The English house before the classical rules: a hall at its heart, entered by a screens passage with the service rooms at one end and the family’s parlour and great chamber at the other, built of oak framing or stone under steep tiled roofs, its upper storey often jettied over the lower.
The plan came first and lasted longest. From the fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, houses large and small in England were built round a hall: a tall room open to the roof, with a hearth in the middle of its floor and a high table on a dais at its upper end. It was entered at its lower end by a passage running through the house from front door to back, screened from the hall by a timber partition, and off this screens passage opened the buttery (for drink), the pantry (for bread) and the way to the kitchen. Beyond the high table were the family’s private rooms: a parlour on the ground floor and the great chamber, or solar, above it. The order of these rooms, which Andrew Boorde set down about 1540, is the same at Penshurst Place, a great house of the 1340s, and in the timber-framed house of a prosperous yeoman a century later.
Most houses were framed in oak. The frame was cut and fitted in the carpenter’s yard, numbered, and raised on a low stone or brick plinth; its panels were filled with wattle and daub and limewashed, so that the timbers stood out dark against pale walls. Close studding, posts set barely their own width apart, was a show of wealth in an age when good oak was dear. An upper storey was often jettied, its joists run out past the wall below to carry the wall above a foot or two further out, and in the Wealden house of Kent and Sussex the jettied ends of the house stood forward of the hall between them under one long roof. Roofs were steep, at about fifty degrees, tiled or thatched, and ended in gables.
The sixteenth century changed the hall but kept the order. Fireplaces built into brick chimney stacks replaced the open hearth, so the smoke no longer needed the height of the room, and in many houses a floor was put into the hall to make a chamber above it. Windows grew larger and were glazed with small leaded panes between stone or oak mullions; a bay window, often carried up through two storeys, lit the high table at the upper end of the hall, and oriels on brackets lit the chambers above. Cross-wings at either end of the hall, each under its own gable, gave the Tudor and Elizabethan house its familiar front, and the long gallery, a room for walking and for showing pictures, appeared on the top floor of the great houses.
The great Elizabethan houses, Hardwick and Longleat and Wollaton, already borrowed the symmetry and some of the ornament of the Renaissance, but the hall house survived in the country for another century. Its revival in the nineteenth century, as “Old English” and “Tudorbethan”, put half-timbered gables and tall chimneys on the villas and suburban houses of England and America.