A short history of the English house from the Norman keep to the eighteenth century, by the architect who had surveyed the Elizabethan houses: how the hall shrank and the private rooms grew, and how the plan of hall, screens and two ends became the symmetrical house.
Gotch (1852–1942), a Kettering architect and historian of Elizabethan building, wrote for the general reader, with plans of the houses he describes. His account of the screens, with their three doorways to the buttery, the kitchen passage and the pantry, and of the stair to the solar at the hall’s upper end, is drawn from houses such as Haddon Hall and Penshurst.
The book, part by part
I The medieval house and the Tudor house
The hall, the screens and the minstrels’ gallery; the solar and its stair; the growth of the private rooms and the coming of symmetry.