over the centuries. Those of fifteenth – and sixteenth-century date often back onto a river range, as at the Old House, Shrewsbury.
The second group of towns have timber-framed houses, still with an open hall (a feature to be found in almost all types of town houses until the sixteenth century not only in the great town houses of the gentry but in every type of house above the very smallest town house), built not away from the street but parallel to it. Many date from the fifteenth century and are nearly always a simple straight range incorporating a small open hall and a two-storey bay of which the upper part was a solar.
Although throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, houses continued to be built with their long sides parallel to the street, it then became more common for them to be set at right angles to the street, thus presenting narrow gable-fronted elevations which are a common feature still to be seen in many towns. Their development clearly reflected the growing competition for space in city centres and the importance, no doubt for commercial reasons, of having a frontage on one of the main streets. The result was that in many towns the characteristic ‘burgage’ plot was not uncommon. Although these plots might be narrow, they were not necessarily small. In Oxford, for instance, in the main streets, where frontages were more valuable, the plots were long and narrow, sometimes two or three hundred feet deep yet only twenty or thirty feet wide. In the side streets the plots tended to be wider and less deep.
With such narrow sites the standard medieval hall-house with an open hall and a two-storey block at one or both ends had to be adapted, and the obvious and most practical plan was to set the hall range at right-angles to the street. In most cases the plan with the two-storey block at both ends seems to have been adopted, for, although the plots were narrow, they were generally deep enough to accommodate the longer house. Over the centuries these medieval town houses have been greatly altered, and it can now be only conjecture as to which end was the solar and which the service. However, it seems from medieval documents that the solar end was to the street, where the ground-floor room could be used as a shop, with the service bay at the far end of the hall, backing onto a courtyard and conveniently placed close to the detached kitchen at the rear.
Where the plot was of sufficient width, the hall range could be lit from the courtyard, even if this was so narrow that it was little more than an alleyway. Independent access to this courtyard was often provided from the street by a narrow through-passage. When the plot was narrow, it was necessary to make use of the entire width, and a problem arose in lighting the open hall in the middle when a two-storey bay was used at the end. In some cases it was possible to get light from
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