In the smaller houses effort was not so conspicuous. The designers drew upon the same sources for their effects--mullioned windows, classic string-courses, steep gables, and fine chimney-stacks--but they were more modest in their use of them, and refrained from employing pilasters, except perhaps to a doorway. Between the simplicity of the small manor house and the magnificence of the nobleman’s mansion lay every degree of elaboration, and a series of examples might be brought together forming a continuous _crescendo_ from a squire’s home like Pilton Manor house in Northamptonshire (Fig. 113), through such houses as Sydenham in Devonshire (Fig. 114), or Moyns Park in Essex (Fig. 115), up to splendid mansions like the home of the younger branch of the Cecils at Hatfield (Fig. 116). [Illustration: 115. Moyns Park, Essex.] [Illustration: 116. Hatfield House, the North Front (1611).] [Illustration: 117. Derwent Hall, Derbyshire.] Moyns Park has a special interest, inasmuch as it is one of the fairly numerous cases in which a house of the first half of the sixteenth century was superseded by a finer one in the second half. Here the low, gabled, half-timber building is of the earlier date, and the lofty one, with its row of fine brick chimneys, is of the later. There could hardly have been forty years between the two buildings; the earlier has some excellent detail, especially on the long front not shown in the illustration: it was a fine house of its kind; and yet such was the passion for new houses that it was soon superseded by its loftier and more monumental neighbour. The general appearance of houses of this time may be gathered from the illustrations, which comprise examples from various districts of England, and serve to show, among other things, that the same treatment was adopted over the whole country, varied according to local circumstances. Where stone was abundant, the houses were of stone, with more or less elaborate detail according to the hardness of the material. On the great beds of easily worked Oolite which stretch from Somerset and Wiltshire through Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire into Lincolnshire, the work is often both rich and delicate, and has acquired through time and weather a soft grey tint enlivened by the partial incrustation of many-hued lichens. In Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire where the stone is much harder, the work is of a plainer and more severe type, such as may be seen at Derwent Hall (Fig. 117), and the colour is more sombre. In the eastern counties brick is frequently the chief material, with stone where wrought detail is required, such as quoins, cornices, parapets, and pilasters. Felbrigge Hall in Norfolk (Fig. 118), probably built by Thomas Windham, who died in 1653 at the age of eighty-two, is a good example. In some instances where stone was not easily to be had, the detail which would otherwise have been in that material, was worked in plaster to imitate it.