FIREPLACES occur in some of the earliest buildings; that is, large recesses specially contrived in the walls, with an outlet for the smoke carried up for some distance in the masonry. This arrangement appears to have been adopted very generally, and was by no means a luxury of later times. It is true that the alternative method of a central hearth in the middle of the floor was also of frequent occurrence. But both ways of heating were in vogue at the same time. The wall fireplace is not the successor of the central hearth, but if anything its predecessor. When it is remembered that in the early keeps the various rooms were placed one over the other, it is clear that the facilities for the escape of smoke from the lower rooms would have been but small had the fire been on a central hearth. There would indeed have been no exits for it but the small windows. Accordingly most keeps are provided with fireplaces in the walls. A good example is furnished at Castle Hedingham (Fig. 6). On the other hand, in the great halls of the fortified manor houses, which were usually of one storey, it was an easy matter to contrive an opening in the roof immediately over the central hearth. This opening was protected by a ventilating turret called the louvre, which kept off the rain, but allowed the smoke--or as much of it as was not wafted about the room--to escape through it. As the roofs were constructed of wood, so too of necessity was the louvre, and owing to the lapse of time and to other destructive agencies, both roofs and louvres of the early periods have perished. In some houses, such as Stokesay, the central hearth of the great hall still remains, while in the smaller rooms fireplaces of contemporary date are also to be seen. It is clear that the central hearth was not considered an intolerable nuisance, inasmuch as it survived until the end of the fifteenth century and later: the great hall at Richmond Palace, built for Henry VII., had one; so too had Deene Hall, already referred to, which was built in the reign of Edward VI. The louvre for the central hearth had a direct successor in the lantern light so often seen in Georgian houses; the connection between the two may be seen in some of the halls of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, where it is evident that the lantern light stands in the same place as the ancient louvre, and is but a modernised version of that feature. An excellent example of a central hearth in a great hall may still be seen at Penshurst Place in Kent (Fig. 71). This, although of later date, about 1350, is typical of all such cases. [Illustration: 71. Penshurst Place, Kent. The Great Hall.] [Illustration: 72. Abingdon Abbey, Berkshire. Chimney-shaft and Chimney-vent (13th cent.).] [Illustration: 73. Abingdon Abbey. Orifice of Chimney-vent.]