, towards
the close of the same century, the long gallery was built over the
ground floor rooms forming the south side of the upper court, and
apparently this wing was prolonged in order to give that extreme length
to the gallery which was so characteristic of Elizabeth’s time. This
prolongation carried the south front beyond the line of the east front,
an arrangement very unlikely to have been adopted while the house was
still fortified.
Another curious and instructive feature is the gallery or gangway which
is carried along the east side of the hall. This is not an original
gallery, but was erected in order to connect the south rooms with
those on the north, which previously had been completely severed from
each other by the lofty hall.
Haddon Hall, therefore, taken as a fourteenth-century dwelling, shows
that protection from casual attack was still essential, but that there
was a great amount of separate accommodation for the members of the
household. The rooms, however, were arranged without much regard to
convenience. They were placed in long and somewhat straggling ranges
of single apartments leading one into the other. Privacy was much
more studied than it had been in the preceding centuries, but it was
provided to a degree that falls far short of modern requirements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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