The WALLS of mediæval houses were frequently left bare, but when they were covered three methods seem to have been adopted. The earliest was to apply a thin layer of plaster, a method which has survived to the present day. But whereas nowadays the plaster is of sufficient thickness to cover all the irregularities of the wall and to be brought to a perfectly true and even surface, in early times it was quite thin, and although it stopped all the crevices, it retained the main irregularities of the wall, and produced a pleasant variety of effect. The plaster was frequently decorated with coloured lines or simple patterns, and occasionally with figure subjects. The next method was to cover the walls with wainscot, that is, with oak panelling. Of this treatment few, if any, examples survive; but, judging from other Gothic woodwork, the panels must have been of considerable size set in framing of large scantling. This work was also frequently painted in colours and patterns. The third method and the last in point of date, was to cover them with hangings--tapestry or arras, as they were generally called, from the town where they were chiefly manufactured--“the costly cloths of Arras and of Tours,” as Spenser calls them. CHAPTER VII. EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY--COMING OF THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE. It was during the sixteenth century that took place the most remarkable development in domestic architecture which occurred in England until the middle of the nineteenth century; and especially during the second half was this extraordinary advance particularly noticeable. Several causes produced this effect, chief among them being that great upheaval in thought which gave rise to the wonderful movement known as the Renaissance. The Renaissance stands not only for a revival of ancient forms in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but for a vast awakening in all departments of human enterprise, and the final abandonment of mediævalism with all its crude and crabbed methods and ways of thought. New ways were followed in science, in learning, in religion, in art; and the knowledge of these new ways was widely disseminated by the new invention of printing. So far as architecture was concerned, Italy was the fountainhead of the new stream of thought; and so far as England was concerned, it was in the reign of Henry VIII. that the stream first reached our shores, and affected our traditional methods of design.