Monday 17 March 2014

A typical nobleman's house

The typical nobleman’s house contained kitchens, communal space, withdrawing rooms and a chapel. In the early days, each function may have been housed in separate buildings, but by the 12th century the separate parts began to come together in one building.

The Great Hall had services (ie kitchen, pantry, buttery) at one end and the withdrawing space (ie  one withdrew from the hall into a private space reserved for the family members ) at the other. The Great Hall goes back into legend – Beowulf awaited Grendel in the Great Hall. Built of timber, with a huge open timber roof – ie no upper storey, the halls were built on the same plan for a thousand years, in differing scales and in every form of dwelling. Wood gave way to stone. Gradually castles expanded and life went out of great halls and into withdrawing spaces, but we still have a hall, which is the space a visitor first sees on entering our homes today.

In the middle ages, the entrance to the hall was through a porch in one of the long sides of the hall. A “screens passage” led the visitor to the hall itself. Timber screens or partitions on one side of the corridor closed off the view of the hall. Two doors led from the passage to the “low status” end of the hall; on the other side of the passage, there would be three doors – one to the kitchen, another to the pantry and the third into the buttery. The old French word for buttery was bouteillerie which was where they stored their casks and bottles. The pantry  was the bread room where a pile of stale loaves would be stored to use as trenchers - used instead of plates. The kitchen would be a long way from the hall because of the need for huge fires and the consequent fire risk. Often a passageway between the buttery and the pantry led to the kitchen. If not, then the scullions would have to go outside in the open air to reach the kitchen - or the whole carcase roasting in the open air.

A step ran across the width of the hall and separated the nobility from the hoi polloi. At the end furthest from the screens passage, beyond the step, was a raised dais at the “high” end of the hall where the lord and lady and their family sat. After the fourteenth century it was often lit by a projecting bay or an oriel window. Behind the dais a door led to the withdrawing chambers beyond. The open fireplace was in the centre of the hall, and smoke escaped via an opening in the roof. Fireplaces were common in other dwellings by the fourteenth century, but halls persisted with the central hearth.


Trestle tables, set lengthwise along the walls, were set up for meals while the head of the household sat at a single high table that ran across the width of the dais. There would be several “sittings” for meals in large households, and by the fourteenth century the head of the house most likely ate in his withdrawing chamber.

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