To make a square of half the area of another, join the mid-points of its sides: the rotated square so drawn has exactly half the area. Repeat to halve again.
side of inscribed square = s ⁄ √2 · area = ½ s²
The hall, its screens passage and its two ends
Put the hall at the heart of the house and enter it at one end, by a passage running through the house from front door to back door, screened from the hall. Open the buttery, the pantry and, between them, the way to the kitchen off that passage, at the hall’s lower end; put the family’s parlour, and the great chamber over it, beyond the hall’s upper end, where the high table stands.
Andrew Boorde, a physician writing about 1540, gives the order of the rooms in a sentence: the parlour joined to the head of the hall, the buttery and pantry at its lower end with the cellar under the pantry, and the kitchen a little apart from them, reached by an entry along the wall of the buttery. He says nothing of the screens or the great chamber: those are known from the houses themselves, as J. H. Parker and J. A. Gotch measured and described them.
The plan is older than any book that describes it. From the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, houses large and small in England were built on it: Penshurst Place (c. 1341) and Great Chalfield Manor (c. 1470) as much as the timber-framed Wealden house of a prosperous yeoman. The passage was divided from the hall by a timber screen, hence its name, the screens passage; over it there was often a gallery for musicians.
The hall was at first open to the roof, warmed by a hearth in the middle of the floor whose smoke rose to a louvre. In the sixteenth century the fire moved into a chimney stack against a wall, and in many houses a floor was put into the hall, making a chamber above it. The order of the rooms survived the change, and the cross-wings at either end of the hall gave the Tudor house its gabled front.
Related rules
End the choir in a semicircle of piers; wrap an aisle (the ambulatory) around it, and open a ring of chapels off the ambulatory, each with its own altar and windows, so that the east end steps down in tiers of roofs and buttresses.
Build the monastery, if possible, so that everything it needs (water, a mill, a garden and the various crafts) is inside the enclosure, so that the monks need not wander outside, which does their souls no good; and set a wise old monk at the gate, with a cell beside it.
Let all the monks sleep in one place if their number allows, each in his own bed, clothed and ready to rise, with a light burning until morning; place the dormitory where they can go straight to the church for the night office.
Receive every guest as Christ, the poor and pilgrims with the greatest care; give the abbot and the guests a kitchen of their own, so that guests arriving at unexpected hours do not disturb the brothers; lodge them in a guest house apart, in the care of a God-fearing brother.
Give the sick a room set apart and a brother to serve them, with baths when they need them; give the novices a place of their own where they study, eat and sleep under a senior.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The hall, its screens passage and its two ends”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/hall-and-screens. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.