Medieval house1/8/2023 ![]() The ancestor of the fireplace was the central open hearth, used in ground-level halls in Saxon times and often into later centuries. The fireplace provided heat both directly and by radiation from the stones at the back, from the hearth, and finally, from the opposite wall, which was given extra thickness to absorb the heat and warm the room after the fire had burned low. If the later Middle Ages had made only slight improvements in lighting over earlier centuries, a major technical advance had come in heating: the fireplace, an invention of deceptive simplicity. Oil lamps in bowl form on a stand, or suspended in a ring, provided better illumination, and flares sometimes hung from iron rings in the wall. Lighting was by rushlights or candles, of wax or tallow (melted animal fat), impaled on vertical spikes or an iron candlestick with a tripod base, or held in a loop, or supported on wall brackets or iron candelabra. But all tables were covered with white cloths, clean and ample. Most dining tables were set on temporary trestles that were dismantled between meals a permanent, or "dormant," table was another sign of prestige, limited to the greatest lords. The lord (and perhaps the lady) occupied a massive chair, sometimes with a canopy by way of emphasizing status. The castle family sat on a raised dais of stone or wood at the upper end of the hall, opposite to the entrance, away from drafts and intrusion. When the hall was on an upper story, this entrance was commonly reached by an outside staircase next to the wall of the keep. The rushes were replaced at intervals and the floor swept, but Erasmus, noting a condition that must have been true in earlier times, observed that often under them lay "an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats and everything that is nasty."Įntrance to the hall was usually in a side wall near the lower end. Floors were strewn with rushes and in the later Middle Ages sometimes with herbs. Carpets, although used on walls, tables, and benches, were not used as floor coverings in Britain and northwest Europe until the 14th century. In a ground-floor hall the floor was beaten earth, stone or plaster when the hall was elevated to the upper story the floor was nearly always timber, supported either by a row of wooden pillars in the basement below, as in Chepstow's Great Hall (shown left), or by stone vaulting. By the 13th century a king or great baron might have "white (greenish) glass" in some of his windows, and by the 14th century glazed windows were common. Windows were equipped with wooden shutters secured by an iron bar, but in the 11th and 12th centuries were rarely glazed. Early halls were aisled like a church, with rows of wooden posts or stone pillars supporting the timber roof. A large one-room structure with a loft ceiling, the hall was sometimes on the ground floor, but often, as is Fitz Osbern's great tower at Chepstow (below), it was raised to the second story for greater security. Hether on the motte, in the bailey, inside the walls of the shell keep, or as a separate building within the great curtain walls of the 13th century, the living quarters of a castle invariably had one basic element: the hall.
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