A physician’s book of advice on keeping well, which opens with chapters on where to build a house and how to order it: the parlour joined to the head of the hall, the buttery and pantry at its lower end with the cellar under the pantry, the kitchen a little beyond them, and the house set where the air is good and the water sweet, its windows never full south.
Boorde (c. 1490–1549) was a Carthusian monk turned physician, who travelled widely in Europe and wrote some of the first books in English on medicine and travel. His Dyetary was written for a household, and he begins it with the house, since good air, light and order were for him a part of health.
His advice on the arrangement of the rooms gives, in a sentence, the order the English house had kept since the thirteenth century: the family’s rooms beyond the hall’s upper end and the service rooms at its lower end. He describes a great house round a quadrangle, with a gatehouse facing the hall door and a chapel; the screens passage and the great chamber are not in his text but in the houses themselves. He has an aspect rule of his own: the chief prospects east, west or between, never full south, whose wind, he says, corrupts.
The book, part by part
I Of the site and the building of a house
A house set on good ground, with fresh air, sweet water and a prospect; the hall, parlour, buttery, pantry and kitchen ordered about the hall, the stables and the privies kept away from it.