Houses and homes

There are some very attractive houses in this region. Some of them make me briefly envious, Some just make me smile. We have a whole range around us, from the chateaux with the guardian dogs, live, who race along the fence barking until you are safely out of their sight, right down through the small farmhouse to the caravan in the field, and even better, the caravan on stilts.
If you build in the local style, and some do, then a square tower rising out of the body of the building is a must, and the 4-sided triangle roof can be seen peeking out of the forests for miles around. (I'm sure there's a name for a 4-sided triangle, which obviously isn't a triangle, but I don't know what it is.) I'll add a few pics of examples over the next few days.

Some look very old, and it is easy to imagine they've been here from medieval days. I have no doubt they have mice too, because they're built of rough stone which makes it easy for those little feet to climb and get in through the roof. I know snakes live in lofts - we hear horror stories from our rellies in Australia where people are very wary of entering loft spaces because they never know what they will encounter. Last night when I was drifting off to sleep I imagined a war one in the loft above me - mice versus snakes and lizards, and it made me feel sorry for the mice.

 I encountered one in the laundry room yesterday. It shot across the floor and out where the water pipe comes in through the wall. DH has caught one on his wildlife camera while it was running across the living room floor during the night. Odd that Tim doesn't seem to have noticed them yet.

Hall-Keeps

Before the Norman invasion, castles and defensive buildings had been built in wood. Timber palisades were built around defensive buildings on the top of a motte, or mound of earth. Domestic buildings were often outside, below the motte, but if the place was attacked, everyone fled inside and hurled stones and arrows at the attackers.

Once the Normans started building in stone, castle architecture moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Stone curtain walls enclosed the bailey, sometimes called courtyard or ward, and protected the domestic buildings and formed a first line of defence for the castle. Any towers built into the curtain wall were called mural towers. Sometimes the curtain wall had a gatehouse tower that acted as the keep, or strongest building in the castle. There was always a postern gate in the curtain wall to allow for a night time escape from a difficult situation.

Tower keeps followed, and slowly domestic functions moved from the bailey into the tower keep. Strong, rectangular towers, usually higher than they were wide, with the hall, reached by an outside staircase, on one floor and the Great Chamber, or solar, providing the living accommodation for the lord and his family, on the next storey. Latrine shafts emptied into ditches, or deep pits like the one at Richmond in Yorkshire, said to be so deep it never had to be cleaned out. No convenient ditch or pit? Then some unlucky person had to remove the disgusting piles from the bottom of the latrine shaft.

There was always a chapel, but they sometimes remained in the bailey.
Hall-keeps appeared. Usually wider than they were high, they brought the Great chambers and the hall together on the same floor, with a latrine, or garderobe, not far away. Hall, Great Chamber, chapel, keep and storerooms now fitted into the one rectangular tower. Walls were often 14 feet thick, with slit windows on the lower levels. Larger windows appeared higher, well out of reach of scaling ladders. Storerooms needed to be vast and hold food to see the occupants through a siege. A well was a necessity. Now they were found on the inside, accessed through the storerooms.

The French called a hall-keep a donjon and the word corrupted into dungeon, often associated with prisoners.
Kitchens were often ignored. Cooking was done over open hearths and in timber kitchens outside in the bailey. Square keeps of this period, like Newcastle, often had a gallery running through the thickness of the walls at the upper storey level. Openings let in daylight, and provided a view of the countryside; a man could turn and look down on the activity in the hall below him.

Royal castles housed a garrison, always on the lower floor. If the lord was not in residence, then a skeleton staff remained: the castellan, or constable, the man in charge, his household, the chaplain, a few soldiers, a watchman and a porter.

The first pic shows the ditch surrounding the curtain wall at Harbottle, and the second looks north to Scotland from the meadows around the outer bailey on the west side of the castle.