The first history of the English medieval house from the buildings themselves: the hall and its screens, the buttery, pantry and kitchen, the solar, the porch, the fireplace, the bay window and the timber roof, from the Norman manor house to the reign of Henry VIII, with plans and views of the houses measured.
Begun by T. Hudson Turner, who wrote the first volume, on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before his death in 1852, the work was completed by John Henry Parker (1806–1884), the Oxford publisher and antiquary, completed the work, the volumes for Richard II to Henry VIII appearing in 1859. They gathered the surviving houses of England, measured and drawn, with the documents that named their rooms.
From them comes the plan of the hall house as it was built: a hall with a screens passage across its lower end, entered by doors at both ends, a gallery over the screens, doors from the passage to the buttery and the pantry and, between them, a passage to the kitchen; at the upper end the dais, lit by a bay window often carried up through two storeys, and a door to the parlour and the stair to the solar over it; a porch, often with a room over it, before the screens; and a fireplace on one side of the hall in the later houses.
The book, part by part
I Richard II to Henry VIII (1859)
The hall, its screens and offices, the solar and the chapel; the bay window and the oriel; timber framing and the jetty; the house as it was lived in.