There is not much to be said about the other type of kitchen, such as remains at Haddon and South Wingfield. It was a large apartment, and usually furnished with several vast fireplaces. At South Wingfield there were three, two of which are shown in Fig. 34. At the back of one of these are the two ovens. None of the examples quoted have windows of any great size, a fact which points to the fire itself having been depended on to supplement the scanty daylight. As in many other respects so in the kitchens, the great colleges at Oxford and Cambridge afford the best existing illustrations of the internal economy of a mediæval house. They still have to cater for some hundreds of people daily, and so it was in the abbeys and great houses of the Middle Ages. In an abbey kitchen the number for whom cooking was required was sometimes as much as seven or eight hundred. In a nobleman’s house, such as Lord Burghley’s, the number was less, it is true, but it must have amounted to one or two hundred. In smaller houses the requirements were not nearly so great, and kitchens of more modest dimensions were sufficient. [Illustration: 34. Fireplaces in the Kitchen, South Wingfield Manor House (_cir._ 1435–40).] CHAPTER V. THE LATER MANOR HOUSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. During the fifteenth century a further advance was made in the amenities of house planning, and although considerable attention was still paid to defensive precautions, there was nevertheless a great expansion in accommodation, and a more determined effort towards obtaining a distinct architectural effect. A certain symmetry of treatment is almost inherent in architecture. It is to be found in the early keeps, where the shallow buttresses or piers and the windows are to a large extent symmetrically placed. But no attempt was made at that time, nor indeed for some centuries, to give a symmetrical disposition to the buildings as a whole. Ranges of rooms were either built entirely new or added to existing buildings as convenience seemed to dictate, and it has already been observed that this haphazard method of planning was extravagant and wasteful. In the fifteenth century there was a noticeable tendency towards symmetry, which easily led in the sixteenth to that very exact balance of part with part so characteristic of the Italian manner, which was to exert an overpowering influence on English designers. Examples of this tendency are to be seen in the beautiful keep at Warkworth in Northumberland (1435–40, Fig. 45, p. 82); in the ruins of Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, built by Sir William Hastings about the year 1460 (Figs. 47, 48, pp. 84, 85); and at Cowdray in Sussex, also built in the later years of the same century.