Medieval English Town-House Plans

Abstract

T HE purpose of this essay is to examine a certain number of late medieval English town houses, to analyse and compare the various types of plan used, and in particular to see the different ways in which the typical openhall house plan was adapted to a more or less restricted town site.' What we are concerned with is in fact the problem of adapting what was probably in origin a country-house type to urban conditions. This rus in urbe tradition, like the townsman's cattle in the common fields and the 'broad gates' and miniature farmyard that sometimes occupied part of his tenement, reminds us how much the medieval town remained part of'the countryside. For our purpose the houses that I shall take will be middle-sized and fairly large, but not too large; the kind of house that will normally have an open-roofed hall as the principal element in its plan. I shall on the one hand exclude the smallest houses with only one or two rooms to each floor, where the hall plan, if it can be said to be applied at all, is applied vertically, the solar being piled on top of the hall, or the hall or solar piled on top of the shop. And on the other hand I shall exclude the very large houses, such as Arundel House in the Strand, or the Bishop's Palace or the Old Deanery a t Salisbury, where there was so much space that the introduction of a complete manor-house plan presented no problem of adaptation at all. The house plans with which we are concerned may be classified into two main groups, according to whether the hall is placed parallel to the street, or at right angles to it, and these groups may in turn be subdivided. In each of the various types of plan we shall find that the house is either a three-part house, i.e. with a service-wing at one end of the hall and a solar wing at the other, or a two-part house, i.e. with the solar or principal chamber over the service-rooms at the entrance end of the hall.